Would it help us out if we try to reject the notion of "true definitions", and instead try treating all language and logic as just pragmatic tools that will always fall short of the reality beyond our concepts? So we are free to conceptualise and reconceptualise without end, so long as we understand that it's always only provisional, and remain open to seeing things from another angle.
Being open to revision seems essential…but what it if opens us up to skeptical doubts that rot the foundations of our knowledge? What if we end up being too scared to trust our best methods?
(These are wildly abstract replies but you see the idea.)
I think this is a big difference between Wittgenstein and Hobbes/Descartes/Plato here. The latter three all think there is a correct perspective from which you should be looking at things, and you need to start with the right definitions or the truly certain starting points. But Wittgenstein just suggests that you stop asking certain questions that are only suggested by the language you used to get there - he doesn’t say there is a correct set of questions to ask or answer, just some bad ones that leave you banging against the glass. His metaphor suggests that there is a right direction to go, but I think his actual claims about philosophy don’t.
What does history (in particular, the development of various schools of thought in “modernity”, appropriately construed) have to say about this difference?
It would assuage our egos (maybe) but in the long run it would cripple us because it’s a form of cope. If there really aren’t any true definitions, then that would be a profound discovery, and we should ask what we can learn about the world from that most curious fact.
I tend to think of our definitions as like cutting a cake. There are practically infinite ways of cutting a cake, and there's no "true cut", but some ways are better than others, depending on the cake and circumstances.
I guess it is pretty profound, but I think it follows quite naturally from the idea that reality precedes language and intellect.
Although actually, I'm a bit of a platonist and think there is something like a "divine mind". But I think it contains every *possibility* of concept/definition, rather than just the correct ones.
Right and, no matter how you cut it, you can't put the cake back together again seamlessly. There's always a gap. The parts don't add up to the whole. At least since Socrates, that's what reason has been trying to tell us. So here's a crazy thought: maybe we should listen to reason.
I will say that Gadamer's way of hinking about philosophy is in some ways pessimistic, as it seems to suggest an ineradicable gap between our concepts and the world. One might hope for more from philosophy!
I loved this essay. The starting comparison between Wittgenstein and Hobbes was already fascinating, but then you pulled it across so many genres! I have fond memories of reading Raymond Smullyan’s puzzle books as a child.
As for Nabokov, you’re making me think I should go and reread “Pale Fire.” It had a quietly profound influence on an essay that I wrote a while back, but only as a memory of that first reading. You’re quite right to compare it either to a trap or to freedom from one, ambiguously speaking (and I hope this is likewise vague enough for anyone unspoiled!)
Lovely stuff, a pleasure to read. However, lose 10 points for not managing to fit in at least the following Hobbes-gold!
"Seeing then that Truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise Truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or els he will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the more he struggles, the more belimed."
I mean, come on, it is literally the sentence before the one you quoted!
Great essay. There's so much I want to comment on. For now, though, I was struck by how Hobbes's account of the fluttering bird seemed to anticipate Descartes' method of methodological doubt (i.e. ignore past authors and return to first principles).
Love that point. While researching this essay, I learned that Hobbes actually met Descartes (and Galileo). Which is pretty cool. I wonder what language they spoke together!
What a wonderful essay, a lot for me to digest before coffee has fully entered my bloodstream! It made me think about the role of curiosity as a first step: you have to ask "what am I inside?" And exploring with curiosity gets you a lot further than crashing around in a panic (to use the bird/fly parts of the analogy) or sitting passively and looking at the wall (for Plato).
Funny side story on Wittgenstein: When our daughter was like, I dunno, 14 or so, she went through a phase of insomnia. She picked up the Tractatus and began reading it, assuming it would put her to sleep. The next morning she told her dad, "I was shocked to realize it was TOO INTERESTING to let me get back to sleep!" (Sadly, from your pov, she did not go into philosophy; her love is pure math.)
Until you find the way out you need good plumbing. Everyone does. I like Midgley’s analogy, which I just taught, because it doesn’t presuppose a way out or problems no one needs to solve. It just presupposes the existence of actual problems that really need fixing. Fixing them does involve better definitions (clean, solid pipes) but most importantly it involves connecting them properly. This would be true even if we were trapped in an escapable system.
I thought you might appreciate a comment from someone who loves this stuff but does not have a sufficient background on it to presume to comment substantively: This was delightful and enlightening to read. I am forwarding it to my 14yo because -- though perhaps not intended as an introduction -- it is a great introduction to these thoughts.
I enjoyed this article! This might be embarrassing, but I've only recently learned the term "cognitive closure problem" -- basically the hypothesis that human cognitive faculties are fundamentally incapable of solving certain philosophical problems (I suppose I'd be interested in extending this hypothesis by also adding *perceiving* certain philosophical problems). Certainly I'm aware of the general concept, but I've never heard this term before!
Personally, I'm skeptical that these problems are that common and/or significant. I suspect to the extent we don't understand problems it's due to some combination of not having the right empirical knowledge, the right conceptual tools, or lack of sheer time/cognitive power/computational ability, not total blanks.
I'm curious, have you tried estimating how likely/common these problems are? And relatedly, in which areas they might be in?
In my favorite fictional stories (eg There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm), when people are really puzzled by apparent gaping holes in their epistemology, it's possible to come up with increasingly clever solutions to map the gaps. Even if you can't *know* the truth directly, there might still be indirect ways to get you closer to knowing *of* the truth.
Your article presents the whole thing as both intriguing and a fun mystery, but maybe it comes across as a bit...too mysterious? Like reality is reality and whether cognitive closure is real feels like a real empirical phenomenon that we can come up with tools for assessing! (Or maybe I'm just too overly bullish on human reason and data?)
I'm a little reminded of Turing's Halting Problem and the associated eschatology. There's the mathematical proof, the common-language understanding of what the proof says, and the wild extrapolations people sometimes make from the common language understanding.
I agree with the first, understand the value of the second, but have a many doubts about what people sometimes say about the third.
In particular people sometimes go from Turing's Halting Problem to say that it's impossible for computers/AIs to analyze computer programs without running them, which is just an insane claim for anybody who programs (or thinks even a little in atheoretical terms about what computers do!)
Like obviously going by the parameters and assumptions of Turing, it's impossible to make a computer program to tell in the general case whether a program will halt (that's what a proof means! Humanity effectively has no stronger piece of evidence than a purely logical proof!)
But it does not mean that computers can't figure, in principle, that (eg)
> While True:
> continue
is a program that will halt. Human programmers can understand this, and communicate their understanding well. This also means that human programmers can make programs that do simple static analysis on software without directly running them.
So it's never obvious to me why people should expect the Halting Problem to be a serious problem in real-world programs, at least for programs of sufficiently low complexity that humans can figure out their halting status.
This analogy is getting somewhat convoluted, but I do strongly suspect that it's possible for something similar to be possible in philosophy, where problems that we cannot tackle head-on for one reason or another can still by analyzed from a distance with 1 or more layers of indirection.
I think there is no antimemetics division is really interesting because many of the stories are predicated around the idea that closing the gap in your epistemology will be your undoing. So the problem is not to close the gap—the problem is figuring out what you need to do while learning as little as possible about the problem you are trying to solve, because the problem will kill you if you remember what it is. That’s why amnestics are so vital in the story: they provide a way for the characters to screw up without dying immediately. But the way that they screw up is by figuring out what the problem is.
In other words, the characters are explicitly trying not to leave Plato’s cave, because the outside world that the shadows represent will kill them, but they can still use the shadows for problem solving.
1. That any language at or belief system is a limited view or perspective should not be a source of dread but joy. It means that the world can always be unfolding for the curious observer/thinker. It would suck if language could truly model the world, as that would be it, and the future would just be variants, as though the only narrative universe were Marvel. Dreadful.
2. Zizek and ideology. There is no non-ideological position, so the interesting challenge is breaking your own “intuitions”
Ah, what a great post, connecting so many things. I happened to find Wittgenstein's metaphor that his aim in philosophy was show the fly the way out of the fly bottle just recently - in a half-forgotten book by Walter Kauffman (Critique of Religion and Philosophy). That we are all like flies who can't find the way out of the bottle is so evident when we think about consciousness - . someone's gotta help us apparently; we are hopelessly trapped in human cognition, and keep bumping into the glass. Oh! And thanks for recommending Nabokov's Pale Fire (and the YouTube video) without giving anything away! Reading that novel is an unbelievable adventure for the mind.
Would it help us out if we try to reject the notion of "true definitions", and instead try treating all language and logic as just pragmatic tools that will always fall short of the reality beyond our concepts? So we are free to conceptualise and reconceptualise without end, so long as we understand that it's always only provisional, and remain open to seeing things from another angle.
Being open to revision seems essential…but what it if opens us up to skeptical doubts that rot the foundations of our knowledge? What if we end up being too scared to trust our best methods?
(These are wildly abstract replies but you see the idea.)
I think this is a big difference between Wittgenstein and Hobbes/Descartes/Plato here. The latter three all think there is a correct perspective from which you should be looking at things, and you need to start with the right definitions or the truly certain starting points. But Wittgenstein just suggests that you stop asking certain questions that are only suggested by the language you used to get there - he doesn’t say there is a correct set of questions to ask or answer, just some bad ones that leave you banging against the glass. His metaphor suggests that there is a right direction to go, but I think his actual claims about philosophy don’t.
What does history (in particular, the development of various schools of thought in “modernity”, appropriately construed) have to say about this difference?
It would assuage our egos (maybe) but in the long run it would cripple us because it’s a form of cope. If there really aren’t any true definitions, then that would be a profound discovery, and we should ask what we can learn about the world from that most curious fact.
I tend to think of our definitions as like cutting a cake. There are practically infinite ways of cutting a cake, and there's no "true cut", but some ways are better than others, depending on the cake and circumstances.
I guess it is pretty profound, but I think it follows quite naturally from the idea that reality precedes language and intellect.
Although actually, I'm a bit of a platonist and think there is something like a "divine mind". But I think it contains every *possibility* of concept/definition, rather than just the correct ones.
Right and, no matter how you cut it, you can't put the cake back together again seamlessly. There's always a gap. The parts don't add up to the whole. At least since Socrates, that's what reason has been trying to tell us. So here's a crazy thought: maybe we should listen to reason.
I have seen ideas like this come up in discussions of certain continental philosophers. For example, see the description of Hans Georg Gadamer's philosophy by Blake Smith (who is on Substack!) at the following link: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/judith-butler-vs-judy.
I will say that Gadamer's way of hinking about philosophy is in some ways pessimistic, as it seems to suggest an ineradicable gap between our concepts and the world. One might hope for more from philosophy!
I loved this essay. The starting comparison between Wittgenstein and Hobbes was already fascinating, but then you pulled it across so many genres! I have fond memories of reading Raymond Smullyan’s puzzle books as a child.
As for Nabokov, you’re making me think I should go and reread “Pale Fire.” It had a quietly profound influence on an essay that I wrote a while back, but only as a memory of that first reading. You’re quite right to compare it either to a trap or to freedom from one, ambiguously speaking (and I hope this is likewise vague enough for anyone unspoiled!)
Lovely stuff, a pleasure to read. However, lose 10 points for not managing to fit in at least the following Hobbes-gold!
"Seeing then that Truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise Truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or els he will find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the more he struggles, the more belimed."
I mean, come on, it is literally the sentence before the one you quoted!
I'm glad you've put that one in the record! So good. "The more belimed" is just a wonderful phrase.
Great essay. There's so much I want to comment on. For now, though, I was struck by how Hobbes's account of the fluttering bird seemed to anticipate Descartes' method of methodological doubt (i.e. ignore past authors and return to first principles).
Love that point. While researching this essay, I learned that Hobbes actually met Descartes (and Galileo). Which is pretty cool. I wonder what language they spoke together!
What a wonderful essay, a lot for me to digest before coffee has fully entered my bloodstream! It made me think about the role of curiosity as a first step: you have to ask "what am I inside?" And exploring with curiosity gets you a lot further than crashing around in a panic (to use the bird/fly parts of the analogy) or sitting passively and looking at the wall (for Plato).
Funny side story on Wittgenstein: When our daughter was like, I dunno, 14 or so, she went through a phase of insomnia. She picked up the Tractatus and began reading it, assuming it would put her to sleep. The next morning she told her dad, "I was shocked to realize it was TOO INTERESTING to let me get back to sleep!" (Sadly, from your pov, she did not go into philosophy; her love is pure math.)
Until you find the way out you need good plumbing. Everyone does. I like Midgley’s analogy, which I just taught, because it doesn’t presuppose a way out or problems no one needs to solve. It just presupposes the existence of actual problems that really need fixing. Fixing them does involve better definitions (clean, solid pipes) but most importantly it involves connecting them properly. This would be true even if we were trapped in an escapable system.
I thought you might appreciate a comment from someone who loves this stuff but does not have a sufficient background on it to presume to comment substantively: This was delightful and enlightening to read. I am forwarding it to my 14yo because -- though perhaps not intended as an introduction -- it is a great introduction to these thoughts.
I enjoyed this article! This might be embarrassing, but I've only recently learned the term "cognitive closure problem" -- basically the hypothesis that human cognitive faculties are fundamentally incapable of solving certain philosophical problems (I suppose I'd be interested in extending this hypothesis by also adding *perceiving* certain philosophical problems). Certainly I'm aware of the general concept, but I've never heard this term before!
Personally, I'm skeptical that these problems are that common and/or significant. I suspect to the extent we don't understand problems it's due to some combination of not having the right empirical knowledge, the right conceptual tools, or lack of sheer time/cognitive power/computational ability, not total blanks.
I'm curious, have you tried estimating how likely/common these problems are? And relatedly, in which areas they might be in?
In my favorite fictional stories (eg There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm), when people are really puzzled by apparent gaping holes in their epistemology, it's possible to come up with increasingly clever solutions to map the gaps. Even if you can't *know* the truth directly, there might still be indirect ways to get you closer to knowing *of* the truth.
Your article presents the whole thing as both intriguing and a fun mystery, but maybe it comes across as a bit...too mysterious? Like reality is reality and whether cognitive closure is real feels like a real empirical phenomenon that we can come up with tools for assessing! (Or maybe I'm just too overly bullish on human reason and data?)
I'm a little reminded of Turing's Halting Problem and the associated eschatology. There's the mathematical proof, the common-language understanding of what the proof says, and the wild extrapolations people sometimes make from the common language understanding.
I agree with the first, understand the value of the second, but have a many doubts about what people sometimes say about the third.
In particular people sometimes go from Turing's Halting Problem to say that it's impossible for computers/AIs to analyze computer programs without running them, which is just an insane claim for anybody who programs (or thinks even a little in atheoretical terms about what computers do!)
Like obviously going by the parameters and assumptions of Turing, it's impossible to make a computer program to tell in the general case whether a program will halt (that's what a proof means! Humanity effectively has no stronger piece of evidence than a purely logical proof!)
But it does not mean that computers can't figure, in principle, that (eg)
> While True:
> continue
is a program that will halt. Human programmers can understand this, and communicate their understanding well. This also means that human programmers can make programs that do simple static analysis on software without directly running them.
So it's never obvious to me why people should expect the Halting Problem to be a serious problem in real-world programs, at least for programs of sufficiently low complexity that humans can figure out their halting status.
This analogy is getting somewhat convoluted, but I do strongly suspect that it's possible for something similar to be possible in philosophy, where problems that we cannot tackle head-on for one reason or another can still by analyzed from a distance with 1 or more layers of indirection.
I think there is no antimemetics division is really interesting because many of the stories are predicated around the idea that closing the gap in your epistemology will be your undoing. So the problem is not to close the gap—the problem is figuring out what you need to do while learning as little as possible about the problem you are trying to solve, because the problem will kill you if you remember what it is. That’s why amnestics are so vital in the story: they provide a way for the characters to screw up without dying immediately. But the way that they screw up is by figuring out what the problem is.
In other words, the characters are explicitly trying not to leave Plato’s cave, because the outside world that the shadows represent will kill them, but they can still use the shadows for problem solving.
Fantastic essay!
It brought to mind two things:
1. That any language at or belief system is a limited view or perspective should not be a source of dread but joy. It means that the world can always be unfolding for the curious observer/thinker. It would suck if language could truly model the world, as that would be it, and the future would just be variants, as though the only narrative universe were Marvel. Dreadful.
2. Zizek and ideology. There is no non-ideological position, so the interesting challenge is breaking your own “intuitions”
Ah, what a great post, connecting so many things. I happened to find Wittgenstein's metaphor that his aim in philosophy was show the fly the way out of the fly bottle just recently - in a half-forgotten book by Walter Kauffman (Critique of Religion and Philosophy). That we are all like flies who can't find the way out of the bottle is so evident when we think about consciousness - . someone's gotta help us apparently; we are hopelessly trapped in human cognition, and keep bumping into the glass. Oh! And thanks for recommending Nabokov's Pale Fire (and the YouTube video) without giving anything away! Reading that novel is an unbelievable adventure for the mind.
Perhaps an allusion to Zembla, my dear country.