ONT RE: Re: Logic As Semiotic -- Still Quasi After All These Years
At sompe previous point in time, John and Jon said:
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JA: Taking Wittgenstein as a cure for Russell
is like morphine as a remedy for laudanum.
JC: Many of my best teachers were Wittgensteinians.
Some of my best teachers were Benedictines.
JC: His Philosophy of Mathematics shows profound misunderstandings, most of
them would agree.
Nonetheless, I find the lessons of the 'Investigations' lead me to
pretty much the same
place as does studying Peirce, at least after immersion in Russell,
which I started at
the tender age of 14. Since Wittgenstein is explicit that his work is
intended as
therapy, I think it is fair to say that appropriate therapy depends on
the disease.
There are cases when a large dose of Russell is the medicine that will
produce
the best results.
Russell was a childhood hero for me, too, and
Wittgenstein the popular icon of my undergrad
years, but that was yesterday ... and I have
so many nitty gritty bits of work to do that
all their "gaminess" will just not win over.
But I have had my shots, and will try to
stay out of your clinic.
Jon Awbrey
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Well, I mainly learned my logic from John. Usually at coffee shops in
Vancouver. And I didn't realize I knew any logic until I started progamming
and designing databases, and found that the coffee shop conversations came
in handy .....
I only discovered Wittgenstein a couple of years ago (definitely not as a
teenager -- my dad gave me Sartre's Being and Nothingness for my 16th
birthday, and I was pissed off at him for a year -- I wanted a car, not
depressing crap a teenager doesen't need since to be a teenager is to be
depressed anyway), finding the "Tractatus" in a bookshop. I was drawn to the
cool title, and cool author's name. Didn't really know who he was. Coulden't
fathom 3/4's of what he was talking about. But the text had the concision
and image ladeness I associate most often with great poetry, so I read on.
Wittgenstein was a good cure for intellectual boredom. Mainly I found myself
in a raging argument with the Tractatus, either severely agreeing or severly
disagreeing with every second statement, the only middle ground being that
large 3/4's that I found unfathomable in much the same way I found Pound's
Canto's unfathomable. If you can not distinguish what is being said, you can
neither agree or disagree, or you can both agree and disagree. The law of
the excluded middle is violated.
I avoided Peirce for several years. Stan started urging me to read him, and
talking about Vagueness, which didn't make any sense to me at the time. I
thought this might be evidence that Stan was finally "losing it", and the
poet had abducted the scientist in him. I told him, "I'm interested in
precision, not vagueness". Then Edwina showed up on OCA, and her writings
initially seemed to be coming from the planet mars, or points more distant.
She kept talking about energy in ways that bore absolutely no relation to
how I'd learned about it in undergraduate physics and physical chemistry. So
I finally got fed up with all this Peirce nonsense, and decided to read
something of his, so I could tell everybody who had been bugging me to read
him that I had read him, his stuff was crap, now go away and stop bugging
me. Stumbled onto a book on Peirce at UBC bookstore, a single volume that
was really cheap, and went, OK -- I can be informed and not spend much
money, and tell everyone I read the dude, didn't dig him, now go away.
I think I started reading "A guess at the riddle", and it was the clearest
statement of what I feel it means to be a scientist that I'd ever
encountered in someone else's words. And Peirce's "popular" articles, are
amazing gems of crystal clarity, like the best articles in Scientific
American. I started sending Edwina questions, when I coulden't understand
quite what I was reading, and she very generously sent me long detailed
answers. Her definition of the logical nature of signs was my ticket in.
While my ex-supervisor Jack Maze focusssed on some of Edwina's arguments on
signs and transformation of energy (which once put in the concrete terms of
plant development, made a great deal of sense), I started to focus on Peirce
in the context of the origins of modern mathematical logic, and the
alternate paths it might have taken. Since database design is really just
the construction of very complex truth tables, I had a legitimate excuse to
study logic and write off all the books a s business expenses.
I found, repeatedly, the great logicians, find themselves staring into the
void, and going "Where the heck does this stuff come from anyway". The
american logician Emil Post kept a diary of logic, where he echoed many of
Peirce's musings on universal (and inhuman) consciousness.
Wittgenstein and Peirce. Peirce and Wittgenstein. Which is the cure, which
is the disease? Or are these two faces of the same disease?
The memorable last couplet of the prose poem that is the Tractatus:
"He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright
What we can not speak about, we must pass over in silence".
Wittgenstein examined what is in logic, and what we can get out of it, to
demonstrate that the important things that matter to human life are not
there. While he later rejected the methodology of the Tractatus, he was
consistent in his focus on what can not be said in language, and how to go
about showing it. Attempt 1 focussed on the heart of formal langauge.
Attempt to focussed on the surface of informal language.
So -- what is it, that can not be said, that is so important to be shown?
Try talking about Vagueness. To talk about it, is to make it not Vague. The
essential nature of firstness is that it can not be talked about. "Pure
feeling" can only be shown, not said. "I love you". "Show me."
Logical paradoxes are not possible in vague systems. Combinatorial orderings
and discrete truth tables are not possible. If we can make some cuts, we can
begin define combinations, construct truth tables of combinatorial
possibilities, calculate probabilites .....
But we have to make some cuts first. Where? How?
Consider Wittgenstein as an Introduction to Pierce, in time reversed order.
W will show you some interesting puzzles. P will point to the metaphysical
problems that underlie the puzzles. The distinct games and puzzles on the
surface are because of vagueness at the depths.
As philosophical curatives go, I prefer Earl Grey tea. On really bad days,
Darjeeling tea. On really good days, Orange Pekoe ("only in Canada").
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