
Wittgenstein’s Legacy: The Principles of the Private Language Arguments (2018) - tokyoseb
https://doi.org/10.1111/phin.12186
======
tokyoseb
If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would
recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction
before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his
first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on
another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray
Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting.

I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it
definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn
unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly
“natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky
grounds.

~~~
zwkrt
I’ll let professional philosophers try to peel apart every nuance of the
Investigations. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and approachable—if not
chaotich—book for anyone used to reading academic papers in CS, math, or
linguistics. The topic is deeply scrutinizing our everyday language,
especially language about mental states. He is a very persuasive and poetic
writer. Some excerpts:

\- To utter a word is to strike a note on the keyboard of the imagination.

359\. Could a machine think? ... Well is the human body to be considered such
a machine? It surely comes as close as possible to being such a machine.

583\. ... And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling
mouth _smiles_ only in a human face.)

------
tlb
When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said that
he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because words
might mean different things. I imagined he was talking about words like
"socialism" or "equality" \-- words that are obviously slippery. But it turns
out that words like "is" and "have" cause just as much trouble.

Wittgenstein is famously hard to read. I have the book (translated by a group
including the author of this article) with side-side German-English text, the
better to puzzle over his more inscrutable pronouncements. But this article is
worth your time.

~~~
tuesdayrain
> When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said
> that he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because
> words might mean different things.

That's how I've always intuitively felt about the Ship of Theseus thought
experiment. It only seems paradoxical when people try to apply imprecise
language to a precise situation. The way I see it, it's technically a new ship
with every part that gets replaced. Nothing unusual about it.

~~~
goatlover
It's unusual because our ordinary language does not talk about objects being
new with every change. The ship that sets sails is supposed to be the same
ship that returns. And yet change is part of life. Everything undergoes
change, as Heraclitus noted a long time ago. So why do we talk so imprecisely
about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next
time we step in it?

~~~
coldtea
> _So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence?
> Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?_

Because the concept of river describes a body of water in flow starting from
and passing through specific geographical locations.

Those all remain, even if the water at any point X of the river changes...

~~~
goatlover
Those all undergo change as well. In context of the parent, any change
whatsoever results in a new object. Which was the point of Heraclitus not
being able to step in the same river twice. It's all flux.

That's what motivated Plato and Kant to come up with their philosophical
responses to the flux. One with eternal forms and the other with categories of
thought.

~~~
coldtea
> _Those all undergo change as well_

And we are free to disregard small changes, like we do everywhere.

I'm aware of Heraclitus' thought (and other pre-socratics, Aristotle, Plato,
Kant, Hegel, and many others besides) but it's not a binding observation (that
one should fell compelled to respond by resolving some great paradox).

"Yeah, the river undergoes small changes all the time, and bigger changes from
time to time. Still enough remains common for us that we still don't care and
will call it by the same name, what are you gonna do about it?" is a nice
common sense response...

~~~
goatlover
Right, but the paradox is that a bunch of inconsequential changes lead to
major changes over time, such as the ship being replaced plank by plank until
it has none of the original material.

------
DanielBMarkham
My favorite self-quote: technology development is applied philosophy.
Wittgenstein taught it; we're the people living it.

When philosophy and science existed mostly as words handed from one generation
to the next in written form, it was possible to amass enough of a web of
meaning for any one general field for a body of practitioners to gain useful
applicable knowledge for the rest of humanity. But as philosophers found out
early enough, and the sciences are learning too, it's also possible to create
not only webs but islands of meaning, such that localized progress can appear
to be made without having any impact, positive or negative, on mankind as a
whole. We mind our knitting so well that nothing ever gets knitted.

We technology developers have this problem; but we not only have it, we have
had it over and over again with each new domain we absorb. We start with
(spoken) languages, jargon, and cultural knowledge, combine various tribes
together, create a mezzanine language among ourselves, then translate all of
that into math. Hopefully it's provable, rock-solid math. But however we do
it, we deal with mapping ideas to bits.

In the history of mankind, nobody else has ever had the job of doing that over
and over again across dozens or hundreds of domains. Instead, the typical
approach was to become good in one domain, then continue to specialize. In
this sense, technology solution development is applied polymathematics.

Because of that, it's been really interesting watching the tech community
interact with the academy. I don't think there's much love lost on either side
most days, but both groups have important things to offer the other. I've seen
several attempts to formally bridge the gap, but it's usually done through
some quasi-formal symbolic system such as UML. The light hasn't come on yet.
We are getting close, though, as it's a hoot to watch.

History nerd note: when Wittgenstein first began down this road and realized
the impact of what he was doing, he announced that he had "solved philosophy".
Philosophy was no longer something that needed work. This had to have driven
Russell bananas; as he was trying to "solve" it by going down an almost
diametrically-opposite path.

~~~
Merrill
While natural languages and mathematics are two important formalisms by which
technologists communicate, it seems to me that we also use a much broader set
of visual symbolic systems. These include tables of data in various formats
and figures that incorporate drawings, diagrams, charts, pictures and videos.
These are now as important as the text and formulas. Problems with tables and
figures are one of the main reasons for retractions.

It seems that philosophers like Wittgenstein deal with all text communications
(like a law book) or at most with text and formulas (like a math book). It not
clear how their work relates to something such as a complex, detailed
structure diagram of a molecule like a enzyme, such as are frequently
published.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'm using the term "mathematics" in a deliberately hand-wavy fashion because
people keep wanting to poke at this from various angles and even though the
underlying theory is the same, it can appear that you are receiving different
answers simply because you are asking the question from different
epistemological frameworks. There's a reason Wittgenstein was the man and I'm
not.

If you like, we can assume that different numbers have a concrete, discrete
meaning. We can then add commutation and association, maybe induction. At some
point, however far down the rabbit hole we want to go, these numbers in a
table represent some physical thing: six apples or whatever. These diagrams
and other visuals represent some tangible, agreed-upon thing: a diagram of an
enzyme, perhaps.

The mapping of various calculii to either physical things or commonly-held
concepts is not on the table here. The point is that the concepts themselves
can have subtly-different meanings for any two practitioners or observers. A
doctor in the middle ages may check your humeurs and a modern nurse may check
you blood pressure. Imagining for a second that both operations look similar,
even though you may have the same number, you have a completely different
understanding of what those numbers _mean_.

So whatever formal rules of mathematics you'd like to have, and whatever
visuals or measurements you'd like to take or produce, the end goal is
analysis or language creation around a shared interest. If I hold up a coconut
and want to trade it, then you make some odd sound, it means nothing. But then
if you hold up two bananas, we may be beginning to converse and exchange
meaning. (In this case by way of commerce, but this is just one example of
thousands) The visuals enable higher-bandwidth conversations. Do I then think
that 1=2, since I had one coconut and you had 2 bananas? I might. I might not.
If we're from completely different cultures we have a lot more work to do.

That's an obvious example, the deeper and much more profound truth is that the
same thing can happen with a vapor trail in a particle accelerator. I'm
reminded of John Wheeler's idea that maybe there's only one electron in the
entire universe. Once the web of meaning reaches some degree of complexity,
the human brain shuts down and stops evaluating all the possible alternative
meaning paths; we are not aware of this. In our mind we've thought through
everything and are sitting on top of thousands of years of received wisdom. It
has always been like this.

So yes, they are much, much more important than text or formulas, but they're
more important because they assist us in the drive for common language
creation. Frankly, many times they do a much better job than the others. But
the job in both cases is the same.

I will make another stupid analogy. Ever see the scintillating grid optical
illusion?[1] It looks like you can see every other black dot except the one
you're looking directly at. Meaning is similar in that whatever the concept
under observation, it appears like some analysis can work out the problems.
The other ones, farther away, don't need any work. They're all set in stone.
But then, given time, when you look at those, you realize that no, actually
there's some problems over here. That area you were looking at before? That's
all fixed now.

The lesson here is that there is a cognitive limit to the things that you can
simultaneously ponder about their meaning, relationships, and relevance to any
one situation. After that limit, it's all just "common knowledge" or received
wisdom. It has to be this way. (no time to go into why). But then you realize
that it's all a web, we're all living in our own constructed grid that's
different, and the goal is to align both the concepts under observation and
the "given" concepts among several of us such that we can erect a language
scaffold sturdy enough to make progress towards some common goal.

I know that sucks, but that's the best I've got in ten minutes. Hope it
helped. There's an entirely other conversation about how we construct these
grids, how we share them, and more importantly why this is a feature of
sentience and not just a stupid primate trick. No time for that.

1\. [https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/scintillating-
grid](https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/scintillating-grid)

~~~
Merrill
Apparently the ideas and mental concepts in one person's brain are roughly
similar to those in another's, at least similar enough so that common sets of
symbols, semantics, and syntax can be agreed such that communication is
possible. The fact that various observers get the same impression of the
scintillating grid is evidence for some commonality, although I think that in
this case it arises from processing in the retina.[1]

I don't see how this obviates the possibility that individuals can have a
private language that is in principle not understandable by others, per
Wittgenstein. Consider an oenophile who has a most sensitive palate, and who
can describe a wine using a whole set of adjectives that are meaningless to
most and which must only vaguely represent the actual sensations being enjoyed
by the expert. The expert may have a whole internal vocabulary, and due to
imprecision of terms, one expert's internal vocabulary may be different from
all others. You could say the same for perfumers, cheese mongers, color
experts and others who have extraordinary powers of sensation, and which well
might be unique to the individual. And the internal language of the individual
may not be intelligible by any other because their olfactory or retinal
apparatus may not be exactly alike.

I also suspect that this applies to conceptualization as well as sensation.
Quite possibly Einstein's internal language was unique to him.

[1]There was an excellent MOOC on the visual system. "Light, Spike, & Sight:
The Neuroscience of Vision" \-
[https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/9.01x/3T2014/course/](https://courses.edx.org/courses/MITx/9.01x/3T2014/course/)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The universe, fortunately, has a plethora of similarities, such that some
basic edge detection and a bit of neural net work in the retinal layers,
combined with a bit of proprioception correlation, provides an enormous amount
of 90%+ confidence-level shared realities, or at least a good enough fake.
Just not 100%. GANS are doing a great job of showing us that not even all of
that is required to begin the "faking-out" process.

But the illusion here is the same: that given this natural input we begin
processing before birth, that these concepts extend to completely invented
terms. Most folks never look there, they never wonder why a car is called a
car, and there's no downside at all. It's a pernicious concept and a wickedly-
difficult thing to eventually realize.

I don't see where we disagree. The only thing I'd add is that whether you have
a completely private language or not, in terms of problem-solving/goal-
seeking, is not important. For non-formal, non-tech things, using common words
and gestures provides the quickest way forward. Once you start creating a
self-consistent system of symbols representing state and behavior, though, you
might actually be better off if everybody has completely different private
languages. The illusion of common understanding where there is none is more
dangerous than misunderstanding. There are no red lights or sirens that go off
when human communication failures happen. It's all silence. It could be no
other way.

------
paganel
Not to diminish Wittgenstein’s influence, quite the contrary, but I for one
first heard about the idea of a “private language” while reading the works of
Wilhelm von Humboldt [1], written around the 1830s (so about a century before
Wittgenstein). I remember Humboldt saying something along the lines of “at the
limit, we each speak our own, private language”. I read his work in
translation, as I don’t speak German, so I cannot tell how much of a direct
overlap there is between von Humboldt and Wittgenstein in terms of the
nomenclature they were both using.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt)

~~~
tokyoseb
Wittgenstein didn’t come come up with the idea of a “private language” but in
his Philosophical Investigations he famously argued that the concept itself is
nonsense (not via a single logical “proof” but using several thought
experiments).

The idea that a private language exists (ie. ‘mentalese’) is taken for granted
by a lot of authors. I recently read Stephen Pinker’s book The Language
Instinct and he never seemed to doubt the concept for instance.

~~~
paganel
I have not read Pinker so I don’t have a good idea of what he meant by
“mentalese”, but Humboldt was using the concept of “private language” more on
the lines of two different people having different “understandings” (for a
lack of a better word) for concepts bearing the sama name. For example when I
think of a “red apple” I might think of a different thing compared to when you
think of a “red apple” on your turn (leaving aside the issue that we still
need to settle on what “thing” from the previous sentence actually means).

I must admit that I last read some Wittgenstein about 15 years ago, but even
so, I don’t find that this understanding of what a “private language” really
means is that far off from his writings. If anything, it completely
invalidates the 2000-year old platonic “ideas”, as me and you thinking of
different things when presented with the words “red apple” practically means
that there is no underlying “red” or “apple” idea behind those concepts. That
is something very valuable, Plato’s interpretation being debunked, that is.

~~~
chernov
>practically means that there is no underlying “red” or “apple” idea behind
those concepts. That is something very valuable, Plato’s interpretation being
debunked, that is.

This is one of my favorite parts in a fictional book Anathem. The question of
syntax and semantics is explored there, and even a solution is suggested.

------
danharaj
> So the resultant sentence, for example ‘I know I am in pain’, is nonsense

I found this amusing. It's definitely possible to not know one is in pain.

> And if that were so, it would be possible for me to make a mistake about
> whether I am in pain or not, and it would be possible for me to doubt
> whether I am in pain, but not to be sure. But none of these are genuine
> possibilities. So, this route is closed.

But they are, though. I think anyone who has suffered from chronic pain and/or
dissociation has experienced these 'impossibilities'. I think this might be
beside the point of the argument, that the author chose a naive working
example that makes sense to him, but I need to further think about what it
means to say "I was in pain" a while after asking myself "Am I in pain?"
likewise "I wasn't in pain". It seems to me that the arguments laid out here
rest on a transparency of language that doesn't actually exist.

> But it does not describe an impossibility either – for a logical or
> mathematical impossibility is not a possibility that is impossible. The
> sequence of words has been shown to have no sense – to be a nonsense.

Ok, but if something is nonsense, i.e. nothing, then it has no meaning. But
the demonstration of an impossibility theorem in mathematics most definitely
has non-trivial meaning. It is not obvious that you can't trisect the angle,
and there is a minimally complex way to obtain the result which is certainly
more complex than, say, the impossibility of 1 = 2 in the integers. But if
they're both nonsense (i.e. nothing, as the author says), then I can't ascribe
this complexity of proving their impossibility to them, for I would be able to
make some sense of nonsense.

Now, even in most constructive logics there is no sense ascribed to a theorem
of "A => 0", but this, in my opinion, should be considered a flaw in logic,
the absurd does have meaning! No one thinks that Wiles proved that nonsense
was nonsense, an immediately _obvious_ statement. Nonsense can appear as sense
for so long that you would never know it was any different.

\--

I think my rumination above as I read are very shallow (and I have spared
y'all from many more), but I have been wanting to read Wittgenstein for quite
some time now and I think this writing will motivate me to do it sooner. At
the very least Wittgenstein is irresistible to engage with. I think one of my
main problems is with the reliance on logical possibility as fully coherent.

------
simplesleeper
For those who enjoy Wittgenstein, I highly recommend the works of one his
greatest students - Elizabeth Anscombe. Possibly one of the most prominent
women philosophers of all time.

~~~
zafka
Thank you for the Recommendation. I have read little of Wittgenstein, but he
is on my "to be read" list. I had a quite brilliant but ne'er-do-well friend
who opened by eyes to so many great authors and philosophers: Herman Hesse,
Idries Shah ( story teller?), Doris Lessing, and quite a few others. These
little nudges on HN get me back to reading content more worthwhile than what I
am bombarded with in other venues.

------
goatlover
This works only if one accepts that philosophical problems (itches) can be
dissolved by analyzing ordinary language use to find out where philosophers,
scientists or lay people have abused language to create the problem. One
example the article gives is of failing to notice the disanalogy of people
hiding thoughts behind the curtains of their faces.

> Then someone reports what he thinks, he is neither describing what he
> thinks, nor is he describing anything he sees.

So what is the person describing? If I was thinking it would be nice to take a
break and walk around, and you ask what I was thinking, so I tell you we
should take a break to stretch our legs, am I not telling you what I was
thinking? This sounds like a denial that I was thinking anything at all in
order to block objections to the private language argument that we do have
private thoughts and feelings we can tell other people about.

Maybe the "disanalogy" came about because people do have thoughts which are
only made public upon telling others. We're not a telepathic species, and I'm
as sure about thinking as I am about anything else in experience, including
the world and other people.

------
cjauvin
"This has dramatic implications. For it immediately illuminates venerable
puzzles concerning what non-human animals can think or experience, and whether
they can reason or act for reasons. It sheds no less light on the question of
whether machines can think, or whether we shall be able, sometime in the
future, to make machines that can think. It is not surprising that
Wittgenstein exclaimed ‘How much one must be able to do before one can be said
to think’. It has equally dramatic consequences for theology, both for the
belief that we survive, bodilessly, after death and for the idea that there
can be a supreme thinking being that has no body."

Wittgentein's ideas have echoes and deep relationships with modern subjects
like cognitive science and artificial intelligence (and sensitive ones, like
religion and beliefs in the supernatural). In the case of AI, what is
interesting is that his ideas do not discuss whether it's possible or not to
create a thinking machine (i.e. technically or scientifically), but rather
what it would really _mean_ (conceptually).

------
freyr
For someone so obsessed with language, I never understood why his writing is
so cryptic. I haven't read the original, but in translation, his writing seems
almost purposefully ambiguous. To people here versed in philosophy, was there
really a purpose for this? Could his ideas not have been expressed more
clearly or explicitly?

~~~
Viliam1234
The less clearly you write, the more chance you give people to read in your
texts what they want to see there. And then they will feel good about you
having the same opinion.

Someone expressing himself clearly would not become so famous.

------
rags2riches
Can you forgive me if I take this opportunity to share a link to the brilliant
Avantgarde artist M. A. Numminen singing Wittgenstein?

[https://youtu.be/57PWqFowq-4](https://youtu.be/57PWqFowq-4)

------
debatem1
A professor of mine once referred to Wittgenstein as "Bertrand Russel, through
a mirror darkly". I like the analogy, and wonder which of the two it would
have annoyed more.

------
lordleft
The older I get, and the more I read Wittgenstein, the more I am astonished
that we are able to convey ideas to each other other all. Language is lossy,
and perilous.

