Economics Questions

Re: Wittgenstein

AJ — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:48:02 GMT

That's a good indication to me that he was on to something that most people don't come near grasping. Hence to them he seemed to be all over the map (and maybe even to himself, heh).

Re: Wittgenstein

Brainpolice — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:45:05 GMT

AJ:

Brainpolice:

Of course not, Wittgenstein.

I think that was his point, but with drawn out implications for the enterprise of epistemology, which he wants to basically dissolve.

I see. I've been noticing a lot of Wittgenstein dances pretty near some of my own ideas, in that he understands there is a big problem in the area of language vs. thought. But I've never heard a summary of his ideas and I'm really too lazy to read him right now - too many other things to read and think about.

I think the issue is that Wittgenstein is one of the most widely interpreted thinkers of the 20th century. There are so many takes on him that one is easily confused about what he could be said to have really thought. He's been connected to everything from logical positivism to postmodernism. I'm mostly making use of the interpretations and summaries that I've gathered from sources other than Wittgenstein himself, such as the references to him from John Searle, Hillary Putnam and Richard Rorty.

Re: Wittgenstein

AJ — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:08:19 GMT

Brainpolice:

Of course not, Wittgenstein.

I think that was his point, but with drawn out implications for the enterprise of epistemology, which he wants to basically dissolve.

I see. I've been noticing a lot of Wittgenstein dances pretty near some of my own ideas, in that he understands there is a big problem in the area of language vs. thought. But I've never heard a summary of his ideas and I'm really too lazy to read him right now - too many other things to read and think about.

Re: Wittgenstein

E. R. Olovetto — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:48:16 GMT

Brainpolice:
... as well as the notion of philosophy as a meta-discipline or science that stands above and critiques the whole of culture. That's why there is this reoccuring theme of statements that seem to attack "philosophy" itself, at least as it has normally been concieved.

Yeah, he takes up "philosophy" as "a therapeutic, rather than cognitive enterprise", somewhat similarly to Nietzsche.

The Tractatus is online here, but the math symbols suck. I got Kolak's recent translation for $9, and it has some helpful notes.

I think Donald's Peterson's book is really good. I would get that before even trying Wittgenstein, or read Janik and Toulmin's book for the historical background.

"what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

Usually this is translated more like "Of what we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."

I think he is referring to the noumenal-phenomenal divide, or Tolstoyan-Kierkegaardian "indirect communication".

Re: Wittgenstein

Brainpolice — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:27:04 GMT

Of course not, Wittgenstein.

I think that was his point, but with drawn out implications for the enterprise of epistemology, which he wants to basically dissolve.

Re: Wittgenstein

AJ — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:19:01 GMT

Brainpolice:
As far as I understand it, Wittgenstein's later philosophy challenges the very idea of a connection between words and private mental states, or even between language and an external reality. The question seemed to partially hinge on "can you know my pain?" or "can language be used to accurately represent my internal state?".

Of course not, Wittgenstein. I can imagine two bird flying in the sky, then I can say, "Two birds are flying in the sky," but needless to say it would be impossible to get all aspects of that mental image into words. Rough approximations are what words can provide, and we fill in the blanks because we are both human. The only reason language works at all is that we are all human beings with like sensory organs and relatively similar sets of experiences to draw from. Language takes advantage of this to correlate roughly similar sets of concepts with words and fairly standardize the understanding of these abstract tokens across all people in that language group.

We become expert at manipulating these words and this grammar to arrange sets of concepts in a way that gives enough of the idea of the concepts we hold in our minds that (hopefully) the listener can reconstruct the intended concept from among the pieces of his experience and knowledge that we assume we share. Given how unwieldy this process is it's a wonder it ever works at all, and of course it often doesn't (as is well in evidence on the forums today, and everyday really).

People seem to struggle with words and meaning because they get the idea that there is something magical about the word, a.k.a. the fallacy of magical thinking, similar to reification. This misconception has been around for a while. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1

Re: Wittgenstein

Brainpolice — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:22:46 GMT

As far as I understand it, Wittgenstein's later philosophy challenges the very idea of a connection between words and private mental states, or even between language and an external reality. The question seemed to partially hinge on "can you know my pain?" or "can language be used to accurately represent my internal state?". The idea of language having the function of communicating what's inside your mind to another person's mind gives way to the idea of language as a tool to influence the behavior of other people within the context of a "form of life" or culture that the language is bound up in.

This might make Wittgenstein appear as a behaviorist, although I don't think he was going for that. And while he challenged representational models of language, I don't think he concluded something metaphysical from that (such as the leap to "there is no reality" or solipsism or something along those lines). He seemed to have been using ideas about language to undermine the Cartesian and Kantian traditions. It challenges the Cartesian tradition in terms of the modern philosophical notion of the private mind, and it challenges the Kantian tradition in terms of the analytic/synthetic dichotomy.

His earlier philosophy concieved of meaning in terms of an occular metaphor (pictures), which the logical positivists took and ran with for their own purposes, but he came to reject that view. Is there necessarily an image presented to my mind's eye (another occular metaphor)? For the positivists, it turned out that using this notion of meaning excluded the vast majority of our language (which isn't necessarily explicitly object-refering and image-laden), the consequence of which was to be bound to dismiss common discourse (including ethics, politics, religion, aesthetics, and much of what permeates culture in general) as utterly meaningless.

I think the later Wittgenstein, on the contrary, saw meaning in virtually all discourse, just manifested in a diversity of ways in "language games". He came to reject the notion of a singular "theory of meaning" or "criteria of meaning", the notion of a "meta-language" through which particular languages are translatable into to determine truth-value, as well as the notion of philosophy as a meta-discipline or science that stands above and critiques the whole of culture. That's why there is this reoccuring theme of statements that seem to attack "philosophy" itself, at least as it has normally been concieved.

Re: Wittgenstein

AJ — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:30:50 GMT

Physiocrat:
That been said I did get quite a bit out of him in particular more precise use of language- for example I used to strongly hold the idea that true knowledge came from propositions that couldn't be denied by self refutation, a la Hoppe fused with a bit of Descartes, but to conceive of I do not think cannot be said since we'd have to describe unthinking in words as a concept before using it in the syllogism which would be nonsensical. Now I'm not with him all the way since this would preclude language actually conveying meaning and truth and leave us as mystics as he seemingly comes across as. Reading him also sharpens the senses to tautologies that people use.

Maybe it's because you've been steeped in Wittgenstein, but I had a little trouble understanding the grammar of what you wrote here. I thought, though, that maybe this quote would be applicable or start debate, because it reflects part of my position on words fairly well:

"We can get very confused, because we think that words must have some secret meaning that we have to figure out. They don't. They are just noises or marks, and they mean whatever experience you have learned to mean by them. People tend to use similar words in similar situations, but unless you have specifically agreed on what the words will mean, in terms of underlying experiences, there's no way to know what another person understands when you use them. The experience you attach to a word when you say it isn't automatically the same as the experience another person attaches to the same word when hearing it."

William T. Powers

Re: Wittgenstein

John Ess — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:19:45 GMT

I have his book of lectures on the foundations of Mathematics. It's a strange book and in some places hard to read. He does a lot of the same thing: trying to explain what we mean when we calculate something, or when we say some equation is true, and so forth. The green book "Foundations of Mathematics" is good. I found some of the other books on his mathematical theory impossible to understand since I'm not a mathematician.

It's cool that he interacts with the audience in the book which includes Alan Turing asking him questions about what he means. It's funny that Wittgenstein says Turing is wrong over and over right to his face and then going off into tangents about why his "questions are nonsensical" or whatever; showing that he was a very sharp thinker and always on his feet. It also has drawings in the book that he apparently drew on the board.

Another really interesting book is Wittgenstein Flies a Kite by Susan Sterrett. It shows how he was influenced by engineering and particular airplanes. There is some really interesting stuff in here about how things which are not inherently stable (like bikes and planes) can nonetheless be more usable than things which are on a fixed or random path (like hotair balloons or early gliders and failed planes). Freedom and complexity is why language, bikes, and airplanes are incredibly usable. I think this applies to language games, but it's also interesting perhaps to economics as well. And it's well documented and a very interesting history of the invention of the airplane and all the people involved. It also goes a bit into Wittgenstein's earlier education in math, engineering, etc. and of course the type of fascinations people at the time had (particularly kids playing with miniatures of helicopters and planes). And how for instance modeling scale in engineering is relevant to an appropriate modeling of language. The book makes the point that Ludwig Boltzmann was a big influence on his work.

Re: Wittgenstein

Physiocrat — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:04:45 GMT

I recently finished reading his Tractatus and it was the longest 70 odd pages I ever read!!! As has been said above he's incredibly dense, requiring multiple re-reading of sentences. That been said I did get quite a bit out of him in particular more precise use of language- for example I used to strongly hold the idea that true knowledge came from propositions that couldn't be denied by self refutation, a la Hoppe fused with a bit of Descartes, but to conceive of I do not think cannot be said since we'd have to describe unthinking in words as a concept before using it in the syllogism which would be nonsensical. Now I'm not with him all the way since this would preclude language actually conveying meaning and truth and leave us as mystics as he seemingly comes across as. Reading him also sharpens the senses to tautologies that people use.

NB though, as BP said, Wittgenstein did seem to go on somewhat of a journey philosophically so to talk of Wittengstein as a whole would be unhelpful.

Btw anyone read his stuff on the foundations of mathematics? I'd really like to read that.

Re: Wittgenstein

JAlanKatz — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:22:36 GMT

I was once at a logic seminar where the speaker mentioned that he never understood a certain point Wittgenstein made on logic. He turned to a Wittgenstein expert and asked his opinion. The response - "I don't understand it either." Wittgenstein is very easy to understand in characature (sp), such as by reading Long or someone else who actually understands him. I've come to accept that I will never read Wittgenstein and understand him as clearly as Long does, but I can make sense in broad strokes by seeing what Long says. He's very hard to understand in detail for most people.

Re: Wittgenstein

Hairnet — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:25:32 GMT

Thanks that was very helpful. Honestly I am not interested in him anymore. Getting flipped off means "you are a bad driver", duh.

Re: Wittgenstein

John Ess — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:59:39 GMT

Here is the German/English special edition that you'll find in stores for like 40 bucks. For free via scribd. Take a look.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7365540/Ludwig-Witt-Gen-Stein-Philosophical-Investigations

As for tractatus. His quote is often stated as "that of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence." It is the very last line.

The tractatus basically tried to reduce language to logical structures. I think due to Russell's influence in logical atomism. Where everything is broken down in to small logical statements. Anything which cannot be part of this rigorous system, must be ignored. It is not as if it is impossible to be illogical, but that we must understand what statements pass muster as logical and thus meaningful. For instance, right before the statement he makes about what he must pass over in silence, he says that it is not meaningful to say that God or heaven solves some problem of death. Because that merely creates another problem to deal with in something like theology. And so it goes. We must avoid such questions. (If Wittgenstein had any religiosity it was mostly inspired by Kierkegaard, I think).

But Wittgenstein had an epiphany it is said when someone flipped him off in traffic. And he couldn't figure out what the logical structure of that gesture is. So he concluded that we merely play games with language. But they are games in many different ways. Similar to how chess and football are both games, but not the same type of game. Or "playing a game" might mean just messing someone. Philosophical problems are then about figuring out the games people play that make them so complicated.

I also recommend the (weird) movie Wittgenstein. Which is on google video.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2608378371506756422#

(warning it also has the dreaded Keynes in it).

Or these shorter clips from youtube:

representing his tractatus-era work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0cN_bpLrxk

representing his return:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIhl9rVg6mM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILlvG78ZldQ (featuring Keynes)

Re: Wittgenstein

Hairnet — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:32:14 GMT

Hmmm. I will look up Philisophical Investigations. Thanks Brainpolice.

Re: Wittgenstein

Angurse — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:57:11 GMT

Wittgenstein is talking about the limits of "reality" through human thought and language.