Wittgenstein is at the core really of *linguistic pragmatism *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopragmatism
Languages are tools. There is no truth "out there".
Philosophers are merely a type of *programming language theorists*.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory
@philipthrift
On Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 12:43:01 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:
>
> I quite agree with Horwich and Wittgenstein as they refer to
> meta-physics. I think one contribution of meta-physics, as in analyzing
> the interpretations of quantum mechanics, is what Wittgenstein called
> "therapuetic", i.e. clarifying and identifying real problems versus
> psuedo-problems of language. But I think they also serve a purpose in
> suggesting how science may advance, what new theories might be developed or
> how old ones may be better understood. Although the latter is generally
> done by scientists who are specialists in the field, there are exceptions
> like Tim Maudlin. And from a meta-physical perspective, mathematicians are
> nothing but armchair philosophers.
>
> Horwich doesn't seem to touch at all on moral and ethical philosophy, how
> one should live one's life, as exemplified by the epicurieans, the stoics,
> the existentialists,... Someday neuroscience, evolution, AI, and decision
> theory may make this field more scientific, but in the meantime there's a
> place for philosophy.
>
> Brent
>
> On 2/18/2020 11:43 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/was-wittgenstein-right/
>
> *Was Wittgenstein Right?*
> BY PAUL HORWICH
> MARCH 3, 2013
>
> A reminder of philosophy’s embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to
> settle any of its central issues.
>
>
> The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century
> philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of
> Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come
> from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot
> be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers
> provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific
> issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge,
> mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that
> cannot be found in the work of others.
>
> Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many
> professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of
> hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is
> self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little
> of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly
> the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of
> philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as
> traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us
> the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.
>
> Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is
> the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should
> devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments.
> There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the
> methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend
> of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of
> a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful
> thinking.
>
> This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which
> continues to prevail. Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its
> promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the
> ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how
> we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep
> understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how
> knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can
> be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on — and that
> philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so
> fascinated by it?
>
> If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein.
> For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic
> illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that
> the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial
> controversy and lack of decisive progress — by an embarrassing failure,
> after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore
> traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking
> identification of its tempting but misguided presuppositions and an
> understanding of how we ever came to regard them as legitimate. But in that
> case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its importance from,
> since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is
> great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only
> bits of stone and rubble)” — and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is
> nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language
> on which they stand.”
>
> Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy — perhaps
> tantamount to a denial that there is such a subject — it is hardly
> surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered with a curl of the lip in most
> philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her life’s work
> is confused and pointless? Thus, even Bertrand Russell, his early teacher
> and enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led to complain peevishly that
> Wittgenstein seems to have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a
> doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.”
>
> But what is that notorious doctrine, and can it be defended? We might boil
> it down to four related claims.
>
> — The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic: its primary
> goals, which are to arrive at simple, general principles, to uncover
> profound explanations, and to correct naïve opinions, are taken from the
> sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case.
>
> —The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of
> philosophical investigation — its focus on conceptual truth — is in tension
> with those goals. That’s because our concepts exhibit a highly
> theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake
> of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the
> interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our
> communicative needs and our other purposes. As a consequence the
> commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate,
> and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is not
> possible (as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial
> complexity by means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic)
> level.
>
> — The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy — an immediate
> consequence of the first two — is that traditional philosophy is
> necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably
> inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed.
>
> — Therefore — the fourth claim — a decent approach to the subject must
> avoid theory-construction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to
> exposing the irrational assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations
> are based and the irrational conclusions to which they lead.
>
> Consider, for instance, the paradigmatically philosophical question: “What
> is truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands
> an answer of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand,
> despite hundreds of years of looking, no acceptable answer of that kind has
> ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence with the facts,” as
> “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as “stable consensus”; but all
> turned out to be defective in one way or another — either circular or
> subject to counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have included a
> variety of theoretical proposals. Some philosophers have been led to deny
> that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some have maintained
> (insisting on one of the above definitions) that although truth exists, it
> lacks certain features that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example,
> that the truth may sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred
> that truth is intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible.
> And others persist in the attempt to devise a definition that will fit all
> the intuitive data.
>
> But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these
> strategies rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth,
> and the fourth is highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should begin, he
> thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that our various concepts play
> very different roles in our cognitive economy and (correspondingly) are
> governed by defining principles of very different kinds. Therefore, it was
> always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such
> as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable
> underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand
> for some such property as well.
>
> Wittgenstein’s conceptual pluralism positions us to recognize that
> notion’s idiosyncratic function, and to infer that truth itself will not be
> reducible to anything more basic. More specifically, we can see that the
> concept’s function in our cognitive economy is merely to serve as a device
> of generalization. It enables us to say such things as “Einstein’s last
> words were true,” and not be stuck with “If Einstein’s last words were that
> E=mc², then E=mc2; and if his last words were that nuclear weapons should
> be banned, then nuclear weapons should be banned; … and so on,” which has
> the disadvantage of being infinitely long! Similarly we can use it to say:
> “We should want our beliefs to be true” (instead of struggling with “We
> should want that if we believe that E=mc², then E=mc²; and that if we
> believe … etc.”). We can see, also, that this sort of utility depends upon
> nothing more than the fact that the attribution of truth to a statement is
> obviously equivalent to the statement itself — for example, “It’s true that
> E=mc²” is equivalent to “E=mc²”. Thus possession of the concept of truth
> appears to consist in an appreciation of that triviality, rather than a
> mastery of any explicit definition. The traditional search for such an
> account (or for some other form of reductive analysis) was a wild-goose
> chase, a pseudo-problem. Truth emerges as exceptionally unprofound and as
> exceptionally unmysterious.
>
> This example illustrates the key components of Wittgenstein’s
> metaphilosophy, and suggests how to flesh them out a little further.
> Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the
> inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts —true, good,
> object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence
> upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed
> to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism
> and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but
> unmotivated.The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved
> merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization
> from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is
> scientism.
>
> As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:
>
> Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with
> the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of
> natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural
> laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by
> using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science
> before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the
> way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and
> leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it
> can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain
> anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.
>
> These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close scrutiny
> turn out to be wrong. But they deserve to receive that scrutiny — to be
> taken much more seriously than they are. Yes, most of us have been
> interested in philosophy only because of its promise to deliver precisely
> the sort of theoretical insights that Wittgenstein argues are illusory. But
> such hopes are no defense against his critique. Besides, if he turns out to
> be right, satisfaction enough may surely be found in what we still can get
> — clarity, demystification and truth.
>
> NOTE: A response to this post by Michael P. Lynch will be published in The
> Stone later this week.
> [
> https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/of-flies-and-philosophers-wittgenstein-and-philosophy/
>
> ]
>
> Paul Horwich is a professor of philosophy at New York University. He is
> the author of several books, including “Reflections on Meaning,”
> “Truth-Meaning-Reality,” and most recently, “Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy.”
> [ https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/paul-g-horwich.html ]
>
>
> cf.
> *Language Games, Writing Games - Wittgenstein and Derrida: A Comparative
> Study*
> Jolán Orbán
> https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Lang/LangOrba.htm
>
>
> @philipthrift
>
>
>
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