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Comment by Buldak | Hacker News Reader

Wittgenstein tries to explain how language works, how it represents the world. One consequence of his theory is that language cannot represent that relationship itself. (At one point, he compares this limitation to the way that an eye necessarily can't see itself.) Well, if you believe that, what's the point of writing the Tractatus? So the ladder metaphor is supposed to suggest that contemplating the Tractatus might lead the reader to grasp the nature of language, even as they ultimately realize that a book can't really depict that straightforwardly.

One source which I've found very accessible on this topic is Bryan Magee's interviews of John Searle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrmPq8pzG9Q&list=PLB72977AF4...

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Exactly this, but even more so. Wittgenstein believed the purpose of philosophy is to "prevent the bewitchment of our senses by means of language". Throwing the ladder away is important, else the reader might mistakenly interpret the tractatus as being the ultimate systemization of reality, rather than a critique of all such projects.

Fantastically, our modern obsession with truth-tables when studying logic comes from exactly this misreading! (Which also lead to Wittgenstein quitting philosophy for years.)

Wittgenstein was initially received by Bertrand Russell, and by the various positivists of the time as a possible intellectual giant who could champion their various projects. But he sews the seeds in the end of the Tractatus of the criticisms that would be developed more fully in his Philosophical Investigations, which is sometimes read as a repudiation of his own earlier work.

I don't think he intended with his ladder metaphor to fully repudiate the Tractatus, I think the purpose of the Tractatus evolved over the course of him writing it. Otherwise the second half of his philosophical career would have just been an endorsement of the Tractatus rather than retrospective criticisms of it.

The tractatus isn't like the blue and brown notebooks, where we just grabbed random notes of his after he died and published them for future generations to study. It's an intentional published work. He means everything he says in it the moment it is published.

He _definitely_ evolves the view presented throughout the course of the tractatus, but this is intentional, walking the reader up the ladder, the last step of which is throwing the ladder (the tractatus) away.

The relation between early and late Wittgenstein more complex than outright repudiation. Immediately after the tractatus he thought he solved the problems of philosophy, and later came to realize simply destroying the positivist project was not ask there was the problem of philosophy.

On Russell, hilariously, he would organize readings of the tractatus with the Vienna circle. Wittgenstein would be so furious with their interpretation he would sit the room with his back to them and talk Indian poetry aloud.

So it's the third of GPs options:

> achieving mystical realizations along the lines of zen koans

Except that there's really nothing mystical about zen koans, if mystical is meant in a derogatory way as vague mumbo-jumbo. Zen koans are trying to do the same thing as Wittgenstein is (according to the parent - I haven't read him): lead the thinker to recognise the limitations of language, and in particular its inability to fully express ideas about its own limitations. The response "mu" unasks the question, indicates that the concept has been understood but the question itself seen as nonsensical.

That's my understanding anyway. I haven't practised Rinzai Zen, the one that emphasises koans, but only Soto Zen, which mostly eschews philosophising in favour of just sitting quietly.

>lead the thinker to recognise the limitations of language, and in particular its inability to fully express ideas about its own limitations

Right, I think that's a good way of putting it. He even writes in the Tractatus about how we can see with our eye, but we can't "see" the limits of our visual field. (Edit: I see now that GP mentioned this, which I missed while skimming.)

I think Wittgenstein would have credited those higher meanings with significance and not divided them as mumbo jumbo. In a way you're supposed to apprehend that those things that mean the most are not the things that language is capable of representing.

Hold up. You can see your eye just fine by looking in a mirror. Where's the problem?

I think parent comment meant that one can’t use the eye to see itself directly without using any intermediaries like mirror or photograph.

Obviously, but why isn't the use of an intermediary allowed in this metaphor?

It's allowed, but once you've used a mirror to understand your eye, you don't need the mirror anymore.

Technically it’s entirely possible given sufficient gravitational bending.

The eye can't see inside of itself. The metaphor breaks down though, because the inside of an eye are in principle _seeable_ (mirrors and microscopes etc), while the "nature of language" or whatever, is in principle _unspeakable_ , no so much as a coherent thing to ask after.

Well, you are not really seeing an eye in a mirror, you are just seeing a representation of it. The medium cannot depict all the dimensions and details of the object, so again you are able to see depictions, representations, and simplifications of it, but never truly be able to grasp the object itself.

Right, it's a three dimensional object projected onto a two dimensional surface and your knowledge about it, from looking into the mirror, is merely superficial. What's to say our world isn't a five dimensional space projected onto four dimensions? What can language say about anything, everything, and the universe when great amounts of it is hidden from us?

Sure you can say that everything I see is technically a representation in my head. But there is very much a shared reality, a domain of objects and state of affairs for which we both agree about the presence or absence of the same representations. There's a difference between a value and our measurement of a value. If every multimeter we touch to a battery reads 5.9v, its possible the battery is actually 6v and every single multimeter was coincidentally wrong. However from the inside the situation is indistinguishable from a 5.9v battery. We may as well accept the reality of our perception and its representations as the real thing per se, because even if it is delusion we are still stuck playing by its rules as if it were real.

I am "really" seeing an eye in the mirror in the sense that I'm seeing the same thing other people would call an eye, and thus it exists in the shared domain. To have a shared domain of objects and facts is to have a common ground. There is no "object itself" for us to reach out and grasp outside of our mutual perception of objects. We might all be in a computer simulation. Doesn't matter. The conversational/perceptual reality is reality.

Even better, you absolutely see things in your eye. They're called "floaters". Your brain learns to mostly ignore them.

And if you develop cataracts, your vision tends to "yellow", and you'll be seeing more and more of the lens of your eye, as it becomes less transparent. Cataract surgery (= replacing natural lens with plastic lens) can lead to the operated eye seeing "bright" and un-operated one "yellow".

Thanks, that's actually a much better explanation than the one on wikipedia

If I can respond to Wittgenstein here:

> he compares this limitation to the way that an eye necessarily can't see itself

On the contrary, language is both perception and action. And it is also a self replicator: language -> model or brain -> language. I think that's why LLMs are so great - they rely on this medium that is both receptive and emissive, unlike other modalities.

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