EPTOn June 15 2011 06:12 MozzarellaL wrote:
I was going to make some, but then I realized I didn't need to.
I was going to make some, but then I realized I didn't need to.
You're oh so clever. OH SO CLEVER -_-
Philosophers: Arguments against Wittgenstein? - Page 5
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PH
United States6173 Posts
You're oh so clever. OH SO CLEVER -_- | ||
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Lee Wang
13 Posts
On June 15 2011 05:29 MozzarellaL wrote: I'm going to start a branch of philosophy proclaiming philosophy to be useless. That's such a novel way of looking at things. I'll be sure to join your movement! | ||
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zizou21
United States3683 Posts
On June 14 2011 19:01 Kurfyrst wrote: Simply put, my criticism of your position is the following: language may well be contextual in nature, and it may well be that we form our understanding of reality through language. But surely language originates in reality, not the other way around. The pre-condition for understanding anything at all, however minimally, must be that concepts refer to something real. pretty sure Wittgenstein would disagree with this On June 15 2011 00:16 kataa wrote: nice video!, thanks for sharing | ||
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candh
Canada8 Posts
Wittgenstein is trying to purport the futility of philosophy by utilizing language objectively to demonstrate that language itself is contextual and self-defeating. By virtue of this contradiction, the philosophy fails. No, language necessarily isn't rooted in context. There is a large difference between the definition and connotation of words. The latter seems to be that which has overtaken the attitude of the modern world. My suggestion is to refer to the Classical philosophers - namely Aristotle. You'll find that in philosophy there are truly only two branches of philosophy: the classical and the modern. Either the thought is rooted at an attempt to demystify the objective reality we inhabit, or otherwise to argue senselessly over ideological theories that ultimately culminate to nothingness. My 2 cents, take it how you will. | ||
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SonicTitan
United States249 Posts
"Is it a tiger, Jerry Lewis, or a microwave?" Honestly, the best (indeed, the only, without reading the source material) refutation I can give of Wittgenstein is that while I agree that the question of what we mean when describe things, whether abastract concepts or concrete objects, should ALSO be asked (hello Socrates), we can't simply throw out the question of what these things actually are. Yes, I know that Wittgenstein is operating like a modern Sartre in a sense, but if that's the case, why discuss ANYTHING? Frankly, the poster above me may have said it better. | ||
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KnowNothing
69 Posts
On June 14 2011 22:25 Brotkrumen wrote: I think you are saying that we cannot experience objective reality, right? That all experience is subjective and we cannot infer objective reality from experience. First, "can experience" is used rather lax. It implies, that there is a causal chain between what we experience in our mind and what happens in reality. Even subjective reality proponents usually do not have a problem with that, except those that claim that there is no objective reality outside us whatsoever. I fall into the latter group, though to be precise I don't claim that there is no objective reality, I claim there is no possible evidence of one. I refuse to assume the existence of something which by definition is that which no one has ever perceived. How do we interact with objective reality? Let's take touch for example: Our mind tells our arm to move forward, our finger to extend and to touch an object. When the contact happens, two material objects have made contact: our finger and the object. This happened in objective reality, no matter how we experienced it. Most subjective reality proponents won't have a problem with this either, but in the next step, the opinions diverge: You say that aggregate concepts, such as valour, do not refer to clear, specific realities, but involve some form of interpretation on our part. My point is that everything does, so this is not an accurate distinction to make. You yourself are using the word "mind" to describe one of your supposedly specific scenarios here, yet the term is unclear because it is, similarly, an idea built from multiple experiences rather than anything specific and concrete. Besides the point as that may be, if we consider touch specifically, is it possible to answer a simple question about this objective reality that our finger touched the object? I would like to know when this can be said to occur. Is it when a single molecule of the object contacts a single molecule of the finger? There's something which needs clarification here. Are we talking about touch, the sense, or touch, as in physical contact? If we mean the sense, then touch occurs whenever nerves fire, which can include moments that do not appear to correspond to our physical interaction with an object as in your example. If you say that we're talking about purely physical contact (ie. objectively real interaction between objects), then you are guilty of begging the question. I certainly think you have strong evidence for showing that humans are configured to interpret the world as having an objective reality outside of themselves, but nothing more than that. Now the nerves send a signal back to our brain and we "experience" the object in our mind subjectively. We form a picture or model of this, we form a model of us touching the object etc. However you want to describe it, a mental state is formed that corresponds to us touching the object. Here subjective reality proponents claim that your experience of the object may completely differ from mine. What I experience as rough, you might experience as smooth. When I jump into your body, I would experience the object as soft, whereas in my body I experienced the object as hard. At this point, nobody can disprove that. It doesn't really matter though. When we touch the same object and we talk about it, we agree on a name for the attribute we experienced. We will call the surface as "rough", no matter how we subjectively experienced it. This basically would move the meaning of "rough" away from it's meaning of "roughness", but would mean "the attribute this surface has". Less abstract: The sentence in our mind "The surface is rough" would when spoken to another person mean "The surface has attribute X", X being whatever the person experiences. Now we have saved our language at least. Whenever we talk about something to another person, we are referring to the actually existing attribute in reality. You are presenting, here, a very weak argument (it's irrelevant), apparently for the express purpose of demolishing it in order to make your point appear stronger than it otherwise would. There is one thing of value here though: you point out how objectivity might relate to language. Still, you don't make it clear how this "saves" language. There are plenty of meaningful examples (to my mind, at least) that you're not dealing with. If I eat a chicken wing and think it's spicy, and, let's say, 50% of people agree that it is spicy, while the rest say that it is simply "bland". What does that say about the chicken wing? Does it have the attribute "spicy"? How about "bland"? How can it have both? Rough, smooth, and so on, have the same problem. They exist in degrees, and these vary within the minds of the people that perceive them. Really, they are all opinions and approximations. In other words, "rough" covers a range of sensations broad enough that individuals can successfully agree upon its usage in a large percentage of cases. Sound familiar? Higher order (I think this is what you are getting at) concepts such as virtue, I agree, do seem to be more controversial ("why?" would indeed be a very good question), but they are not fundamentally different in this way. Having said this, how can I say that "we can experience objective reality"? First, Okham's Razor. To be able to claim that we experience everything subjectively we have to assume that there is an interpretative disconnect between what exists and what we experience. It also is a little circular. There is absolutely no need to assume that there is a disconnect between what exists and what we experience. Quite the opposite. One can simply say that what we experience is what exists. It is you who makes the claim that "objective reality" is, in fact, something (outside of our minds, in which it exists as an idea). It may be here that we find the source of our mutual confusion: you believe, perhaps, that I must deny the possibility of a physical form that corresponds to this (or any) idea. A neural pathway, for instance. And this is an awkward challenge to meet, for my view. However, I can defend "my" position by pointing out that, actually, any idea is different between any two minds, or one mind at different moments. You believe that any physical configuration, replicated perfectly, will respond to the same set of stimuli in precisely the same way. However, I must object that no such case exists anywhere. No two neural pathways are identical down to the smallest detail, and (therefore?) there is no universal form of an idea, or a physical structure that can be shown to replicate it in its entirety. There are 'approximations', but what one makes of this is naturally a matter of interpretation. Simply put, it's a "jump" to go from observing (read: creating) patterns, to concluding that objective reality exists. Secondly, subjective reality would assumes a mind-body dualism. Me being a materialist, would say that as the mind is only the product of it's material, another mind will have the exact same experiences to the exact same objects if it is built the same way. Our current understanding of neuro-science heavily implies that our brains do not differ in such a way as to allow for great differences in experiences. This might be disproven in the future though. Mind-body dualism is not my cup of tea, either. I wish you would be more precise in how you approach this issue, because I do not know exactly what aspects of mind-body dualism you believe are entailed in the subjective reality view. So in conclusion, even if we would know that all experiences are subjective, we would still act as if they were an exact match to objective reality. The success of this action would make our theory of subjective reality irrelevant. Secondly, if we agree that mind-body dualism, is false, we cannot but say that our experiences match objective reality. This conclusion is drawn from your earlier points? Where did you talk about the success of acting according to one interpretation or the other? In the talk about language? 1. One cannot say, without begging the question, that we would still act as if our experiences were an exact match to objective reality without first knowing what that objective reality is, and thereby determining that it corresponds to our subjective perspectives. 2. Why is that? Please explain. | ||
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BlueSpace
Germany2182 Posts
On June 15 2011 13:35 zizou21 wrote: pretty sure Wittgenstein would disagree with this He wouldn't disagree. Wittgenstein is by no means a solipsist although some people discussing here seem to think that he is. | ||
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Biff The Understudy
France7925 Posts
On June 15 2011 13:44 candh wrote: Hi, Wittgenstein is trying to purport the futility of philosophy by utilizing language objectively to demonstrate that language itself is contextual and self-defeating. By virtue of this contradiction, the philosophy fails. No, language necessarily isn't rooted in context. There is a large difference between the definition and connotation of words. The latter seems to be that which has overtaken the attitude of the modern world. My suggestion is to refer to the Classical philosophers - namely Aristotle. You'll find that in philosophy there are truly only two branches of philosophy: the classical and the modern. Either the thought is rooted at an attempt to demystify the objective reality we inhabit, or otherwise to argue senselessly over ideological theories that ultimately culminate to nothingness. My 2 cents, take it how you will. God how much I hate this approach. Philosophy creates, recreates, invents, reinvents, think, rethink concepts. That's it. It's not about arguing, it's not about demystify anything, it's about creating concepts. As soon as you have creation of concept, you have philosophy. And the reason you create concepts, is because you have problems; a concept answers to a problem. That's Deleuze definition, and it's just rock solid. That also makes all the great blabla about the death of philosophy laughable. Aristotle was doing exactly the same job than Kant, or Sartres, or Spinoza. Your dichotomy is just an opinion, and it's really dry. | ||
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