Comment by dlkf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dlkf | Hacker News Reader

No book influenced my attitude toward philosophy more than Wittgenstein's Blue Book. Here are a couple gems:

> The questions, "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substance for a substantive.)

> The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications, has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge. If I wished to find out what sort of thing arithmetic is, I should be very content indeed to have investigated the case of a finite cardinal arithmetic. For: (a) this would lead me on to all the more complicated cases, (b) a finite cardinal arithmetic is not incomplete, it has no gaps which are then filled in by the rest of arithmetic.

> Now I don't say that this is not possible. Only, putting it in this way immediately shows you that it need not happen. This, by the way, illustrates the method of philosophy.

I love his attitude that people talk in the same kind of compulsive way that a squirrel stores nuts for the winter. Not to say it is mindless but that it isn’t rooted in philosophical consistency. Asking again and again “why” like Socrates doesn’t get to the truth it just gets us caught in circles.

Another unrelated Wittgenstein-ian point that I found enlightening in college is that in PL design you can’t design a language that stops people from writing incorrect programs. Statements can’t be correct as an inherent quality of their structure, they can only be correct in context of a goal.

That was Socrates' point. He was asking questions to expose how brittle the claims of knowledge and certainty were. I do find it strange that Wittgenstein—a man who considered Kierkegaard (who wrote an entire book on irony and Socrates) as one of his favorite thinkers—seems not to have realized that Socrates' quest for a certain, clear meaning of a team was ironically intended to always finish unresolved. It makes me a bit curious what he took from Kierkegaard, who was every bit as much of an ironist, if Plato's rather blunt representations of Socratic irony alluded him.

Of course the irony is that Wittgenstein asks "why?" again and again like Socrates and for very much the same purpose (to show that it gets us caught in circles), thus representing even more ironic loops than the previous circles. Wittgenstein turns to philosophy to repudiate it and show as much to his students (show the fly out of the bottle), but in so doing he affirms a central Socratic lesson, but with far less irony. And I would say irony wins out: rather than quiet philosophy into therapy, Wittgenstein became the most influential 20th century philosopher who attracts by far the most published academic and popular commentary.

Ah, but perhaps Wittgenstein was being ironic in pretending not to understand Socratic irony; Wittegensteinian irony. And perhaps zwkrt was being ironic in pretending not to realize Witgensteinian irony; zwkrtatic irony. And perhaps you are being ironic in pretending to misinterpret zwkrtatic irony; bangkoksbestic irony. I assure you, however, that this comment is not ironic, nor is the one after this.

Maybe your assurance is ironic. I assure you that my assurance is not ironic.

As tends to be true of much of philosophy, the core insight of Wittgenstein is not too big, I think. His argument, at least in his later work with language games, revolves around "why is it that we look for truth with such unclear language? Is it even possible to clarify our language?" And that's both Socratic and also more specific than Socrates. It's done in a very down-to-business and direct tone, which gives it that ironic sensibility, since it projects confidence in an investigation that we can easily see is going to start reducing itself to the tiniest scraps of truth by assuming so little a priori.

Within the context of his mathematical investigations this question makes a lot of sense, though: the younger Wittgenstein was studying logic under Bertrand Russell and therefore had a lot of exposure to the idea of a formalized logical totality as represented by Principa Mathematica - this was the world he lived in. And he did not seem to feel that the incompleteness theorems settled the limitations of logical formalism either.

Might interest you. This idea is explored to the fullest the way i understand it. Śūnyatā - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81

Not so sure that's quite it. Having reflected on this a great deal over the years, I would say that many of Wittenstein's insights about language and life are more closely expressed as Tathata. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tath%C4%81t%C4%81]

This is just like non-euclidean geometry. There are some fundamental postulates that you choose, in any kind of descriptive language, which is just convenient and doesn't really come from an empirical observation or is subject to constant improvement or change. They just are.

I really love how this subject is approached in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

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