Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.
Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.
> Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed.
So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man.
BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic.
And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex
I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any stretch.
But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.
Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter 2.
I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in the category anti-science apologists along the lines of intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy. And the extent to which he has gained influence in academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a legitimate observation.
Could you say something more about him being an anti-science apologist? I can see your case that his arguments fail, but I don't see the anti-science.
But the essence of it is, if you consider optimists about the possibility of computers and AI, whether they be philosophers or programmers for major tech companies, and then you consider an opposing camp, made up of various 20th century philosophers, the most prominent of them being Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, the second camp attempts to approach the problem by asserting that there's an essence to intelligence or consciousness, and that essence is captured in certain key pieces of vocabulary, such as insight, "thinking" and so on. They declare that these are special things that human minds have, that by definition, in some sense, cannot be modeled by any formal description or scientific investigation, and the essence of their definitions is always a moving target.
Their approach to the topic also parallels that of intellectuals who insisted that Darwin was wrong about evolution, and the essence of their insistence was a failure of imagination for the explanatory power of evolution. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but in some ways you could consider the crux of the debate to be this posture of incredulity that the spectacular complexity of life could be explained the iteration of essentially simple and blind rules.
Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, but Dreyfus especially, looked at the logic gates of computing, and then looked at the dynamic, associative, poetic, analogy oriented aspects of human thinking and thought that these contain some magical essence that couldn't possibly be modeled by computers, and that the fundamental ideas of computing needed to be replaced by some new set of core ideas. However, our recent breakthroughs, while they are based on special and new principles that relate to vector databases, convolutional networks and so on, perhaps exhibiting the very core ideas that Dreyfus and Searle believed were missing, those breakthroughs have happened on the same old boring foundation of computing, with logic gates and whatnot, and there was a failure of imagination on their part to understand that those foundational principles could give rise to the more dynamic concepts that they believed were necessary, and that these two things were not in fact in conflict at all.
And the preemptive assertion that they belong to two a category inaccessible to computing principles as they understood them, indeed to any sort of in computational principles of any kind whatsoever, is something that I would contend is a fundamentally anti-scientific instinct that comes from a place of lacking imagination.
But just for the record, re-reading it now 37 years after the fact, I would not hold it up as a particularly good piece of work. It's a bit cringey actually.
My bad. I've gotten pretty overwhelmed with all the activity in this thread, and I'm trying to get some actual work done in between responses so I'm a little distracted.