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.

Lecture 4 - David Hume tbh

In our latest lecture the main focus was the hugely influential and important David Hume. He is influential to many philosophers but also us journalists as his approach asks us to constantly verify information. He comes from the empirical school of philosophy and believes that ideas are synthesised; this is in great distinction from the idealists and rationalists such as Descartes. His approach is more like science whereas the rationalist viewpoint comes from a more religious way of thinking. He was probably an Atheist as to be religious would go against his own theories but to have said so in his time he would probably have been prosecuted and killed if he said so; Galileo was persecuted just because he questioned some of the less fundamental aspects of religion. Hume's work helped influence the modern philosophy of Logical Positivism (The Vienna Circle) which is the philosophy that modern science uses and social science follows as well. Social science is the scientific explanation of human behaviour, similar to but not entirely like Sociology.
Hume saw things in a similar way to Einstein and Einstein 'admitted that he could not have the gumption to oppose Newton's immortal status without reading Hume'. He saw things as mechanisms with no absolute truths or knowledge. Just because the sun rose yesterday doesn't mean it will tomorrow; the sun rising is a mental illusion, (admittedly the sun does not rise, it just appears to). He had ideas on a number of things, for example he had ideas on causation saying that it is only happening in your head, not in nature. With an example of billiard balls he says that whilst the white ball hits the red, you cannot know that it was this that caused the red ball to move, you cannot show the causation. On the subject of induction and logic he says you can draw inferences from your own synthetic logic, e.g. you can add knowledge to certain things as the brain synthesizes them together; an example of this would be a unicorn (bear with me), if you know what a horse looks like and you know what a rhinoceros looks like your brain can synthesize the image of a unicorn. Hume also had thoughts on morality, the 'is/ought' dichotomy, but there is no morality in phenomena - no teleology - if Hume were alive today and was told to solve the speeding problem, he would simply put up more cameras.

Hume's philosophy influences the modern philosophy of Logical Positivism which follows the verification principle. By this I mean that any knowledge you might have needs to be verified to have scientific value. The metaphysical needs to be separated from science, this is part of Aristotle's logic, it needs to be non-contradictory, i.e. if the sun is not the moon, then the moon is not the sun. In logical positivism there are three kinds of statements: those statements that can be verified as provisionally 'true', non contradictory; those statements that can be verified as definitely false, contradictory; and those statements that cannot be verified, gibberish. This is very similar in the way it functions to how a computer operates and thinks.

If Hume was the progenitor of logical positivism, Karl Popper was a disciple of Hume's theories and philosophy and took the theories to their logical conclusion. He ritually attacks metaphysics, what he wants is science but he also attacks the verification principle as this is also metaphysics. The statement that non-verifiable statements are gibberish is gibberish itself as it is not actually verifiable. To Karl Popper, statements need to be falsified also, it must be capable of not just verification but falsification.

Hume sought to take to its logical conclusion the work of earlier empiricists such as Locke and Berkeley, rooting out any explanations that depended on invention rather than experience. In the book I Think Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know by Lesley Levene, she writes that "Reasoning, says Hume, is about discovering relationships between things. He identified two different sorts: 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact'. That 15 is half of 30, for example, can be discovered and demonstrated by reason alone, without reference to other forms of evidence, so belongs in the first category. Statements such as 'The sun will rise tomorrow', however, cannot be demonstrated by reason alone; as long as their negation is conceivable, we depend on experience to determine whether they are true or false - which means they belong in the second category." She goes on to say that, for Hume, "mathematics was the only worthwhile form of demonstrative reasoning. Books that did not contain mathematical demonstrations or empirical reasoning - he singled out those on metaphysics and theology in particular - deserved to be 'committed to the flames' as nothing but sophistry and illusion".

To journalists, Hume is so important that this blog really does not do him justice so it will be interesting to look into him more and the seminar will also be an interesting experience.

Until next time. Stay Classy Internet.