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Quora Answer : What's your take on Wittgenstein?
Well the first interesting thing about Wittgenstein is that he's a philosopher who had a dramatic change of mind along his career.
Obviously many people change their mind. And many philosophers evolve their opinion between their earlier and later life and writing.
But with Wittgenstein it's an overt and dramatic break. So it makes sense that a lot of people talk about "the first Wittgenstein" vs "the second Wittgenstein".
If you want to start talking about his philosophy you really need to start by identifying which of these philosophies you are targeting. Because they are not the same.
I'm not an expert but my very, very rough overview is that first Wittgenstein is someone who is aligned with the beginnings of analytic philosophy and Logical Positivism and Russell's systematization of mathematics. And imagines treating language with the same formalism as mathematics or logic. It's a philosophy that thinks language can be a self-sufficient toolkit to build a model isomorphic to the real world. Like building a city out of Lego where all the buildings and objects have a 1:1 correspondence to the real thing. Your words are your collection of Lego bricks.
In principle you could write down a complete description of all the facts in the world and based on your knowledge of the meanings of all the words, you'd have a correct model of the world which you could use to do accurate reasoning about the it. Just as you can take a mathematical model of some system and use mathematical rules to reason about the system it describes.
Similarly, when you can't understand something about the world, it's because your model isn't good enough and you don't understand the word meanings well enough. So you have to refine them and add more detail.
This philosophy is about trying to systematize this idea of language, spelling out what is necessary for language to be such a toolkit for modelling the world. How words can map onto the world. How the world needs to be for words to map onto it. Etc.
The second Wittgenstein has given up on this project.
He recognises that language is too slippery and holistic. And that language always depends on something outside itself. On a pre-existing shared understanding or shared "form of life" or shared activities and goals or a shared "language game" within a community. Words get their meanings not from a fixed mapping to the facts of the world, but only from what that community wants to use them for.
This is a model which emphasizes the connection between language and lived, shared experience and communal action. It opens up the path to further "ordinary language" philosophy. A philosophy of language as tied to "speech acts". Etc. It's a language which can't be held to absolutely mirror or picture the world. But is simply a tool to operate within it.
It also notes the holism and circularity of definition within language. Words get their meanings from their context. And these meanings can shift, but not all at once. The mechanics are such that you must hold some fixed while changing others. But that doesn't make the fixed ones "special" or "absolute". They are simply the ones you are holding fixed at this moment for this context or this "game". There's no real foundation or skeleton of words with hard and fixed meanings to which you add a softer tissue of more "plastic" or looser words. They are all plastic and loose.
One thing that's interesting about this view is that it has parallels with continental philosophy and continental holism about language. But seems to be have been an independent discovery rather than one which comes through an engagement with continentals. I'm guessing (though not certain) that he probably knew something of Husserl, but was unlikely to be very interested by Heidegger or any of the more recent continental tradition philosophers. (Actually he was doing this thinking in the 1920s and 1930s so before a lot of the continentals)
Wittgenstein comes up with his model simply through starting with the assumption that language can be an accurate picture of the world, and realizing the failings of that idea.
This makes him a rather odd outsider in the sociology and politics of modern philosophy. He's a trained engineer. A soldier. An architect. A logician (including being the guy who invented Truth tables for logic). In other words, a total geek. He's still part of the analytic tradition, dismissed and rejected by many in the continental tradition. But he ends up saying the kind of things that drive your average conservative culture warrior harrumphing about "post-modernism" and "relativism" up the wall. Simply because he's thought about it a lot.
The other thing that's striking is how much he is an "anti-philosopher". Always running away from philosophy to do other things in his life. And his work is often intended as "therapeutic" not trying to "solve" philosophical problems so much as "cure" us of worrying about them.
He emphasizes that philosophical "problems" are often just misuses and misunderstandings of words rather than deeper issues.
In his first philosophy, many problems come from us not understanding the meaning of the words well enough. If only we could pin them down better, the problems would disappear.
In his second, the fact that we have a word for something doesn't mean that the world really has that thing. And many philosophical problems, he asserts, are nothing but trying to take words that have a "function" in a particular context and abstract them out and using them in a different context where they have no useful function.
To take a simplistic example (which may not be Wittgenstein's, I'm just making this up), the verb "to be" is perfectly useful if I ask an everyday question like "Is he a doctor?" "Yes, he is a doctor". But if I take this notion of "is" and try to abstract it into a thing and say "so what is being, anyway?" then I am not confronting a profound and important question about the universe. I'm merely taking the verb "to be" away from the contexts where it was a useful tool, and trying to apply it in a context where it has no valid usage.
That's a big challenge to philosophy which has always done exactly that. Taken things from everyday life and tried to abstract more general principles out of them and then worried about exactly what those principles are. It's a pretty radical challenge to the whole tradition.
Quora Answer : Why do some people devote their lives to studying Wittgenstein?
Why does anyone choose to specialize in trying to understand any philosopher? Or specialize in philosophy at all? Or specialize in anything? Biology full of people who spend a lifetime studying one or another small insect that you and I are never likely to even hear of.
Partly we can't be good at everything and some people prefer to be experts in a narrow field than generalists with shallow knowledge of a lot of fields.
Wittgenstein is potentially interesting for two reasons :
1) he is a significant philosopher who said interesting things and had a philosophical model which has a lot of implications that can be teased out and studied.
2) his is particularly interesting as a philosopher who changed his mind so dramatically and therefore has two, quite different philosophical models. Some people can be taken with that : how did that process of changing your mind so profoundly work? Were the seeds of the second Wittgenstein already in the work of the first? Were they in the failures of the first? What was it about Wittgenstein that allowed him to build a system and then be willing to throw it away and start over? Etc.
Quora Answer : What did Wittgenstein mean by the phrase 'language goes on holiday'?
For Wittgenstein, words don't "mean things" just because of some magical quality they have.
Instead, words are tools which get their meaning from the context they're used in. And the purpose we put them too. Meaning derives from this context. And, in particular, the context of what we want to do with them. In this situation, we decide to use this word for that purpose.
All philosophy, is in some crude sense, an argument about "what do you mean by the word X"? It's about finding consistent and useful conceptual frameworks to try to make sense of the world.
What Wittgenstein reminds us is that many times when we get counter-intuitive results or insoluble problems in philosophy. It's because we took words which got their meaning in one context "on holiday" to a different context where they don't still have their original meaning given by the new context, but we expect them to be able to do useful work for us. Simply from some residual meaning they were carrying around with them.
But this is, for Wittgenstein, wrong. The word didn't retain its original meaningfulness in the new context. And our belief that it did is now the cause of an insoluble problem.