“‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof be silent,’ the seventh and final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is to me the most beautiful but also the most errant. ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof write books, and music, and invent new and better terminology through mathematics and science,’ something like that, is how I would put it. Or, if one is not predisposed to some such productivity, ‘. . . thereof look steadfastly and directly into it forever.’”
-- Daniel Kolak, comment on a post by Gordon Cornwall.
This misses the point that Wittgenstein made. Inventing better terminology doesn’t help you if you don’t have any information in the first place.
Something might have happened before the big bang. The big bang erased all information about what happened before the big bang. Therefore we shouldn’t speak about what happened before the big bang.
Gods might exist or might not exist. We don’t have any evidence to decide whether they exist. Therefore we should stop speaking about gods.
To come to a question that more central to this community:
We have no way to decide through the scientific method whether the Many Worlds Hypothesis is true. According to Wittgenstein we should therefore be silent.
Inventing new terminology doesn’t help with those issues.
I’m by no means an expert on this, but I was under the impression that Wittgenstein meant that language was an insufficient tool to express the “things we must pass over in silence”, e.g. metaphysics, religion, ethics etc., but that he nevertheless believed that these were the only things worth talking about. My understanding was that he believed that language is only good for dealing with the world of hard facts and the natural sciences and, while we cannot use it to express certain things, some of these things might be “shown” by different means, in line with his comment that the unwritten part of the tractatus was the most important part.
This conclusion from one of hist lectures largely sums up how I would understand his view of many of the “things we must pass over in silence”.
“This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.”
This is largely the way I have been led to interpret it through reading other people’s interpretations and it is probably wrong, but I thought that I’d try and express it here, because I do have a strong desire to expand my knowledge of Wittgensteinian philosophy. One thing which I do think is quite likely though, is that Wittgenstein would consider any written “interpretation” of his work to ultimately be “nonsense” insofar as any written part of it is concerned.
IIRC, in “On Certainty” in particular, Wittgenstein had a lot to say about the role of language and how it is not primarily a mechanism for evaluating the truth-value of propositions but rather a mechanism for getting people to do things. In particular, I think he dismisses the entire enterprise of Cartesian doubt as just a game we play with language; arguing that statements like “There exists an external reality” and “There exists no external reality” simply don’t mean anything.
So I’d be surprised if he were on board with language as a particularly useful tool for hard facts or natural sciences, either.
Admittedly, it’s been like 20 years since I read it, and it’s a decidedly gnomic book to begin with, and I’m no kind of expert on Wittgenstein. So take it with a pound of salt.
The Tractatus is a product of what is called the early or first Wittgenstein, while “On Certainty” belongs to his latter stage. By that time he had repudiated the emphasis of the Tractatus on logical correspondence with facts and switched to speaking of language games and practical uses. In both phases his position on “unspeakable” things like ethics and metaphysics was similar (roughly the one Danfly summarizes at the beginning of the parent quote).
I just noticed how poorly written part of my above comment was. I think I’ve fixed it now. I’m glad to see a positive response to it at least, since it shows that people care more about substance than the clarity of writing, which seems more than a little apt when talking about Wittgenstein. It also indicates that I haven’t been entirely misled in my interpretation of a notoriously difficult philosopher.
As much as it might be fun to pretend that my strange writing style was intended as a way of reaching people with “similar thoughts” in a truly Wittgensteinian sense, it was not. It was a boring old mistype. I am nowhere near smart enough to pull that off.
“‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof be silent,’ the seventh and final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is to me the most beautiful but also the most errant. ‘Whereof one cannot speak thereof write books, and music, and invent new and better terminology through mathematics and science,’ something like that, is how I would put it. Or, if one is not predisposed to some such productivity, ‘. . . thereof look steadfastly and directly into it forever.’”
-- Daniel Kolak, comment on a post by Gordon Cornwall.
This misses the point that Wittgenstein made. Inventing better terminology doesn’t help you if you don’t have any information in the first place.
Something might have happened before the big bang. The big bang erased all information about what happened before the big bang. Therefore we shouldn’t speak about what happened before the big bang.
Gods might exist or might not exist. We don’t have any evidence to decide whether they exist. Therefore we should stop speaking about gods.
To come to a question that more central to this community: We have no way to decide through the scientific method whether the Many Worlds Hypothesis is true. According to Wittgenstein we should therefore be silent.
Inventing new terminology doesn’t help with those issues.
I’m by no means an expert on this, but I was under the impression that Wittgenstein meant that language was an insufficient tool to express the “things we must pass over in silence”, e.g. metaphysics, religion, ethics etc., but that he nevertheless believed that these were the only things worth talking about. My understanding was that he believed that language is only good for dealing with the world of hard facts and the natural sciences and, while we cannot use it to express certain things, some of these things might be “shown” by different means, in line with his comment that the unwritten part of the tractatus was the most important part.
This conclusion from one of hist lectures largely sums up how I would understand his view of many of the “things we must pass over in silence”.
This is largely the way I have been led to interpret it through reading other people’s interpretations and it is probably wrong, but I thought that I’d try and express it here, because I do have a strong desire to expand my knowledge of Wittgensteinian philosophy. One thing which I do think is quite likely though, is that Wittgenstein would consider any written “interpretation” of his work to ultimately be “nonsense” insofar as any written part of it is concerned.
IIRC, in “On Certainty” in particular, Wittgenstein had a lot to say about the role of language and how it is not primarily a mechanism for evaluating the truth-value of propositions but rather a mechanism for getting people to do things. In particular, I think he dismisses the entire enterprise of Cartesian doubt as just a game we play with language; arguing that statements like “There exists an external reality” and “There exists no external reality” simply don’t mean anything.
So I’d be surprised if he were on board with language as a particularly useful tool for hard facts or natural sciences, either.
Admittedly, it’s been like 20 years since I read it, and it’s a decidedly gnomic book to begin with, and I’m no kind of expert on Wittgenstein. So take it with a pound of salt.
The Tractatus is a product of what is called the early or first Wittgenstein, while “On Certainty” belongs to his latter stage. By that time he had repudiated the emphasis of the Tractatus on logical correspondence with facts and switched to speaking of language games and practical uses. In both phases his position on “unspeakable” things like ethics and metaphysics was similar (roughly the one Danfly summarizes at the beginning of the parent quote).
I just noticed how poorly written part of my above comment was. I think I’ve fixed it now. I’m glad to see a positive response to it at least, since it shows that people care more about substance than the clarity of writing, which seems more than a little apt when talking about Wittgenstein. It also indicates that I haven’t been entirely misled in my interpretation of a notoriously difficult philosopher.
As much as it might be fun to pretend that my strange writing style was intended as a way of reaching people with “similar thoughts” in a truly Wittgensteinian sense, it was not. It was a boring old mistype. I am nowhere near smart enough to pull that off.