This suggests a core tension. Good scholarship happens when you don’t take credit for much (more citations, more expository work). But status pressures you to take credit for everything, which involves renaming already existing concepts and obscuring the trail.
Probably true. But, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Peterson is (or even might be) plagiarizing Wittgenstein here. “The world is made up of facts rather than things” and “the world can be regarded as composed of actions or as composed of things; let’s focus on the actions and see what we find” are very different from one another.
What seems maybe-kinda-sorta possible: either (1) Peterson read or heard that dictum of Wittgenstein’s, and thought something like “hmm, maybe not facts but acts …” and developed his ideas from there; or (2) Peterson did a bunch of thinking about understanding the world in terms of actions, and one day he thought “ha, I could make it sound like Wittgenstein”. (Which might have been appealing because it’s funny, or because if you’re trying to develop a reputation as a serious thinker then it probably doesn’t hurt to give some readers a vague feeling that something about what you just wrote reminds them of Wittgenstein.)
More likely, though, it’s a coincidence, because everything is always a coincidence.
Incidentally, if it was deliberate then my money is on “trying to remind people subconsciously of Wittgenstein”. Because if you’re aiming for humour, or wanting to acknowledge a source, surely what you do is to begin with something that exposes the parallel more clearly, and then explain further if that seems likely to mislead.
This suggests a core tension. Good scholarship happens when you don’t take credit for much (more citations, more expository work). But status pressures you to take credit for everything, which involves renaming already existing concepts and obscuring the trail.
Probably true. But, to be clear, I’m not suggesting that Peterson is (or even might be) plagiarizing Wittgenstein here. “The world is made up of facts rather than things” and “the world can be regarded as composed of actions or as composed of things; let’s focus on the actions and see what we find” are very different from one another.
What seems maybe-kinda-sorta possible: either (1) Peterson read or heard that dictum of Wittgenstein’s, and thought something like “hmm, maybe not facts but acts …” and developed his ideas from there; or (2) Peterson did a bunch of thinking about understanding the world in terms of actions, and one day he thought “ha, I could make it sound like Wittgenstein”. (Which might have been appealing because it’s funny, or because if you’re trying to develop a reputation as a serious thinker then it probably doesn’t hurt to give some readers a vague feeling that something about what you just wrote reminds them of Wittgenstein.)
More likely, though, it’s a coincidence, because everything is always a coincidence.
Incidentally, if it was deliberate then my money is on “trying to remind people subconsciously of Wittgenstein”. Because if you’re aiming for humour, or wanting to acknowledge a source, surely what you do is to begin with something that exposes the parallel more clearly, and then explain further if that seems likely to mislead.