Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously.
The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously.
I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not regard it unseriously.
Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be ant least a little curious about what we know and how we know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are true things that we can never know. These are mostly not scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us understand why science settled on the particular set of axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that exists independently of humans and their conception of it).
> I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke.
Apparently I was wrong about that too. According to another comment in this thread [1], he disavowed the work later, but intended it to be serious when he wrote it.
It has always seemed like self-evident nonsense to me though.
Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.
He disavowed is as comprehensive account of linguistic meaning, but I don't think he regarded it as false or meaningless, only that the full breadth of ways language conveyed meaning was wider than the account given in Tractatus.
> Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.
Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He wrote his more influential works later, and they went in a completely different philosophical direction. You're criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work that he personally disavowed and does not represent the positions he is best known for.
I was intending to criticize the field, and in a shot-from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose Wittgenstein as my example.
> Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed.
So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man.
BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic.
And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand.
I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any stretch.
My gripe is that the commenter above cites early Wittgenstein as an example of the failure of philosophy as a whole, while ignoring (or perhaps being unaware) that later Wittgenstein is what is philosophical "canon". I'll concede there is some debate about how Wittgenstein's views evolved over his life and the extent to which he repudiated his earlier work. But I think you're going a bit far by characterizing what I said as "confidently wrong history," if that's directed at what I wrote.
I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter. I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their defenders, just not me.
But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.
What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.
The deep dive version of this convo might be a topic for another time, but the most concise answer I can give is to grab a copy of I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and flip to chapter 2 where he discusses an idea proposed by John Searle about the so-called "terribly thirsty beer can." This is an argument from Searle that he believes is a knockdown argument against the idea of consciousness embodied in something that isn't a biological mind as we know it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, it is just stunningly naive.
Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter 2.
I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in the category anti-science apologists along the lines of intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy. And the extent to which he has gained influence in academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a legitimate observation.
I would acknowledge that this is a rather original take of my own and you won't find many people who subscribe to it.
But the essence of it is, if you consider optimists about the possibility of computers and AI, whether they be philosophers or programmers for major tech companies, and then you consider an opposing camp, made up of various 20th century philosophers, the most prominent of them being Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, the second camp attempts to approach the problem by asserting that there's an essence to intelligence or consciousness, and that essence is captured in certain key pieces of vocabulary, such as insight, "thinking" and so on. They declare that these are special things that human minds have, that by definition, in some sense, cannot be modeled by any formal description or scientific investigation, and the essence of their definitions is always a moving target.
Their approach to the topic also parallels that of intellectuals who insisted that Darwin was wrong about evolution, and the essence of their insistence was a failure of imagination for the explanatory power of evolution. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but in some ways you could consider the crux of the debate to be this posture of incredulity that the spectacular complexity of life could be explained the iteration of essentially simple and blind rules.
Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, but Dreyfus especially, looked at the logic gates of computing, and then looked at the dynamic, associative, poetic, analogy oriented aspects of human thinking and thought that these contain some magical essence that couldn't possibly be modeled by computers, and that the fundamental ideas of computing needed to be replaced by some new set of core ideas. However, our recent breakthroughs, while they are based on special and new principles that relate to vector databases, convolutional networks and so on, perhaps exhibiting the very core ideas that Dreyfus and Searle believed were missing, those breakthroughs have happened on the same old boring foundation of computing, with logic gates and whatnot, and there was a failure of imagination on their part to understand that those foundational principles could give rise to the more dynamic concepts that they believed were necessary, and that these two things were not in fact in conflict at all.
And the preemptive assertion that they belong to two a category inaccessible to computing principles as they understood them, indeed to any sort of in computational principles of any kind whatsoever, is something that I would contend is a fundamentally anti-scientific instinct that comes from a place of lacking imagination.
But just for the record, re-reading it now 37 years after the fact, I would not hold it up as a particularly good piece of work. It's a bit cringey actually.
Critique of Pure Reason is Kant. I thought you were making a joke based on the earlier mixup between Kant and Wittgenstein. Late Wittgenstein is Philosophical Investigations. There are also good texts on philosophy of language that excerpt from the major authors (including Wittgenstein) without requiring you to read the entirety of their books.
Nope, not a joke. Just the same mistake I made originally. I guess I have conflated Kant and Wittgenstein in my mind even more thoroughly than I thought.
My bad. I've gotten pretty overwhelmed with all the activity in this thread, and I'm trying to get some actual work done in between responses so I'm a little distracted.
I think your critique of philosophy would land better if you picked an easier target. The primary metaphor of the Tractatus (pulling up the ladder) often goes over people's heads.
What do you make of Wittgenstein's "no private language" argument?[1]
I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand that that argument is offered as proof that "language is essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of some import.
He's not wrong, but the right way to make this argument is in terms of Shannon's information theory. You don't need to resort to philosophical mumbo jumbo, as Wittgenstein did. And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive.
This is the difference between the Wittgensteins and the Dennetts and Maudlins of the world. Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions, while Dennett and Maudlin are really scientists first and philosophers second. Their work is chock full of references to actual scientific studies. Maudlin probably knows more about quantum physics than many physicists.
>Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions
??? If anything his criticism of his own work was that it was excessively represented language as being the kind of language used by the natural sciences, which was a narrow slice of the full breadth of possible ways language can be used to convey meaning. The very thing that makes his career so fascinating is that he was purely an engineering bro, who cared more about math and logic, and he brought that perspective into philosophy, and challenged philosophy as being nonsense when measured against the standards of the hard sciences. That's essentially what the Tractatus is, and also the reason why it was retrospectively regarded as dogmatic.
Shannon's information theory is brilliant, but born out of an interest in formalisms related information transmission, and while it can be treated like it's in conversation with theories of semantic meaning, I don't think it was ever considered a specific repudiation of any particular approach. There was a whole century's worth of "ordinary language" philosophy in the anglo world guilty of much graver offenses in regarding uncritical assumptions about ordinary language as some kind of conceptual or informational bedrock, and the ways you apply Shannon to any of that, while I think you can, are non-obvious.
> And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive.
Tractatus came out something like 20 years before information theory, and by the time it was published he had already taken his late career "turn" to self criticism, but again, I don't think anyone treated Shannon like it was any specific commentary on his philosophy, the topics are rather remote and while they can "speak to" one another in a sense, a lot depends on how you build out your conceptual bridge between the two topics.
Information-theoretical arguments are powerful, but they're not the only worthwhile approaches. You can't use an information-theoretic argument to teach someone information theory, and they'll find it easier to grok the consequences of information theory if they have other concepts to relate it to. Having multiple different routes to a given understanding is useful.
Wittgenstein was studying the nature of language, something closer to mathematics than to physics. And he came up with these ideas no later than 1933: Shannon only published his work on information theory in 1948. That Wittgenstein's later work was validated by advances in science over a decade later suggests that "philosophical mumbo jumbo" does not characterise it well. Indeed, perhaps there's something to learn from it.
I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt:
"Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously.
[1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair