From my perspective, saying that “this philosophical opinion is kinda like this Less Wrong article” sounds like “this prophecy by Nostradamus, if you squint hard enough, predicts coronavirus in 2020″. What I mean is that if you publish huge amounts of text open to interpretation, it is not surprising that you can find there analogies to many things. I would not be surprised to find something similar in the Bible; I am not surprised to find something similar in philosophy. (I would not be surprised to also find a famous philosopher who said the opposite.) In philosophy, the generation of text is distributed, so some philosophers likely have track record much better than the average of their discipline. Unfortunately—as far as I know—philosophy as a discipline doesn’t have a mechanism to say “these ideas of these philosophers are the good ones, and this is wrong”. At least my time at philosophy lessons was wasted listening to what Plato said, without a shred of ”...and according to our current scientific knowledge, this is true, and this is not”.
Also, it seems to me that philosophers were masters of clickbait millenia before clickbait was a thing. For example, a philosopher is rarely satisfied by saying things like “human bodies are composed of 80% water” or “most atoms in the universe are hydrogen atoms”. Instead, it is typically “everything is water”. (Or “everything is fire”. Or “everything is an interaction of quantum fields”… oops, the last one was actually not said by a philosopher; what a coincidence.) Perhaps this is selection bias. Maybe people who walked around ancient Greece half-naked and said things like “2/3 of everything is water” existed, but didn’t draw sufficient attention. But if this is true, it would mean that philosophy optimizes for shock value instead of truth value.
So, without having read Wittgenstein, my priors are that he most likely considered all words confused; yes, words like “time” and “free will”, but also words like “apple” and “five”. (And then there was Plato who assumed that there was a perfect idea of “apple” and a perfect idea of “time”.)
Now I am not saying that everything written by Wittgenstein (or other philosophers) is worthless. I am saying that in philosophy there are good ideas mixed with bad ones, and even the good ones are usually exaggerated. And unless someone does the hard work of separating the wheat from chaff, I’d rather ignore philosophy, and read sources that have better signal-to-noise ratio.
I won’t pretend that I have a strong understanding here, but as far as I can tell, (Later) Wittgenstein and the Ordinary Language Philosophers considered our conception of the number “five” existing as an abstract object as mistaken and would instead explain how it is used and consider that as a complete explanation. This isn’t an unreasonable position, like I honestly don’t know what numbers are and if we say they are an abstract entity it’s hard to say what kind of entity.
Regarding the word “apple” Wittgenstein would likely say attempts to give it a precise definition are doomed to failure because there are an almost infinite number of contexts or ways in which it can be used. We can strongly state “Apple!” as a kind of command to give us one, or shout it to indicate “Get out of the way, there is an apple coming towards you” or “Please I need an Apple to avoid starving”. But this is only saying attempts to spec out a precise definition are confused, not the underlying thing itself.
(Actually, apparently Wittgenstein consider attempts to talk about concepts like God or morality as necessarily confused, but thought that they could still be highly meaningful, possibly the most meaningful things)
These are all good points. I could agree that all words are to some degree confused, but I would insist that some of them are way more confused than others. Otherwise, the very act of explaining anything would be meaningless: we would explain one word by a bunch of words, equally confusing.
If the word “five” is nonsense, I can take the Wittgenstein’s essay explaining why it is nonsense, and say that each word in that essay is just a command that we can shout at someone, but otherwise is empty of meaning. This would seem to me like an example of intelligence defeating itself.
Wittgenstein didn’t think that everything was a command or request; his point was that making factual claims about the world is just one particular use of language that some philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) had hyper-focused on.
Anyway, his claim wasn’t that “five” was nonsense, just that when we understood how five was used there was nothing further for us to learn. I don’t know if he’d even say that the abstract concept five was nonsense, he might just say that any talk about the abstract concept would inevitably be nonsense or unjustified metaphysical speculation.
These are situations where I woud like to give a specific question to the philosopher. In this case it would be: “Is being a prime number a property of number five, or is it just that we decided to use it as a prime number?”
I honestly have no idea how he’d answer, but here’s one guess. Maybe we could tie prime numbers to one of a number of processes for determining primeness. We could observe that those processes always return true for 5, so in a sense primeness is a property of five.
From my perspective, saying that “this philosophical opinion is kinda like this Less Wrong article” sounds like “this prophecy by Nostradamus, if you squint hard enough, predicts coronavirus in 2020″. What I mean is that if you publish huge amounts of text open to interpretation, it is not surprising that you can find there analogies to many things. I would not be surprised to find something similar in the Bible; I am not surprised to find something similar in philosophy. (I would not be surprised to also find a famous philosopher who said the opposite.) In philosophy, the generation of text is distributed, so some philosophers likely have track record much better than the average of their discipline. Unfortunately—as far as I know—philosophy as a discipline doesn’t have a mechanism to say “these ideas of these philosophers are the good ones, and this is wrong”. At least my time at philosophy lessons was wasted listening to what Plato said, without a shred of ”...and according to our current scientific knowledge, this is true, and this is not”.
Also, it seems to me that philosophers were masters of clickbait millenia before clickbait was a thing. For example, a philosopher is rarely satisfied by saying things like “human bodies are composed of 80% water” or “most atoms in the universe are hydrogen atoms”. Instead, it is typically “everything is water”. (Or “everything is fire”. Or “everything is an interaction of quantum fields”… oops, the last one was actually not said by a philosopher; what a coincidence.) Perhaps this is selection bias. Maybe people who walked around ancient Greece half-naked and said things like “2/3 of everything is water” existed, but didn’t draw sufficient attention. But if this is true, it would mean that philosophy optimizes for shock value instead of truth value.
So, without having read Wittgenstein, my priors are that he most likely considered all words confused; yes, words like “time” and “free will”, but also words like “apple” and “five”. (And then there was Plato who assumed that there was a perfect idea of “apple” and a perfect idea of “time”.)
Now I am not saying that everything written by Wittgenstein (or other philosophers) is worthless. I am saying that in philosophy there are good ideas mixed with bad ones, and even the good ones are usually exaggerated. And unless someone does the hard work of separating the wheat from chaff, I’d rather ignore philosophy, and read sources that have better signal-to-noise ratio.
I won’t pretend that I have a strong understanding here, but as far as I can tell, (Later) Wittgenstein and the Ordinary Language Philosophers considered our conception of the number “five” existing as an abstract object as mistaken and would instead explain how it is used and consider that as a complete explanation. This isn’t an unreasonable position, like I honestly don’t know what numbers are and if we say they are an abstract entity it’s hard to say what kind of entity.
Regarding the word “apple” Wittgenstein would likely say attempts to give it a precise definition are doomed to failure because there are an almost infinite number of contexts or ways in which it can be used. We can strongly state “Apple!” as a kind of command to give us one, or shout it to indicate “Get out of the way, there is an apple coming towards you” or “Please I need an Apple to avoid starving”. But this is only saying attempts to spec out a precise definition are confused, not the underlying thing itself.
(Actually, apparently Wittgenstein consider attempts to talk about concepts like God or morality as necessarily confused, but thought that they could still be highly meaningful, possibly the most meaningful things)
These are all good points. I could agree that all words are to some degree confused, but I would insist that some of them are way more confused than others. Otherwise, the very act of explaining anything would be meaningless: we would explain one word by a bunch of words, equally confusing.
If the word “five” is nonsense, I can take the Wittgenstein’s essay explaining why it is nonsense, and say that each word in that essay is just a command that we can shout at someone, but otherwise is empty of meaning. This would seem to me like an example of intelligence defeating itself.
Wittgenstein didn’t think that everything was a command or request; his point was that making factual claims about the world is just one particular use of language that some philosophers (including early Wittgenstein) had hyper-focused on.
Anyway, his claim wasn’t that “five” was nonsense, just that when we understood how five was used there was nothing further for us to learn. I don’t know if he’d even say that the abstract concept five was nonsense, he might just say that any talk about the abstract concept would inevitably be nonsense or unjustified metaphysical speculation.
These are situations where I woud like to give a specific question to the philosopher. In this case it would be: “Is being a prime number a property of number five, or is it just that we decided to use it as a prime number?”
I honestly have no idea how he’d answer, but here’s one guess. Maybe we could tie prime numbers to one of a number of processes for determining primeness. We could observe that those processes always return true for 5, so in a sense primeness is a property of five.