...in particular since you obviously don’t know what I’m referring to
I’m referring to Wittgenstein’s idea of rule-following.
I’m well aware of rule-following paradoxes, having discovered quite a few of them myself. Observing ambiguities or siding with majority definitions does not mean that one believes that the definitions determine reality. One could believe in majority definition and still think tabooing words is a good idea. That’s why it’s not obvious to me that Wittgenstein would have actually made the mistake of definitional determinism, i.e. defending having different anticipated experiences depending on the sounds we use to refer to things.
I shall explicitly point out that If you literally thought that I had never heard of (Wittgenstein’s) rule-following paradoxes, then you massively overestimated my cluelessness and should update away from me being quite that clueless. (Similarly I am surprised by the extent of your background reading on this matter so have updated away from ‘This person’s bashing WIttgenstein based on a misrepresentation of Wittgenstein that they heard without independent analysis.’ and updated slightly towards your original claim being basically correct.)
...Ernest Gellner’s review of Kripke’s book on Wittgenstein...
Not sure if this is relevant to what you’re saying, but IIRC Kripkenstein (if this is Kripkenstein you’re alluding to) is controversial as an interpretation of Wittgenstein.
That was not the point, though, which rather was that Cohen’s and Wittgenstein’s arguments are alike in that they claim that on conceptual questions, the majority is by definition always right.
This seems (not completely sure because I am not certain to what you’re referring by ‘conceptual questions’) like a direct accusation of WIttgenstein being a relativist. From my position it seems like there’s a fair chance that you’re committing a fallacy of ‘this person pointed out that language games are consensus-/usage-based, so they’re a relativist’ or something. That class of fallacies is a Distinct Thing that I’ve noticed when people talk about such things, and your comment sounded a lot like that way of thinking.
I am unconvinced that Wittgenstein would really defend e.g. a majority losing money on conjunction tests (i.e. actual consequential decisions rather than semantic disputes) as proof that losing money is right in a useful sense.
I find it quite peculiar that you recommend other users to remove parts of their comments [...]
I’m not saying anyone should write off Wittgenstein—I’m saying this idea was wrong.
Sure. But in the context of LW culture which can be quite keen (not necessarily unfairly) to write off mainstream/conventional philosophy, stuff like what you wrote can come across like that whether you intend it or not. I think to a lot of LWers your mention would pretty much sound like writing Wittgenstein off, and given how highly regarded Wittgenstein is by mainstream philosophy, it makes mainstream philosophy seem much more like a joke. Wittgenstein’s work seems to be particularly susceptible to such dismissals. I am not convinced that such an update (against Wittgenstein/mainstream philosophy) should be made in this case. Even if you eventually quote something to me proving that the mistake you highlighted really is something Wittgenstein would do, it would still not refute my main point, which is that flippantly writing Wittgenstein off in such a way promotes a misunderstanding, even if what you meant happens to be correct. If someone is frequently misrepresented (as Wittgenstein seems to be to me) when they are criticised, then you should take care to not appear to be reinforcing the faulty criticism.
I’m not sure whether ‘I find it quite peculiar’ was a euphemism for ‘Fuck you; you can’t tell me what to write’; did you mean it literally? If so, has it at least stopped seeming peculiar? :) It’s not that I’m certain your comment will mindkill LWers; it’s just that I don’t think much is lost by editing out that word, and something is gained by avoiding mindkilling LWers about WIttgenstein/mainstream philosophy.
(LW prematurely dismissing certain at-first-glance-woolly or mainstream philosophy is a big issue that e.g. RobbBB takes very seriously as something to be addressed about LW’s culture and vital if the community wants to be able to mature enough philosophically to function without Eliezer correcting our philosophical mistakes. I’m not sure how much I agree, but I feel like RobbBB would also get a bad feeling from your line about Wittgenstein. Just in case that means more to you than the suggestion of a nobody like myself.)
I think I’m getting you now—you’re a radical advocate of ask/tell culture, right? I’m not—in my world you don’t tell other people to remove part of their posts. But anyway, let’s leave this and go to the content of your post, which is interesting.
Yes, Kripkenstein is controversial, which I referred to when writing that it’s not clear it’s the right interpretation.
Yes, I do think there are strong relativist strands in Wittgenstein. Again, it is hard to know what Wittgenstein actually meant, since he’s so unclear, but a famous Wittgensteinian such as Peter Winch certainly drew relativistic conclusions from Wittgenstein’s writings, something I delve upon here.):
Winch argues that cultures cannot be judged from the outside, by independent standards. Thus, the Zande’s belief in witches, while unjustified in our culture, is justified in their culture, and since there is no culture-transcending standard, we have no right to tell them what to believe. Gellner takes this to be a reductio ad absurdum of Wittgenstein’s position: since the Zande are obviously mistaken, any philosophy that says they are not must be false. And, since Gellner thinks that Winch has interpreted Wittgenstein correctly, this makes not only Winch’s but also Wittgenstein’s philosophy false.
(Actually, it strikes me now that Gellner’s strategies wrt the two Wittgenstein interpretations are quite similar. In both cases he congratulates Winch/Kripke for having elucidated Wittgenstein’s muddled ideas, by and large accepts their interpretation, and then argues that given this interpretation, Wittgenstein is obviously wrong.)
Regarding Wittgenstein and “mainstream philosophy”. While Wittgenstein still is a star in some circles, most analytic philosophers reject his views today, rightly or wrongly. The linguistic approach to philosophy due to Wittgenstein and the Oxfordian ordinary language school died out in the 60′s, and was replaced by a different kind of philosophy, which didn’t think that philosophical problems were pseudo-problems that arose because we failed to understand how our language works. Instead they went back to the pre-Wittgensteinian view that they were real problems that should be attacked head on, rather than getting dissolved by the analysis of language.
This points to something more general, namely that analytic philosophy is far from monolithic. It includes Wittgensteinians, Quinean naturalists and “neo-scholastics” (in James Ladyman and Don Ross’s apt phrase) and no doubt a score of other branches (it depends on how you individuate branches, obviously). I take it that most of LW’s criticism of analytic philosophy is actually direct against “neo-scholasticism”, which is accused of not being adequately informed by the sciences, of working with outdated methods, of being generally concerned with ephemeral problems, etc. In my view there is much to this criticism, but similar criticisms have been launched by naturalistic or postivistic philosophers within the analytic camp.
The huge differences between the different branches of analytic philosophy makes the term “analytic philosophy” a bit misleading, in fact.
I should have explicated more clearly what I meant by “some sort of Wittgensteinian logic” in the OP, though—point taken.
I’m well aware of rule-following paradoxes, having discovered quite a few of them myself. Observing ambiguities or siding with majority definitions does not mean that one believes that the definitions determine reality. One could believe in majority definition and still think tabooing words is a good idea. That’s why it’s not obvious to me that Wittgenstein would have actually made the mistake of definitional determinism, i.e. defending having different anticipated experiences depending on the sounds we use to refer to things.
I shall explicitly point out that If you literally thought that I had never heard of (Wittgenstein’s) rule-following paradoxes, then you massively overestimated my cluelessness and should update away from me being quite that clueless. (Similarly I am surprised by the extent of your background reading on this matter so have updated away from ‘This person’s bashing WIttgenstein based on a misrepresentation of Wittgenstein that they heard without independent analysis.’ and updated slightly towards your original claim being basically correct.)
Not sure if this is relevant to what you’re saying, but IIRC Kripkenstein (if this is Kripkenstein you’re alluding to) is controversial as an interpretation of Wittgenstein.
This seems (not completely sure because I am not certain to what you’re referring by ‘conceptual questions’) like a direct accusation of WIttgenstein being a relativist. From my position it seems like there’s a fair chance that you’re committing a fallacy of ‘this person pointed out that language games are consensus-/usage-based, so they’re a relativist’ or something. That class of fallacies is a Distinct Thing that I’ve noticed when people talk about such things, and your comment sounded a lot like that way of thinking.
I am unconvinced that Wittgenstein would really defend e.g. a majority losing money on conjunction tests (i.e. actual consequential decisions rather than semantic disputes) as proof that losing money is right in a useful sense.
Sure. But in the context of LW culture which can be quite keen (not necessarily unfairly) to write off mainstream/conventional philosophy, stuff like what you wrote can come across like that whether you intend it or not. I think to a lot of LWers your mention would pretty much sound like writing Wittgenstein off, and given how highly regarded Wittgenstein is by mainstream philosophy, it makes mainstream philosophy seem much more like a joke. Wittgenstein’s work seems to be particularly susceptible to such dismissals. I am not convinced that such an update (against Wittgenstein/mainstream philosophy) should be made in this case. Even if you eventually quote something to me proving that the mistake you highlighted really is something Wittgenstein would do, it would still not refute my main point, which is that flippantly writing Wittgenstein off in such a way promotes a misunderstanding, even if what you meant happens to be correct. If someone is frequently misrepresented (as Wittgenstein seems to be to me) when they are criticised, then you should take care to not appear to be reinforcing the faulty criticism.
I’m not sure whether ‘I find it quite peculiar’ was a euphemism for ‘Fuck you; you can’t tell me what to write’; did you mean it literally? If so, has it at least stopped seeming peculiar? :) It’s not that I’m certain your comment will mindkill LWers; it’s just that I don’t think much is lost by editing out that word, and something is gained by avoiding mindkilling LWers about WIttgenstein/mainstream philosophy.
(LW prematurely dismissing certain at-first-glance-woolly or mainstream philosophy is a big issue that e.g. RobbBB takes very seriously as something to be addressed about LW’s culture and vital if the community wants to be able to mature enough philosophically to function without Eliezer correcting our philosophical mistakes. I’m not sure how much I agree, but I feel like RobbBB would also get a bad feeling from your line about Wittgenstein. Just in case that means more to you than the suggestion of a nobody like myself.)
I think I’m getting you now—you’re a radical advocate of ask/tell culture, right? I’m not—in my world you don’t tell other people to remove part of their posts. But anyway, let’s leave this and go to the content of your post, which is interesting.
Yes, Kripkenstein is controversial, which I referred to when writing that it’s not clear it’s the right interpretation.
Yes, I do think there are strong relativist strands in Wittgenstein. Again, it is hard to know what Wittgenstein actually meant, since he’s so unclear, but a famous Wittgensteinian such as Peter Winch certainly drew relativistic conclusions from Wittgenstein’s writings, something I delve upon here.):
(Actually, it strikes me now that Gellner’s strategies wrt the two Wittgenstein interpretations are quite similar. In both cases he congratulates Winch/Kripke for having elucidated Wittgenstein’s muddled ideas, by and large accepts their interpretation, and then argues that given this interpretation, Wittgenstein is obviously wrong.)
Regarding Wittgenstein and “mainstream philosophy”. While Wittgenstein still is a star in some circles, most analytic philosophers reject his views today, rightly or wrongly. The linguistic approach to philosophy due to Wittgenstein and the Oxfordian ordinary language school died out in the 60′s, and was replaced by a different kind of philosophy, which didn’t think that philosophical problems were pseudo-problems that arose because we failed to understand how our language works. Instead they went back to the pre-Wittgensteinian view that they were real problems that should be attacked head on, rather than getting dissolved by the analysis of language.
This points to something more general, namely that analytic philosophy is far from monolithic. It includes Wittgensteinians, Quinean naturalists and “neo-scholastics” (in James Ladyman and Don Ross’s apt phrase) and no doubt a score of other branches (it depends on how you individuate branches, obviously). I take it that most of LW’s criticism of analytic philosophy is actually direct against “neo-scholasticism”, which is accused of not being adequately informed by the sciences, of working with outdated methods, of being generally concerned with ephemeral problems, etc. In my view there is much to this criticism, but similar criticisms have been launched by naturalistic or postivistic philosophers within the analytic camp.
The huge differences between the different branches of analytic philosophy makes the term “analytic philosophy” a bit misleading, in fact.
I should have explicated more clearly what I meant by “some sort of Wittgensteinian logic” in the OP, though—point taken.