[C] [Wittrs] re Blue Book student Coxeter, other overlaps

From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:06:36 -0800
Siobhan Roberts has this excellent new biography out
entitled 'King of Infinite Space:  Donald Coxeter, the
Man Who Saved Geometry' Walker and Company 2006.

I will excerpt from her text (pages 106 - 107)

"""
The reclusive Wittgenstein had taken a liking to Coxeter
when he was a student, and they kept in touch.  "I had tea
with Wittgenstein yesterday," he recorded in his diary.
"He talked very interestingly about blindness and deafness,
and why you get seasick on a camel but not on a horse.
He doesn't seem any more abnormal than before."

Coxeter had enrolled in Wittgenstein's "Philosophy of
Mathematicians" lecture for the 1933-4 year.  To
Wittgenstein's horror, so did a total of forty students,
far too many for the intimate lecture he was willing to
deliver.  "There are too many of you," the philosopher
protested.  "Will three or four please leave?"  After
only a few weeks, Wittgenstein informed his still too
numerous students that the class would continue no
longer.  He deigned to lecture for only a chosen few.
He would dictate his thoughts, and his select students
were instructed to copy the notes and distribute them
to the rest of the class in what became known as his
Blue Books.  The select group included Wittgenstein's
five favorite students:  Francis Skinner (a promising
mathematics student who became Wittgenstein's
constanct companion, confidante, and collaborator);
applied mathematician Louis Goodstein; philosopher
Margaret Masterman (a pioneer in the field of
computational linguistics, her beliefs about language
processing by computers were ahead of their time
and are now fundamental to the field of artificial
intelligence); philosopher Alice Ambrose (of the
analytic school, who also wrote papers on pi,
mathematics, and the mind); and Coxeter.
"""

Roberts goes on to talk about how LW didn't like the
lecture hall setting and they instead retired to Coxeter's
sitting room.  Coxeter was actually impatient with
LW's style and didn't feel he was able to grasp the
substance, so stopped attending the classes -- even
while they kept meeting in his room.

Donald Coxeter's scenario is important in my technical writing
and storytelling in part because it overlaps the scenarios of
two philosophers I've studied:  Ludwig Wittgenstein's and
Buckminster Fuller's.

There's a lot more on the Fuller-Coxeter relationship in this
book.  I was connecting some of these dots for readers of
edu-sig just last night:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2010-January/009722.html

How I connect Fuller and Wittgenstein is through this notion
of namespaces and invention.  "Meaning as use" connects to
"meaning as spin" (one changes the meaning by changing the
spin -- hence "spin doctor" in popular parlance).  LW spun the
meaning of the word "philosophy" (to bring us a new / remade
version of the discipline).  Fuller imparted spin to a lot of key
words in his own invented namespace, which I categorize as
philosophical (with good reason).  I actually own a four volume
dictionary that helps me map Fuller's meanings (called 'Synergetics
Dictionary' and a gift from the author, E.J. Applewhite).

Thesis:

I think the "doing" nature of the PI, versus the more passive
"describing" nature of the TLP, brings the PI closer to
contemporary computer science and its machine-executing
languages.

I am especially interested in connecting LW's idea of
"language games" to "namespaces", as I've discussed in
many previous posts already.

A language game tends to impart its own spin (meaning)
to its "names" (memes, monikers, tokens)  which is why
we consider "namespaces" to be "containers for meaning"
i.e. a namespace, like a language game, supplies a
context.

A challenge in philosophy, and in scholarship more generally,
is sorting out these partially overlapping meanings and
tracing them back to their original contexts.  Unless one is
sensitized to the multiplicity of namespaces, one is in
danger of assuming that what X means by Y is what Z
means by Y, simply because they're both using Y.  All
nuance and specificity go out the door once you treat
all Ys as "global" (i.e. as having some fixed objective
meaning we all share irrespective of context).

This work of providing context is called :"disambiguation"
in some circles and is an important exercise whenever
the waters get too muddy (as often happens in
philosophical discourse, as well as in diplomacy).

To take an example (from Wikipedia), we have two
authors using the word  "Synergetics" to describe their
work, yet their respective namespaces are really quite
remote from one another:

"""
Synergetics can refer to:

    * Synergetics (Fuller), a school of thought on
thinking and geometry developed by Buckminster Fuller
    * Synergetics (Haken), a school of thought on
thermodynamics and other systems phenomena
developed by Hermann Haken
"""

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synergetics ]

Of course lots of "spin doctors" work it the other way too
and deliberately take connotations and denotations
from one namespace and apply them in another -- what's
called taking something "out of context".

Per Arthur Koestler, this may actually be a creative act
and gets used all the time in advertising. Wittgenstein's
notion of philosophy as a series of jokes (deeply
grammatical?) would connect here (Koestler explores
jokes in 'The Act of Creation').

I suspect we're all guilty of cross-breeding meanings
across namespaces.  That's part of what we do as tool
users, as "memetic engineers."  Stuart Kauffman's
thinking on exaptations would enter in at this juncture:
the unforeseen or unanticipated re-purposing of
something takes us into the space of the "adjacent
possible" i.e. some "other tomorrow."

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=636

One could mine the TLP here as well, for ideas about
possibility vs. what's actually the case.  However this
post is already plenty long.

Kirby


"Flies fly back into fly bottles every day."
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[C] [Wittrs] re Blue Book student Coxeter, other overlaps

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