Wittgenstein and more logic... yay

Have you missed my posts? No. Well neither have I really but they've got to be done and this weeks could be quite interesting. Don't take my word for it, read on; and if it isn't don't complain, I said it could be quite interesting, not it will be. Important distinction there. Firstly, the traditional "I didn't just Google Wittgenstein, honest" biography intro. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, (what a name), was born in Austria in 1889 but did a lot of his best work in Britain as a peer of Bertrand Russell working in the same field of logic. Russell even described him as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating". Can't say fairer than that, especially since in my experience of Russell he's quite disparaging of other philosophers. His work is divided between the early thoughts in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus or the Tractatus to its friends, and his later writings, articulated in the Philosophical Investigations. In his earlier work Wittgenstein was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world, and believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship he had solved all philosophical problems, according to Wikipedia at least. But later on in his work he rejected many of the Tractatus's propositions, arguing that language games are the most important function, more on which will undoubtedly come later. He died in 1951 at the age of 62 in Cambridge and perhaps the best way to sum this shambles of an opening paragraph up is to directly quote the Tractatus. Either way that's exactly what I'm about to do. "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits." - Tractatus 6.431

Second paragraph!! Wooo!! Well anyway, the Tractatus is a seminal piece of work which reflected a desire to "reveal the relationship between language and the world: what can be said about it, and what can only be shown." This is where we start getting our logic and later, our language games. Now this next bit is confusing for me and could be boring for you so some of the words will be links to stupid pictures or videos, just to keep it fresh. Now the Tractatus is divided in to seven chapters which each have smaller sections, by the time you get to chapters four and five, the sections are branching out so far that it's difficult to keep up. For now then. Let's keep it simple and look at the seven main propositions.

1. The world is everything that is the case.
2. What is the case (a fact) is the existence of states of affairs.
3. A logical picture of facts is a thought.
4. A thought is a proposition with a sense. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)
5. A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions.
6. The general form of a proposition is the general form of a truth function, which is: (Impossible to type, I don't know where to get the characters from?). This is the general form of a proposition.
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Yay learning! Things or objects are defined, according to Wittgenstein, by their relation to other things. An object is the simplest form of content. Nothing we think of is a priori, it can only come from our understand of other facts and objects. Try to picture an alien that is not made up of something from this world, our world. I think, and so would Wittgenstein, pretty impossible. You can try to be original all you like but it all comes back to Locke in the end. The problem of angels, how do we understand an abstract concept like angels, we take the body of a person and the wings of a bird. Objects that we understand from this world to create a new object, not an original idea and certainly not a priori. Un-logic is a concept foreign to us; we express logic through language and therefore cannot stray far from logic. The word tree is an arbitrary label, it is there to help us logically deal with objects; the roots, the leaves, the branches; and understand it as a tree. This cannot be done illogically. Wittgenstein argues that if you understand language you can understand the world. The reason I've been struggling with a lot of philosophy has nothing to do with me being an idiot or them being too clever, according to Wittgenstein, things seem senseless when you have a lack of understanding of language. "The limits of my language mean the limits of the world" and all that [5.6 in the Tractatus].

Let's carry on with language for a while, the main thrust of the Tractatus picks apart logic in language, reasoning that all statements and colour in speech follow certain rules of logic. To Wittgenstein I would suggest that there is no difference in the importance of logic in language to the importance of logic in mathematics or later, in computers. The world is just your structure of ideas, a sequence of language games. On the phone to your mum? Language game. Arguing on an Internet forum? Language game. Venting on Twitter? Language game. This blog? Language game. They all have a set of certain rules that we follow; in the seminar Ali did his paper and we all cheered (maybe not, my memory is a little fuzzy sometimes) and then Chris explained all the things we'd inevitably got wrong. This is perfect for the language game of a seminar. During Ali's part, everyone stayed quiet and wrote except for Chris, who in his privileged position as the lecturer in the particular game, has the power to interject; and that's fine! Yay for language games. But it's not possible to work everything out according to the big W, it's a pretty nihilistic view but one which sums up a large amount of philosophy nowadays. He saw metaphysics as a bit of a holiday. You're not really doing anything or getting anywhere but it is enjoyable. You want to believe that you think therefore you are Descartes? Go ahead! Here, have a flake in your little God shaped hole ice cream.

To end, it makes a lot of sense to say "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay silent." In the case of this blog, maybe Wittgenstein would have preferred me to keep it that way.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Seminar Notes - John Locke

This week, with my Seminar paper out of the way with a small degree of success I looked forward to someone else giving it their best shot on the subject of John Locke.

Notes on John Locke

Locke was a man who was not keen on innate ideas. Experience was his reasoning for knowledge and it was through experience that Locke thought we gained our knowledge. How do we know what we know? Well Locke puts it down to experience. All ideas come from observation and sensation, without them, how would we reflect and therefore gain knowledge. Sensation is the source of all ideas and he uses the example of a child as a blank piece of paper to explain this. When we are children, we have not yet experienced enough to conceive certain things. A child kept in a black and white room for all his life will not be able to perceive of other colours like scarlet and green. This links to Berkeley whom I may blog about subsequently. Reflection is another concept that Locke explores and he suggests that the mind collects information and the soul considers it. In this way we gain knowledge. Some people never truly reflect, Locke argues, and these people then never form actual ideas.

Much of his writings in his Essay on Human Understanding (especially in our specific chapter of interest) focus on the soul. Locke believes the soul is as inseparable from thinking as it is from the body. He claims that the soul doesn't always think, you need to have organisation before it can begin to interpret things. His thoughts on dreams are sceptical as the idea that you can stop thinking worries him. What also worries him is the idea that you can be thinking in a dream, be woken up, and have no recollection of what you were thinking or 'dreaming' about. There is a lot of thought on whether you are the same person asleep and awake; you could have the exact same thoughts as your asleep self and never know it. It is like the soul and the mind are together but are almost unaware of each other. He reasons that the soul must have some ideas that are not from sensation but is sceptical of this as it would mean that a 'perfect being' would have given you these thoughts, (and we know how he feels about innate thoughts...), so he doesn't like it. He in fact sees dreams as a collection of thoughts from a waking mind. Nothing we dream can be something we haven't already experienced and reflected on. The soul is always reflecting and thinking but this cannot be observed by the body, it can't remember, but this worries him too. It doesn't make sense to him that the soul and body could be separate and it also suggests that some people who do not think whilst asleep are actually soulless. We discussed in the seminar that Locke's dependence on the soul as a definitive article is much like Descartes dependence on God to bridge the gap between his theory, (see previous post on Descartes God Shaped Hole). I do not think however that he is using it for the same reason that Descartes is; i.e. for convenience and to placate the Church. But I do think the use of the soul is slightly contrived in that Locke explains away innate thought using the idea of a perfect being (i.e. the soul) in much the same way Descartes uses God.

In a kind of round about summing up way. Locke then says that the more experience you get, the better thinker you become; a man can have no original thought without context and experience; the mind can receive intrinsic and extrinsic info; you need to walk before you can run in thinking, think little first before you tackle the real issues and interpretation can skew meaning. An example of Locke's principles came up during our seminar discussion. We could see a tree outside the window of the meeting room but how do we know it is a tree? We have been told it is a tree and experience has taught us that objects with a trunk and leaves are trees but how did this idea come about originally? Do we just assume, as Locke does, that the knowledge came from our experience or do we already have the image of a prefect tree in our minds (Plato's forms) and so we can know the image of a tree as long as it conforms to this perfect tree image. This is a little similar to the work we have been doing in Media Key Concepts as it links to Semiotics and Signs. The sign and the signifier concept with the example of a cat, we see a four legged creature with a tail and we know it is a cat. How do we know it is not a dog? Well because we have the referent of the cat already and so can perceive it to be a cat.


I'm going to finish now, having just briefly mentioned perception, which is Berkeley's area of expertise really, with the poem from Berkeley's chapter in the History of Western Philosophy as I think it actually sums up his theories better than I ever could:

There was a young man who said, 'God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there's no one about in the Quad.'

REPLY

Dear sir: Your astonishment's odd:

I am always about in the Quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by yours faithfully, God

Thanks for reading the ramblings of a confused student. Stay Classy Internet.