Word: wittgenstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...looking up, opening her eyes and answering the question with fluency and intelligence. I was amused by this and did an imitation of it to divert my colleagues after dinner. Among them was a distinguished Oxford philosopher. As soon as he saw my imitation, he immediately said, "That's Wittgenstein! Is her surname _____ by any chance?" Taken aback, I said that it was. "I thought so," said my colleague. "Both her parents are professional philosophers and devoted followers of Wittgenstein." The gesture had passed from the great philosopher, via one or both of her parents, to my pupil...
...Wittgenstein set out in particular to subvert the seductive theories about mind and consciousness that philosophers since Descartes had puzzled and battled over. Again and again in Philosophical Investigations, he catches his interlocutors in the act of being suckered by their overconfident intuitions about what their words mean--what their words must mean, they think--when they talk about what's going on in their own minds. As he says, "The decisive moment in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent." (Today's neuroscientists fall into these same traps with...
...Wittgenstein's Cambridge seminar on the foundations of mathematics included a brilliant young mathematician, Alan Turing, who was giving his own course that term on the same topic. Turing too had been excited by the promise of mathematical logic and, like Wittgenstein, had come to see that it had limitations. But in the course of Turing's formal proof that the dream of turning all mathematics into logic was strictly impossible, he had invented a purely conceptual device--now known as a Universal Turing Machine--that provided the logical basis for the digital computer. And whereas Wittgenstein's dream...
Happily, in those days before tape recorders, some of Wittgenstein's disciples took verbatim notes, so we can catch a rare glimpse of two great minds addressing a central problem from opposite points of view: the problem of contradiction in a formal system. For Turing, the problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that contains a contradiction, "the bridge may fall down." For Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human beings can be said to "follow the rules" of a mathematical system. What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein...
Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein's legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any other charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another (and, presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that...