Marco Giancotti - "Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder"

https://planktonvalhalla.com/20240227-boundaries-are-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

 

 

 human language gives you the impression of being able to categorize things with names

 

 

Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ” — but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! — Look, for example, at board-games, with their various affinities. Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. — Are they all ‘entertaining’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball-games, there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck, and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of singing and dancing games; here we have the element of entertainment, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way, can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: similarities in the large and in the small.

Ludwig WittgensteinPhilosophical Investigations: 66 (

 

 

 

 

 the words we use define boundaries for things, giving us handy ways to tell things apart, but those boundaries are not universal. They’re not “in the world”, they’re practical shortcuts that exist only in human heads. If you look really closely, or if you look at the science, there is no strong reason to draw those lines one way or another. 

 

 

First, the fact that they have their own names can’t be a reason to separate them in that unique manner. We could give a name to the whole subject of the picture, say, “gadorblk”, that from now on we can use to refer to woman-touching-flower-carrying robots whenever we see them. Not very useful, but not prohibited either. You hear of languages that have words for weirdly specific things like “the effect of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, creating a dappled pattern of light and shadow” (komorebi from Japanese) and “the roadlike reflection of moonlight on water” (mångata from Swedish). Why shouldn’t a language have a one-word noun for the content of this picture?

As for the idea that we need to count three entities because each of them—the robot, the flower, and the woman—independently has consistent properties (an “identity”) of its own, the question then arises: why not more than three, then? Why not count each panel and screw of the robot separately? You could distinguish each garment worn by the woman, and each petal of the flower, each with its own independent uses and properties. All these things are “attached” to each other by physical forces that, when you look closely, are the forces of atoms pushing or pulling at each other. Just like the atoms of the robot and of the woman’s hands are pushing and pulling at those of the flower.

 

Sam Dresser - "Heidegger v Carnap: how logic took issue with metaphysics"

https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics

Interesting article about metaphysics and Heidegger and Carnap. Heidegger being a nazi-sympathisant was messed up.

Logic will not stand in his way; logic, says Heidegger, is not 'the highest court of appeals'. His point is that humans can understand things in ways that aren't strictly intellectual. In our day-to-day lives, we talk about 'nothing' all the time. ('What did you do in school today?' 'Nothing'.) We can use the concept in this way because we have a pre-theoretical idea of what 'nothing'... is, Heidegger says Getting to this 'pre-theoretical' place is the very heart of the philosophy as a whole. It means going 'beyond' logic, or perhaps 'behind' it, to appeal to the what-it-is-like-ness of being a person. Heidegger wants to show - but not really to argue for - the idea that logic doesn't exhaust what we can meaningfully say about existence.

It is through moods such as boredom, joy or anger that the world 'discloses' itself to us, Heidegger says.

Now for the twist: the reason we can toss 'Nothing' about so easily - the reason why we have an inkling of 'Nothing' even if we can't directly speak about it - is that there's a particular mood that 'discloses' Nothing. That mood is anxiety. While fear tends to have a singular object, like a vengeful spider or a murderous clown, anxiety lacks a target. It shears away meaning, revealing the pointlessness of it all, the utter, hollowed-out barrenness of existence.

Perhaps it takes a mind as subtle as Ludwig Wittgenstein's to really, truly understand Heidegger. After reading Heidegger's lecture, Wittgenstein remarked:

To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being [Sein] and anxiety [Angst]. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be mere nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language.

Much of the disagreement between Heidegger and Carnap boils down to the notion of 'limits': the limits of words, the limits of knowledge, the limits of expression. And limits naturally prompt questions about beginnings: where to start when we do philosophy, and how does that starting point influence wherever we might be headed? In logic, Carnap found firm ground from which to launch his own philosophy, and to articulate the kind of thinking that should be classed as truly 'philosophical'. For Heidegger, logic is useful but not sufficient. There is so much more to say, so much more to question, so much more bound up with the business of being alive.