[Wittrs] Re: some helpful guidelines for reading Wittgenstein's philo...
- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2009 14:23:06 -0700
On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 1:56 PM, c.moeller1<cmoel888@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> Hi, Kirby,
>
> The story, of course, was Stuart's. I recast it adding my own comments and
> interpretations and conclusions.
>
Yeah, he's good an interior landscape journalism, good grist for the mill.
> One of this Wittgenstinean group's stated charters is:
>
> "Above all, we want people to understand philosophic "problems" as only
> exercises created by manipulating grammar. And to see the philosopher's
> role, therefore, as one who watches over the grammar of others during the \
> ritual of disputation or pronouncement."
>
I confess not having read that until now but see it as quite
consistent with Sean's behavior and stated goals for this list. The
guy walks his talk. He should be our BDFL.
> I have it that logic is a valid subject of inquiry, construction, and as a
> foundation for
> precision in philosophical discussion, otherwise how could systems of
> thought be properly and concisely expressed. But the existing logic systems
> are lacking a rich vocabulary of operators—some grammar—especially certain
> verbs. They depend upon the sparse concepts of existence, non-existence and
> coincidence (in both time and space). These systems of static
> logic—descended from Aristotle through Boole [1], Frege, Pnueli, Prior, and
> all modern logicists and natural philosophers—are lacking in several
> respects. The models of correct thinking [2] are unable to be used to
> describe or to create any more than was given (sum of the parts); or
> directly express causation (which instead must be divined or extracted from
> the givens). They can't be used to express or treat dynamic or changing
> scenarios, thus they can't deal directly with ongoing time [3] or processes
> which evolve with time.*
>
> Those observable attributes, including synergy or emergent behavior, cause
> and effect, dynamic activities and ongoing time, are very evident in the
> real world and especially in life.
>
> My question is: "How can philosophy treat questions of dynamic living and
> being without a
> dynamic logic?" The answer is, of course, "Only with great difficulty."
>
> In response to my observation of the shortcomings of logic and philosophy, I
> created a dynamic system of logic, "Natural Logic" (NL) that includes all of
> that which went before and has, in addition, those dynamic operators with
> which one may easily describe ongoing process in real continuous time. In
> the system of NL, all the participants are really there and participate in
> the real domains of space and time.
>
> Best regards,
> Charlie
Wow, that's really eloquent and clear, plus has these "hook words"
into my namespace, likely to pull up cosmic fish.
As you may or may not know, I'm a student of a logic language that
forsakes cryptic notation for the most part, as too much a toy, and
goes with a robust humanities prose style for expression, layers it
on, goes with "thick description" ala Clifford Geertz, and yet lays
claims to being a stark, spare "language for thinking very generally"
i.e. is a logic divorced from any one special case (married to them
all). The originator of this austerely geometric language, graphical
as well as lexical, was a famous 20th century icon with many honors
and degrees, many students, but his logic has been excluded from study
or focus in academic circles, dismissed out of hand as unworthy --
whereas in the private sector we're thinking its the bees knees and
are using it extensively to inform our advertising and PR. The
geometry (logic) is dynamic (transformative), accommodates synergetic
effects, is operational, and has enough gravitas to grapple with the
"heavy words" of philosophers (e.g. love, death, eternal, temporal,
virginity... -- this last taking us off into theological country). I
think it's a metaphysics for the ages, will enjoy a long half life
(only slowly leaks sense, smells like oranges 'n stuff, good aroma...
served through a Coffee Shops Network salon in a zip code area near
you (if you're lucky)).
> *I believe LW recognized this when he wrote extensively on the philosophy of
> mathematics, saying at one point, "They are really there." (when describing
> the participating elements in pure logical and mathematical
> transformations). My interpretation is that when ordinary logic deals with
> worldly things, as opposed to abstract things, it is all done by referents,
> i.e., tokens, as I put it, that stand-in for the actual things being dealt
> with. In pure logical and mathematical transformations, all the participants
> are "really there" (they are not stand-ins but are the actual participants)
> in the same domain—which happens to be the static (timeless) space-domain
> for any operations via accepted logic systems, including any and all used in
> computation (or computers).
What's interesting to my about Python (a logic) is it's very modeling
on names pointing to objects, i.e. if Wittgenstein champions the
antithetical view, that name->object "nominalism" is a misperception,
then Python is consciously designed to promote precisely such
name->object thinking. The fun part is the names and the objects live
internally to the logic i.e. are not "out there" in the world, so
we're back to the TLP idea of computer simulations achieving their
applicability by "mirroring" what is the case. And there's nothing
wrong with this metaphor unless it gets in the way, e.g. many computer
workflow management systems don't "mirror" so much as instantiate i.e.
there's nothing else out there "in the world" that's doing this work
(this is the only place where this is happening -- like when an ATM
gives you money, that's not a "simulation" of something more real)).
Put another way, the objects we name in this logic (math notation,
runs against metal at superhuman speeds) are like dolls in a doll
house and if we want them to "puppet" yet bigger dolls, we just "embed
them" like homunculus demons (deamons) in order to "animate the puppet
from within" (another picture borrowed from everyday cogito talk,
which used to bring in the pineal gland more in Descarte's day, but
that's no longer in vogue so much).
Ruby is another language used to puppet real world objects, such as
train engines by remote control. Type a few words on your keyboard,
and some large heavy freight train in Indiana starts rolling. Type
something else, and it stops. Wow, this is logic like we didn't have
in Bertrand Russell's day, when they were always trying to "mirror"
natural language with something more "crystal clear". Wittgenstein
did that job better with "language games" and today we just "cut out
the middle man" and go straight from logic to device control "without
passing go" as they say. Some call this "cutting corners" but geeks
call it "being lazy" (i.e. efficient enough that you're not always
"behind the eight ball"
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/behind-the-eight-ball.html ).
Kirby
4D
> References:
> 1. George Boole's The Fundamentals of Thought more properly should have been
> titled:The Fundamentals of Static Thought. The workings of the additional
> operators in my "Natural Logic" could be titled: The Fundamentals of Dynamic
> Thought.
>
> 2. About thirty "non-standard" logics (aside from predicate calculus and
> propositional logic) are listed in
> http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/courses/logsys/nonstbib.htm
>
> 3. A logic of "time flowing" rather than of "time flown," as philosopher
> Henri
> Bergson (1859-1941) put it in "Time and Free Will" (1888).
>
> --- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, kirby urner <kirby.urner@...> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 9:45 AM, c.moeller1cmoel888@... wrote:
>>
>> << SNIP >>
>>
>> > Since the effectiveness of philosophy hinges on the effective use of
>> > logic,
>> > it too is impaired. Thus your discussion on, and efforts to capture,
>> > consciousness goes `round and `round without resolution.
>> >
>> > Best regards,
>> >
>> > Charlie
>> >
>>
>> Hi Charlie --
>>
>> Your story made plenty of sense to me.
>>
>> People just fall asleep reading books all the time too i.e. there's no
>> cause for alarm, but in the story you gave us, there was cause for
>> concern, maybe a visit to a medically trained person who sees lots of
>> cases.
>>
>> Anyway, regarding philosophy, I think Wittgenstein's in particular is
>> about equipping you to investigate our own way of thinking "as if from
>> outside" and his "climbing the ladder" in earlier years gave him a
>> "good eye" as we say. But you have to willingly become a stranger in
>> a strange land so to speak i.e. what an existentialist might call
>> "alienation" is embraced as a positive, e.g. spin it to mean "thinking
>> more like an ET".
>>
>> Not every philosopher thinks like Wittgenstein of course, but in the
>> humanities especially, and in philosophy in particular, it's OK to
>> "create a whole world" in which the key words or core concepts are
>> "internally defined", maybe not by listing definitions (like in a
>> dictionary) but by having the concepts "bounce off" one another. The
>> use cases teach the principles, the rules, just like in ordinary life
>> (we didn't always have dictionaries, a relatively recent invention).
>>
>> In the case of the TLP, the logically simple components point to each
>> other in such a way that you get an 'ecology of mind' where stuff
>> hyperlinks and folds up, creating like a shiny crystal ball (a
>> literary analogy obviously). The PI is not dissimilar in that its
>> core innovations create a "philosophical world" (like Uru by Cyan) --
>> the aphorisms all "talk to each other" (reflect one another -- add
>> meaning in this way).
>>
>> People come to the PI and want to find the place where it just "says
>> what it means" about matters of grave import -- that is the stereotype
>> about philosophy, some dude on a mountain top, pregnant with special
>> wisdom we might glean and repeat, hoping some of the glory rubs off
>> (we'd like to be wise as well, but maybe not at the price of living
>> like a hermit).
>>
>> What's frustrating to many readers of the PI and connected writings
>> (RFM, On Certainty, Blue & Brown books), is there don't seem to be
>> many "summary scrolls" where you get the pithy "philosophy" that by
>> all rights is supposed to be there ("how could this be a famous
>> philosopher, if he doesn't play superman?").
>>
>> However, a lot of secondary literature has developed over the years
>> where commentators impute lots of summary views to our guy and this
>> more fits that pattern people expect, so in the case of Wittgenstein's
>> philo in particular, there's often more reliance on the commentators
>> than on the original materials, which latter come across as
>> "insufficiently interpreted" or "too raw" ("uncooked" as it were), or
>> just plain "cryptic" (clear as a bell maybe, each aphorism taken in
>> isolation, but to what end do we study them?).
>>
>> I am likewise a commentator contributing to the secondary literature
>> and I inject quite a bit of "summary stuff" i.e. keep going back to
>> "judgment day" and linking this to "waxing and waning of the world" in
>> some eternal sense, in the sense that the facts of the world, its
>> empirical meaning, is not the important dimension with respect to
>> judgment -- he was making the aesthetic and ethical, (what some call
>> "the subjective") of core importance by showing how we must transcend
>> the limits of what might sensibly be said in order to get to this more
>> important realm (his "logical positivist" interpreters got their
>> positive and negative reversed in many cases as they were more wedded
>> to "scientism" i.e. "sounding like a scientist about everything under
>> the sun" (sounds more authoritative, a better way to bully (to BS))).
>>
>> By the time we get to Philosophical Investigations, he's not so
>> obsessed with showing what cannot be said but rather countering the
>> whole notion that there's something missing, something we cannot do.
>> On the other hand, he himself felt continually challenged to get his
>> meanings across, compared himself to a sketch book artist in a
>> landscape, hoping to communicate a "knowing one's way about"
>> sensibility (like a travel writer in Italy) by means of a strategic,
>> finite number of well chosen sketches.
>>
>> Getting that album put together requires throwing away more than one
>> keeps. So yes, philosophy is still difficult, but not because there's
>> some "realm" we are logically precluded from speaking about (that
>> image from the TLP is less in the foreground).
>>
>> What his philosophy actively discourages, is biased against, is
>> playing superman with so-called super-concepts, these supposed "global
>> variables" that'd get us all on the same page if we could only "get it
>> right" about how they fit together (language, logic, reality,
>> consciousness...).
>>
>> Rather, the best one might do is pioneer and develop a namespace, a
>> logical space of "local variables" (internally defined, operationally
>> consistent, yet piggy-backing on ordinary language for meaning -- no
>> way to avoid that, so if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, was the
>> "surrendering" of the PI). The TLP was more invested in
>> "extraordinary language" i.e. the cryptic notations in vogue at the
>> time among followers of Russell, Whitehead, Frege et al). Those
>> seeking to ascend the Tower of Babel (i.e. to play god) are in search
>> of a bully pulpit and find Logic (capital L) attractive for that
>> reason. The PI levels the playing field, is more democratic in that
>> way (although the TLP, properly understood, was likewise about
>> humility before eternity, not being sinfully vain).
>>
>> Rolling the tape forward, we find that not that many folks trying to
>> make a living in philosophy (in the sense of getting a pay check for
>> teaching the subject) can afford to "just do" the kind of work
>> Wittgenstein was doing (investigating grammatical confusions, clearing
>> up difficulties, even coming up with improved designs). The market is
>> more eager for these grand summary views, for "philosophy" in the
>> tradition of metaphysics and/or "highly speculative science" (how
>> metaphysics dresses up today -- a sort of drag queen, or HMS Mad Cow,
>> a kind of "faux science enterprise" decked out with all the
>> trimmings).
>>
>> On the other hand, I think people paid to do advertising, diplomacy,
>> curriculum writing, psychology, stand to benefit from incorporating
>> Wittgenstein's techniques into their work (I know I certainly have).
>> The kind of "distancing" he encourages, with respect to one's own
>> language (patterns of thought), is quite powerful and effective when
>> it comes to developing "new perspectives" (new ways of looking), and
>> that's often just what the doctor ordered in these workaday
>> disciplines. Gestalt switches are often differences that make a
>> difference (Bateson) even if their meaning (significance) takes time
>> to play out (no "aha!" is "the meaning" although we call those moments
>> of enlightenment "meaningful" (per PI Part 2)).
>>
>> Conclusion: a lot of Wittgenstein's legacy is being felt in
>> disciplines outside of "paid for" mostly university-based philosophy.
>> He has a following in the art world for example.
>>
>> Still awake? Or did you nod off there, too much rambling?
>>
>> Kirby
>>
>
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