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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, that this work is so highly regarded says more about the sad state of modern philosophy than it does about Wittgenstein. The Tractatus is linguistically and logically incoherent. For example:

1.1 The world is the totality of facts...

1.11 The world is determined by the facts...

So which is it? Is the world identical with "the totality of facts" or is the world something separate from the facts whose nature is "determined by the facts"? It can't be both. To say nothing of the fact (!) that Wittgenstein never defines what he means by "fact". The standard Phil101 definition is that "a fact is that which is the case" but Wittgenstein writes:

1 The world is everything that is the case.

So he uses the word "world" to mean what is usually denoted by "fact". So either facts are something other than "everything that is the case" or 1.1 is vacuous.

And that's just the first three lines!

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1.1 The world is all the facts added together.

1.11 The world moves forward, by facts being unveiled. (Here, he sort of gives world and facts a better definition by involving time).

The world is everything that is the case = fact + point in time = case

If you have a more detailed response than a quote of the first two sentences of one of the most complicated philosophical works of all time (and arguably what put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science), then it would be a nice chat, but by God man do better than copying and pasting 3 lines and saying "Wow this is dumb"

If I were to write a detailed critique of the Tractatus it would be orders of magnitude longer than the Tractatus. But when critiquing a work that is utter nonsense from beginning to end it suffices to show that the foundations are nonsense because garbage-in-garbage-out. If someone starts out by proclaiming that one is equal to two, you don't have to dig into the details of their argument to say confidently that it has no merit.

> what put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science

That is also nonsense.

First, Wittgenstein did not "put an end to analytical philosophy":

"Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and CONTINUES TODAY [emphasis added]." [1]

And second, Wittgenstein did not start computer science. That credit goes to Alan Turing -- or maybe Goedel or Babbage or Jacquard or Boole or Frege or the unknown inventor of the abacus. But certainly not Wittgenstein.

I'm sorry, but this emperor is naked.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

I disagree pretty strongly with most of the tractatus, but I think you're doing a disservice by acting as if it's undiscussable nonsense.

A lot of important developments in formal logic, for a specific example, modal logic and Lewis' analysis of counterfactuals, would almost certainly not have been advanced if it is wasn't for the opening sentences that you dismissed as meaningless.

I think its also worth pointing out that Wittgenstein later came to reject everything he'd said in the Tractatus and laid out very different views in his later writings, which are arguably even more influential.

That's a long way of me saying: go ahead and disagree the tractatus, but don't pretend there's nothing worth discussing in it.

I didn't say there was nothing worth discussing in it. I said it was linguistically and logically incoherent. In other words, it's nonsense. But just because something is nonsense doesn't mean it is without value or not worth discussing. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, for example, is nonsense, but it has a lot of value and it's worth discussing.

7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Yeah, that's another stupid thing he said. Anything that anyone says about anything manifestly renders that thing of which something was said a thing whereof it is possible to speak. So point 7 is a vacuous tautology.

(Or maybe what he meant was not what he said, in which case he probably failed to follow his own rule.)

Sounds like you don't know Alan Turing was Wittgenstein's student for a number of years. Cool. Feel free to remain an imbecile.

That is indeed news to me. Can you provide a reference?

BTW, Turing's Ph.D. advisor was Alonzo Church. So it's possible that Turing once took a class from Wittgenstein or attended one of his lectures, but he was definitely not "Wittgenstein's student" in the sense in which that phrase is generally understood in academia. According to Wikipedia, Turing "attended lectures given in 1939 by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics." But that is not the kind of thing that would allow Wittgenstein to lay any claim to Turing's work.

Try reading a biography or a companion book instead of just googling everything. The internet has a lot of knowledge, but it's very low quality. Books (depending on the book) have quality of knowledge that is just unmatched on the internet.

And now with LLMs, the quality of knowledge on the internet is going to take another substantial hit soon.

So that's a "no", you cannot (or will not) supply a reference.

You are the one making the claim, so the burden of proof is on you. And BTW, the claim you need to defend is not that "Turing was Wittgenstein's student for a number of years". That is demonstrably false. Turing and Wittgenstein didn't even meet for the first time until after Turing finished his Ph.D., indeed, after he published "On Computable Numbers". But that is neither here nor there (except insofar as it speaks to your general credibility). The claim you need to defend is that the Tractatus "put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science".

Can you cite even one author who supports this claim? Can you cite a single example of Turing acknowledging Wittgenstein as an influence on OCN? (OCN itself doesn't mention Wittgenstein at all.) In fact, can you cite a single example of Turing and Wittgenstein publicly agreeing about anything? Because all of the references to Turing and Wittgenstein interacting with either other involve vehement disagreement.

In fact, I suspect that the truth is the exact opposite. If Wittgenstein had any influence on Turing at all, it would have been to motivate Turing to invent computer science in order to debunk Wittgenstein. Indeed, many of Wittgenstein's positions are embarrassingly naive in light of modern knowledge. It's not just the Tractatus that is bogus, AFAICT he was just wrong about everything. The fact that he is so highly regarded is truly bewildering.

That's not a no. I CAN provide a reference. As a matter of fact, I did. Wittgenstein and Turings biographies. Read my comments you uneducated keyboard warrior instead of acting out emotionally.

You know, I decided to read the Tractatus, and at the end there is this little gem:

"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless"

I shall sleep well tonight.

Isn't an important part of the tractatus pointing out that people get tripped up by "is" having different meanings? I can't remember, it's been a long time.

Maybe, I don't know. I haven't read the whole thing. Like I said, to me it is self-evident incoherent nonsense from the get-go, so it doesn't seem worth spending a lot of time on it. But I will point out that Bill Clinton is infamous for having made the same observation in a rather different context, so it's hard for me to imagine how this could be considered a deep insight.

Clinton briefly studied PPE at Oxford, but quickly dropped the Philosophy and the Economics, keeping only the Politics.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton#Oxford

In this critique have you considered that a way that that X can be logically determined by Y is by X just being Y.

Sure, but that's a vacuous observation. X being determined by Y is only useful when X and Y are somehow distinct. Simply having two different labels for the same object is not very interesting.

I would suggest that if one label is singular (the world) and the other is plural (the totality of facts) and you explain how the latter combine to form the former then the observation should be especially informative.

In general pointing out that two labels point to the same object can be very informative and this is relevant for the context in which Wittgenstein was writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles

Perhaps, but why do you think that's relevant? Both of the references in this case are plural.

Great analysis.

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