Stupid people should strive to become smarter. They should not proclaim themselves to be the norm for being stupid and smart people to be somehow inferior for failure to conform with that norm and for failure to communicate the complex thoughts they have to people who are incapable of taking in complex thoughts.
It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
It's a cultural norm that may exist in the tech world today, but it's certainly not a cultural norm that existed at Cambridge back in Wittgenstein's and Russel's day. -- It's one of the many cultural attitudes that are working together to create the post-truth society we live in today.
It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand (just think of Kierkegaard). That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers. That's true by construction. Because the reason you read is because you start out stupid and want to end up smart.
I actually disagree with the idea that incomprehensible philosophy comes from philosophers so smart that their readership can't understand them. Smarter philosophers could say things that would permit more people to gain greater understanding, wouldn't you say? Assuming of course that philosophers are trying to say things that support understanding.
Further,I think philosophical quality ultimately has to do with its ability to produce positive outcomes. Plato is not definitive -- but reflecting on Plato is deeply enriching. Incomprehensible and miserable philosophy is just that and only that.
> Smarter philosophers could say things that would permit more people to gain greater understanding, wouldn't you say.
This contains the assumption that the purpose of philosophers is to convey philosophy to the masses. I'm not sure why it should be. An electrical engineer's job isn't to convey electronics to lay people. A mathematicians' job isn't to convey his work to laypeople. There are people of those disciplines who take up that as their purpose, and this is an important, crucial role, but to pretend that the goal of every great engineer, scientist or philosopher is to do it is absurd.
Explaining to the masses is one thing. I'm saying the smarter philosophers are able to understand concepts well enough to explain clearly to other smart people. Like, say Richard Feynman in physics. He is smarter, I'd say, for being able to develop concepts and communicate them.
I agree it is a different job to do promotion. But it's an issue if Wittgenstein couldn't communicate comprehensibly to the greatest philosophers of his time -- or experts of today.
Achieve two goals at the same time is always harder or equal to achieve one of them.
If philosophy is easy to understand then good. But make every concept comprehensible to 6-year-old kids would limit the exploration of concepts.
As an example I can think of - in programming world, a bunch of programmers always trying to explain an abstract idea of 'monad' to other programmers but almost always fail. But it's a really useful universal abstraction in programming.
Let me preface that I do find Wittgenstein very interesting and I enjoyed reading his works. But your critique of the article is really bad.
> It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
How is this related to the article? You have some (potentially correct) grievance about imbalanced power relationships in the workplace leading to stupid person winning argument. But this is not the situation here. I don't think the blog author has some power over Wittgenstein.
> It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand
Russel is a great example of a very clear philosopher. Heck, Russel's main complaint with Hegel, for example, was failure to use clear logic.
> That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers.
This is a hard sell. I've ready many books and research papers by great physicists and mathematicians. People who are as "smart" as the best of philosophers (and certainly smarter than me), but mostly their works are quite clear.
----
I think there is a tendency among, especially, austrian and german philosophers to write in sentences that are hard for modern Americans to parse. I suspect this is not a function of "intellect" but rather the prevalent writing style. A lot of philosophical works used lots of indexical references and non-linear patterns. Yet, we are now taught to write with direct, short sentences. Books and other media we read are full of such language. Even our long sentences usually have only dependent clauses. This makes it hard for us to parse out things like:
"Thus the word “is” appears as the copula, as the sign of
equality, and as the expression of existence; “to exist” as an intransitive verb like “to go”; “identical” as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening." (3.323, picked somewhat at random by opening a book and looking for a long sentence on the page)
With no particular loss of meaning (but with greatly improved comprehension, albeit somewhat more verbose, the fault being all mine as it is too late) we could have:
"Thus the word "is" forms a copula that can have two meanings: a sign of equality or an expression of existence. When used to mean "equality," it links an adjective with the object. But, when used to mean "existence," it is an intransitive verb unbound to an object. Thus "is" allows us to speak of something (an object) but also of something happening (no object)."
It uses formal logic formalism but it is pretty clear... what I mean is that there is little burden to interpret what every line means. It is very direct in meaning (if formal logic scares you then look at the text part, short and to the point sentences).
The relationship is that one of the reasons cited by the article for why Wittgenstein is overrated is because he's difficult to understand. That's not a valid argument. Being difficult to understand is not a fault in somebody who is in the business of having to explain difficult things all the time.
And the fact that the author thinks it's a valid argument makes me think that the author subscribes to the same fallacious cultural norm that PHB (pointy-haired boss) subscribes to when he puts the burden on Dilbert to have to work harder to make himself understood by PHB, rather than PHB taking it upon himself to have to work harder to try to understand Dilbert.
Why am I saying it's not a valid argument? Say you read Wittgenstein, and it strikes you that he is difficult to understand, but, despite that feeling of difficulty, your takeaway from reading Wittgenstein is some idea that you think is the idea Wittgenstein is trying to express. At that point you have no way of knowing whether the idea you took away is correct or incorrect, whether it is complete or incomplete as a reflection of what it is that Wittgenstein was trying to say. You furthermore think to yourself: Boy, that idea that was my takeaway from Wittgenstein, I could explain that very easily so that a 6-year old could understand.
World view A: Holds most dearly the notion of a complex idea explained so simply that a 6-year-old can understand.
World view B: Holds that any idea that can be grasped by a 6-year-old couldn't have been all that complex to begin with.
World view A, together with a personality trait of overconfidence, departs from the assumption that your understanding of Wittgenstein is perfect and arrives at the conclusion that Wittgenstein is doing a shitty job making himself understood.
World view B departs from the observation that your understanding of Wittgenstein is such that it could be grasped by a 6-year-old. Granting that the stuff that some of the most famous philosophers of all time were talking about when they were exchanging ideas on philosophy is not stuff that a 6-year-old could understand, you would arrive at the conclusion that your understanding of Wittgenstein is probably incorrect and/or incomplete.
Now.
Overconfident stupid people tend to go through life adopting world view A. Throughout their whole lives they have the experience of smart people talking to them in a complicated way, and taking away ideas that a 6-year-old can understand. Well. If it looks that way to you, it's probably because, being stupid, you only understand half of what they're saying. And, in your perception: Complex ideas simply do not exist. But the world is filled with people explaining simple ideas in complex ways.
Well, to such people I have something to say: "Complex ideas do exist. And I'm done trying to explain them to you and feeling bad when failing."
And Wittgenstein is not a world-famous historical figure due to being overrated. Rather Crispin Sartwell is somebody no one has ever heard of for reasons that seem to me to be entirely rightful.
My claim isnt that wittengstein's ideas can be explained to a 6 year old or are simple or that he is overrated. My claim is that blog author's perception of wittengstein is shaped by how wittengstein wrote. Which is a style that was common for philosophers of the time. The style of expression has little to do with the difficulty of the idea. I regularly read/write scientific papers that would be very hard to meaningfully express to a 6 year old. However, good modern papers do use a direct style with few independent clauses and indexical references. This was not the prevalent style for wittgenstein or even modern continental philosophy.
Tldr, writing style matters and can confuse people independent of idea complexity.
Edit: more thought, in physics (and other math heavy field) we often rename sub-expressions with variable names to make formulas written subsequently shorter and more comprehensible. This means that we often write extra lines of text simply to segment out different concepts so no one line is too hard to understand/too long. This makes it easier to understand the "important" parts.
The article starts with a hit against Philosophical Investigations, which is actually some of his most approachable and interesting work. His concept of language-games is both fascinating & insightful. [0] The systematic way he laid out the contextual nature of meaning in language was groundbreaking at the time, demonstrating that meaning was neither atomic nor discrete, with interlocking contingencies that span multiple words and sentences. In fact this understanding of meaning in many ways probably laid the ground work for aspects of computational linguistics like word-sense disambiguation.
I don't know if he fomented conflict among his "disciples" or if they came to it among themselves, and I'm sure not all of his work was equally insightful, but this article is far from an even-handed assessment of his work.
> demonstrating that meaning was neither atomic nor discrete, with interlocking contingencies that span multiple words and sentences.
How is that original? Of course, the exact meaning of a word and a sentence depends on the context.
If I remember correctly my studies about Mesopotamia, in one the oldest bilingual dictionaries of the world there was a word with two translations, which mean the author knew that there was two distinct meanings for the same word. Centuries later, many of the various authors of the Bible were fond of playing with words. Their writings are full of double-entendre and of reusing the same word in a different context to change its meaning. Aristophanes wrote parodies of the classical Greek tragedies, and he certainly knew how to instill comedy into plain or epic words. It's hard to imagine none of these processes were conscious. More recently, Littré's dictionary at the end of the 19th century had a stress on the context: most definitions include many examples of use across time and places, to show the intrinsic complexity of words.
Here atomic means that objects can be denoted with a finite set of predicates all of whose objects exist (ie you have proximal relationship with) [0]. This is as opposed to objects that subsist (eg everything that is abstract) [1]
Symbols (words) can point to different objects depending on context (what you call words having multiple meanings), this has nothing to do with logical atomism. The point of logical atomism (and as it turns out this is not a complete picture) was that a particular meaning of the word can be described unambiguously (in the sense of using entirely existing objects).
This discussion is largely language agnostic (in a sense that I think every natural human language supports it).
Because that's what the world needs more of: Pitchfork Over/Under-styled hot takes about dense philosophy.
Perhaps there are things that are worth trying to understand, even if they are difficult to comprehend. You can miss out on a lot if you're in the habit of dismissing things out-of-hand.
And yet you're guilty of exactly that which the article admonishes against: celebrating the cult of Wittgenstein on the basis of its inscrutability, not its merit.
Just because something is written in a clear and approachable way, it shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand.
I don't really see how you drew the conclusion from my comment that I'm "celebrating the cult of Wittgenstein". I just take issue with this article, which amounts to a justification of a one-word hot take. I don't object to people having an issue with Wittgenstein -- I'm more disparaging of Wittgenstein than most -- I just want people to be thoughtful about it.
I certainly don't think something should be dismissed because it's written in an approachable way: that's a virtue that all writing should strive for. My point is that some ideas are inherently difficult to write about (and some people aren't very good at writing in a clear way), but we shouldn't be quick to dismiss either because of their difficulty.
There's a difference between thinking something might be worth understanding in spite of its inscrutability - which is what the parent poster was saying - and thinking something might be worth understanding because of its inscrutability.
And conversely, just because something is dense and difficult, and maybe could have been written more clearly, doesn't mean it's without significant merit.
Of course it doesn't necessarily follow that all such material is ground breaking. But sometimes the genesis of groundbreaking ideas doesn't lend itself to easy comprehensibility because the language and concepts needed to convey the ideas, the abstractions, are under development.
Hardly. You betray an inability to focus on the more narrow issue in this comment thread. See my other comments if you want a defense of some of his work; I won't rehash mine and others' comments on the matter here if you can't be bothered to read the wider discussion. If you disagree with those, fine, that's okay, we can both reasonably have different opinions. But your claim that such are not presented, either by me or others, shows your own faults, not anyone elses.
The issue in this particular thread that I am addressing is much more narrow: that of content density and value. And on that front, it is you who have failed to present a cogent reply.
The article makes a case why Wittgenstein is overrated. OP reduced the article to: "Anything that is complicated is not worth understanding," which is disingenuous. The article isn't deep or academic or profound, but isn't deserving of a straw man attack.
And that's my issue with this thread. OP, and now you, are accusing the article of being facile while responding with an obvious claim to a straw man argument. If you want a meaningful discussion, relate it to Wittgenstein, and not some silly "Some things that are complicated are worth investigating" argument that nobody in their right mind would disagree with. If this doesn't seem cogent to you, you've probably been reading too much Wittgenstein.
I'm also of the opinion that Wittgenstein is the most overrated philosopher of the 20th century (if not ever). I'm honestly not sure why he still has entire undergraduate courses dedicated to him (but Godel, Moore, Russell, etc., don't). Virtually none of his ideas made it into any serious philosophical works (sans a bit of philosophy of language). I have a feeling that his work panders to the "obtuseness of ideas" that so many academics crave.
To put him on the same level as G.E. Moore (and his brilliant naturalistic fallacy) and Bertrand Russell (and his [and Whitehead's] brilliant Principia Mathematica) is deeply misguided.
Hang on : Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I !!! You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you are fundamentally wrong (which Russell and Whitehead were) then you get knocked off your perch. Still, I guess that they were in good company.
Bertrand Russell was a wonderful man, but I still smile when I think of the Principia and the essay he wrote nine years after Godel blew it up :"Why Mr. Hitler will not invade Russia"
I think that reason that Wittgenstein is still taught is that there are ideas in there that have not been successfully extended or refuted, except sometimes by Wittgenstein, and even then... Debatably! Also his "approach" is still used by many people.
If the GP thinks Wittgenstein is a vandal I wonder what he makes of Derrida and the other French lunatics; if you want to see where philosophy (and politics and literature) were crippled Paris in the 60's and Yale & Irvine in the 70's would be good places to start. One of it's legacies is the constant and ongoing attack on science - I blame Derrida for climate change denial!*
* I know - this is an act of pure spite, but old people need their fun, and he's dead, and anyway, his friends would just deconstruct my sentence to show that in fact I'm not blaming anyone, blame is not a real concept, things cannot be denied, there is no climate and things can't change.
> Bertrand Russell was a wonderful man, but I still smile when I think of the Principia and the essay he wrote nine years after Godel blew it up
I purposefully put them both up there! Russell was wrong (and, on a personal level, his atheistic slant profoundly annoys me), but he had a coherent and laudable plan -- he was the logical positivists' spearhead. Godel, of course, blew that whole plan up, but it was a plan nonetheless.
> If the GP thinks Wittgenstein is a vandal I wonder what he makes of Derrida and the other French lunatics;
In line with the analytic tradition, I wasn't much exposed to the "French lunatics" (thankfully). Nietzsche was bad enough†.
† I actually quite like some of Nietzsche, but the prose is atrocious.
I can see why someone would think that, it is a reasonable point of view even if I disagree.
I don't get how you can hold Moore and Russell up so highly and then completely discount what they thought of him. I feel they are much better judges of this question than I am.
The article never explains why Wittgenstein is overrated. I've read it twice. All I can gather is that Moore felt he didn't really understand W's philosophical method enough to use it, and that Russell felt that after W, he couldn't do philosophy.
In case anyone wondered, they also maintain a list of underrated thinkers like Bolzano, Spengler, and the Duke of Wellington.
It is generally a better use of time to brush up on the underrated.
Whatever virtues Wittgenstein might have concealed, comprehensibility wasn't among them. If he was right about anything, we can never know, so needn't bother wondering.
I do not feel like this article is engaging with Wittgenstein's arguments or any philosophy in general. I'm extremely tired of these clickbait 5-minute-read articles that somehow attempt to discredit entire lifetimes worth of respected works through ad hominem
I actually like a lot of Kant's arguments (free play and harmony) but he started/amplified the intellectual trend of obtuse writing as a social status marker. And today, philosophy departments-- and philosophy journals -- are very uninspired places.
Philosophy matters. Look at how the lack of it affects politics and individual wellbeing.
If there were someone who would make the argument that 'all philosophy is nonsense' and the person who makes it was respected by a lot of philosophy professors, I would be pretty interested in what he had to say, especially because I have a firm distrust myself of anything that comes out of that discipline.
Not really. He does say in Philosophical Investigations that he had made some mistakes earlier in his career, but there is a thread uniting his earlier and later works: psycho/logical monism, as Imrad Kimhi calls it.
I have zip, zilch, and zero first hand knowledge of Wittgenstein, but I will report on what two of my college profs said:
In college, as a math/physics major, I relented and signed up for a course Philosophy of Science. The course was taught in the philosophy department by a guy from the Bible Department -- the Presbyterian church chipped in some money for the college which however had a good physics department (with some USAF money) and a quite good math department.
So, the course got to Wittgenstein. The prof was traveling or some such so asked a math prof to give the class on Wittgenstein.
As the class started, the math prof winced, hesitated, and said: "I read the Wittgenstein. Uh, let's f'get about Wittgenstein."
That was enough Wittgenstein for me!
The reaction of the Chair of the physics department was "Get your Ph.D. first and philosophize later."
For me, now is "later", and I conclude that his advice was good: Just how math, physics, and the rest of science do or do not work is not simple, and even a first level understanding needs quite a lot of experience, at least observation, of what does or does not work.
Sorry, Ludwig, buddy. Go sign up for a math/physics major, get a Ph.D. in one of those, get experience for some decades, and then see if you can formulate a clean, simple, solid philosophy for how it all should work! My guess is, even with all the background, you can't do it! Sorry 'bout that!
> Go sign up for a math/physics major, get a Ph.D. in one of those, get experience for some decades, and then see if you can formulate a clean, simple, solid philosophy for how it all should work! My guess is, even with all the background, you can't do it!
This is pretty laughable. Math/physics and philosophy may both involve logic, but they are so different. It's neither necessary nor sufficient to be good in one to do well in the other. I'm sorry you had a bad experience in your own philosophy classes, but I've found that understanding some of the basics of philosophy (utilitarianism, natural rights, etc.), have vastly helped me understand why people in the STEM fields are motivated to work on one project versus another.
The course prof suggested that a math prof teach the class.
That was ALL right there in my original post.
Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, just for you, as in my post and as here, the class was
Philosophy of Science
Understand now????
So, a local community college may be able to give you a remedial course in reading comprehension.
I'm sorry you are having so much trouble with simple reading.
Your response, ignoring
Philosophy of Science
is "laughable". You have insulted me and humiliated yourself.
I was torqued. I had big justification in being torqued: I was trying, trying to learn math, physics, and in general science. So, hearing about the course in
Philosophy of Science
I took a chance, signed up, spent the time and the MONEY, tried, and the result was that a math prof's view was "f'get about Wittgenstein" and a physics prof said to philosophize after a Ph.D. So, the course and Wittgenstein ripped me off, wasted my time and money. I was ripped off, had good justification to be torqued, and was.
Again, here I'm reporting what two of my profs said.
> I had big justification in being torqued: I was trying, trying to learn math, physics, and in general science. So, hearing about the course in Philosophy of Science I took a chance, signed up, spent the time and the MONEY, tried, and the result was [... not good].
If you want to learn math or physics, take a math or physics class. A "Philosophy of Science" class will not teach you that. Philosophy studies how people think, how they perceive things, how they organize their motivations ... i.e., why people do what they do. In a "Philosophy of Science" class, I'd expect to learn about why so many people think science is important, why many people feel a desire to learn or have curiosity, and the repercussions of this on the individual and society.
Again, I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but it seems like you were trying to get something out of a class that it was never intended to give you.
It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
It's a cultural norm that may exist in the tech world today, but it's certainly not a cultural norm that existed at Cambridge back in Wittgenstein's and Russel's day. -- It's one of the many cultural attitudes that are working together to create the post-truth society we live in today.
It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand (just think of Kierkegaard). That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers. That's true by construction. Because the reason you read is because you start out stupid and want to end up smart.