mburns's Journal: What About Wittgenstein?

Should I rate Wittgenstein along with Bohr as one of the phenomenalist pessimists? I have not seen him as a cultural progressive, or as advocating an expansive insight into the possibility of science. Instead, his typically quoted saying is simply to express urgent concern over the issue of inexpressibility. But, respected thinkers rate him highly, even writers on computer technology.

He points to self-nested functions as dangerously undefined, but these are surely routine in computers today. I have always simply assumed that Godel, Turing and Church have advanced the understanding of language past that of Bohr and Wittgenstein.

What is bothersome concerning the distinction between nouns and adjectives? Accident and substance can even be handled within classical physics, it seems.

And, what is it about inexpressibility that would impede an investigation of the roots of classical physics? Neils Bohr blundered greatly and with immense influence when he asserted into the 1940's that molecular biology and nonlocality were protected from the possibility of theoretical understanding by the uncertainty principle. This now seems to be a quaint view, but only admitted as such in retrospect by conservatives.

Discussion might come about examples of inexpressibility, but I do not see a threat now to a provisional understanding of classical physics.

--
Michael J. Burns

Philosophy Of Wittgenstein

[mercedo]

It seems he put too much emphasis on the role of language. Language only forms a part of reality, but for him language was prior to reality.

Re:

[mburns]

This is even more so about what I am doing. What is the alternative? He also worked on the limits of language, but you say he held language to be prior.

I was discussing curved spacetime the other day. It is not symbolic but a language, I said, because it is legitimately translatable into language, and language can be used to produce a model of it.

Re:

[mercedo]

He thought the limit of his language is the limit of his world. This idea is very strange to me. For me there are too many things that weren't verbalised, our mind, our history, our dream, etc. All are unable to verbalise, but they all exist. We only verbalise a part of it and it comes to be literature. In his view there are two possible explanations. One is his language skill was extremely well so he could express almost everything what he thought. The other one is his inner world was extremely poor, almo

It is not an educated post

[anti-auctor]

Good evening Michael,

I am sorry, but your posts regarding Wittgenstein and the implied view that he took on expressiblity are not educateed. I studied Wittgenstein in and out for two years in a cubicle at UCB, with related works on modality. You must understand this: He repudiated the the only work he ever published, the Tractatus, in his middle and late years, in his writings (notes) and in his lectures in those years. You are in a fight with something that he repudiated himself. I do not understand your i

Re:

[anti-auctor]

Dear Michael,

Are you even aware of the possibilities that you are wiping off the map (if people listened) with your exhortations and blunt analogies of two men who were fishing in completely different streams? The academics have already done a good enough job of that. And then you come along, just spouting . . . ? You are wrong to do so. It is unethical. It's pure cant. What exactly are you trying to prove (to yourself)? I hate to respond this. But I hate what you're doing. It's wrong, not just wrong in sub