Is logic a valid way to find out the truth-value of a statement, or is it just a way of privileging certain discursive modes over others?
RHODESIA #BTFO (AGAIN)
>60 million africans
fuck outta here with this reddit shit
>>453881
>truth value of a statement
Read Philosophical Investigations. All truth values of statements are subjective and subject to context.
There used to be an idea that statements contain 'atomic facts' which are the absolute bear meanings, all of them which can be assigned true or false values. Wittgenstein showed that the idea is objectively wrong.
>>453881
> Read Philosophical Investigations.
Or just read this
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/#KriSceWit
>>453921
So you're saying logic is useless and shouldn't be taught in philosophy departments anymore?
>>453933
I'm saying language is subjective. As the other annon said, read the little article and it will explain way.
How are you drawing the conclusion that if language is subjective we shouldn't teach logic? Modern philosophy has long accepted that a great deal (if not everything) is subjective. Logic seems pretty objective on paper but when you go trying to apply to actual things instead of just paper-models it is forced to interact with something like language or some other aspect of life that is infact not objective.
I'll explain why this had to be the case. For a very long time philosophy held the idea that knowledge exists outside of human perception. So there would still for instance be a concept of "tree" or "nation" "evil" or "good music" even if no humans existed. These concepts would exist immaterially in some sort of pseudo-platonic form. We thought that 'learning' was getting the approximate understanding of this pseudo-platonic form, which was called "objective truth".
Towards the end of the 19th century, we started realizing that these things do no exist independently of the observer. The only reality is the interaction between the subject and the observer, this interaction is called "truth". So "tree" "nation" "evil" "good music" do not exist objectively, they need to be defined and since only people can define it is subjective.
Language is really obvious one. The English language doesn't have a platonic form, it was made by humans, and we know how to use the words by context. The contextual meaning is the only meaning, there is no platonic objective meaning that would still remain without a human to experience the word.
Welcome to 20th century philosophy.
>>453978
Yeah but why should we use logic if all language is subjective? Doesn't it seem like we're just wallowing in illusions if we ignore Wittgenstein, Russell, Gödel, Heisenberg, and Munchausen?
>>453881
Rhodes is hardly a popular figure these days, also he clearly didn't kill 60 million Africans.
Logic will tell you how truth values relate to one another under the logical operators, ('and' 'If, then' 'Either/Or' and 'Not'). When doing logic you will most likely be examining the formal features. Truth values are also frequently assumed to test the validity of arguments.
Am I the only one who's ever been baffled by the fact that Wittgenstein tries to demonstrate the fact that language is meaningless, through the use of language?
Doesn't his entire idea just shoot itself in the foot?
>>454020
Where does he say this?
>Logic
You mean ideology?
>>453979
Ignoring problems won't make them disappear. Wittgenstein showed us that words have no meaning by themself, the only thing that makes meaning is context and subjective usage. Words mean what the user intends them to mean. If I say "brick" when I really mean "hand me one of those bricks over there" and you get that's what I mean by "brick" than that's all there is to language. The context IS the only meaning
If you want to say words have meaning outside of context and Wittgenstein is wrong you need to actually assert your reasons. If you ignore Wittgenstein he will just come back to haunt you later.
>>453881
Since when does education idolize De Beers?
>>455846
So what's the point of logic? You haven't answered the main question.
>>455896
Why would the point of logic change?
If you want to know the "purpose" of something it has nothign to do with language. That's really more about existentialism or natural law.
...unless you are talking about logical positivism in which case it's a position that is pointless. The inability to form objective statements defunct the position.
>>455857
They don't. It's one of the stupidest comparisons I've ever seen. I'm not even sure if he is taught in normal schooling.
>>453881
Life expectancy increased under colonialism. The death estimates for colonialism, as with the holohoax, are completely arbitrary and have no primary source.
>>456075
It's a scholarship by the Rhodes Trust, as stipulated in his will. Yes it's a prestigious scholarship, that doesn't mean he's regarded as a hero, or even taught in general education. It means he founded a foundation that had a shitload of blood money to hand out. If you not on the far right of the bell curve, you don't even hope for a Rhodes scholarship.
>>456089
Just to add, Rhodes was always seen as prestigious, and exclusive. It was never seen as inclusive (for the majority of it's history it was men only until changed by law), or a way to lift people out of poverty (most Rhodes scholars are already attending a prestigious university at the time of application), or any sort of shit like that. It's exclusivity was one of the reasons for the prestige attached to it, just like getting into an Ivy league (if you can get into the top ranks of Oxford, you can get into any Ivy league easy), except much more exclusive than that. The prestige was always attached to recognizing the recipient as special with lots of potential, not about whatever heroic deeds you think Cecil Rhodes may or may not have done. The closest to making Cecil Rhodes sound heroic is the character selection process, which includes characteristics he was not an exemplary example of.
>>455896
He's answering you perfectly and you're not even checking his sources. Fuck you're an idiot.
>>454020
He demonstrates that it's intersubjective in its meaning, like money. Big difference between that and "objective", "personally subjective" or "meaningless".
>>454020
I do see how it can be beetle to see beetles used to beetle beetles, but that doesn't beetle the beetle.
If beetles can be used to beetle beetles beetles might be beetle, but where beetles cannot beetle beetles that means beetles are unable to beetle and are therefore beetle.
>>453881
But six multiplied by zero is still zero.
Actually that picture is onto something, it's weird that people like Hitler and Stalin are declared literally devils by the general public while Anglo atrocities are largely ignored. Everyone knows about Zyklon B and the gulags but most people appear shocked when you tell them about concentration camps where Boer children starved to death.
>>457553
>but zero multiplied by ten is still zero
That's what you were trying to say.
God damn you deniers are fucking stupid people.
>>457587
badly run concentration camps are a war crime, but not even close to comparable to Nazi and Soviet atrocities. It is right that we don't consider them in the same league.
>>453881
There weren't even 60 million Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa during much of Rhodes's life
>>457609
>A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50 percent of the Boer child population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four (25 percent) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.
>It is thought that about 12 percent of black African inmates died (about 14,154)
That shit was literally a genocide.
>>453921
How did he show they were objectively wrong?
>>457609
How about Churchill's response to the 1943 Bengal famine?
Is that not evil enough for you?
>inb4 it was Japan's fault
>>457641
The book is basically a theories of thought experiments about how language is formed. The basic idea is that words are just sounds and that we teach each other what the sounds refer to by contexualizing it.
I gave an example here >>455846
The idea that words have a fixed meaning that is only defined once is also bullshit. If you've ever read very old literature you'll notice that they use words in a context that is completely different.
Wittgenstein eventually concludes that the entire concept of 'meaning' is nonsense. The context is the only thing that really matters.
Read a few parts from Philosophical Investigations, it's not that hard a read.
>>457682
Wittgenstein was significant but the whole "Nothing more can be said about language, truth, and logic since Wittgenstein" thing is pretty much an exaggeration perpetuated by bad historiography. There have been major developments in most areas relating to his work since he died.
>>457699
Well of course. Wittgeninstein's conclusion that we cannot understand each other is ridiculous. It's just that our understanding is not a universal one but a contextual one.
Put it this way. When we read very, very, very old documents if you have no knowledge of how people used words back than you would be hoplessly unable to understand the language. Words were contextualized very differently in the past. Dozens or hundreds of idiosyncratic compounding each other make it so that a complete novice to such a way of speaking will never understand everything. But if you bring a historian that is familiar with documents from this era he can help you along the way by adding some nice foot-notes and if you read many documents from this era you will also learn the context of the words.
What's importaint about Wittgenstein is he removed us away from the idea that language is something fixed with "atomic facts", as if every word had some platonic form that was unchanged. You can see an example of it with how the word "meme" can mean 2 very different things.
Consider the staements
*in response to a picture of top lel
"s4s sure makes good memes"
*in response to a picture of a Charles Darwin
"Humans evolved from rocks. When will this meme die?"
'meme' has come to mean 2 totally different things. Every usage of the word is going to have a slightly different meaning which will be figured out by context. You are free to use words metaphorically, poetically, academically, or however you want. There is no single definition the whole world must obey. As long as you contextualize the word well than it works out.
>>457718
>What's importaint about Wittgenstein is he removed us away from the idea that language is something fixed with "atomic facts", as if every word had some platonic form that was unchanged.
Do you really think every philosopher before him thought this? His treatment of Augustine's philosophy of language is misleading. He makes it seem like something only an idiot would agree to when in fact it's an account that has as much going for it as Wittgenstein's does. You've fallen into the trap of taking Wittte St his word.
>'meme' has come to mean 2 totally different things. Every usage of the word is going to have a slightly different meaning which will be figured out by context. You are free to use words metaphorically, poetically, academically, or however you want. There is no single definition the whole world must obey. As long as you contextualize the word well than it works out.
Are you now claiming that Wittgenstein coined the idea that univocally named concepts or things aren't necessarily identical, or are subject to change?
>>457729
>Do you really think every philosopher before him thought this?
>Are you now claiming that Wittgenstein coined the idea that univocally named concepts or things aren't necessarily identical, or are subject to change?
You need to understand when Wittgenstein was writing there was a huge movement trying to take philosophy and language into logical postivism, with rigid fixed defatinions. You had things like Russel's writings where he is trying to say "The Present king of France is bald" is incoherent statement because it doesn't confirm to Russel's own narrow understanding of how statements are formed.
Wittgenstein is important in the sense that he helped end this movement. As you pointed out his ideas are not completely original. He may have stated them better but they existed before. Wittgenstein is as I said really a big name not because of what he built but because of what he destroyed.
>>457751
>You need to understand when Wittgenstein was writing there was a huge movement trying to take philosophy and language into logical postivism, with rigid fixed defatinions
I do understand that but I don't think you're making it clear enough that his achievements are most significant in the light of logical positivism, which hasn't had a foothold for a while thanks to people that weren't Wittgenstein.
>You had things like Russel's writings where he is trying to say "The Present king of France is bald" is incoherent statement because it doesn't confirm to Russel's own narrow understanding of how statements are formed.
Why do you write off Russell like this? Can you actually explain his theories of language or are you, like everybody else on 4chan who knows his name, content just to say that he was wrong and Wittgenstein proved it? Russell's theory of names is as important as anything Wittgenstein came up with, whether or not it was correct. Bertrand Russell is one of the most unfairly derided philosophers ever discussed on this site.
>>453921
wittgenstein philosophy can be a good case for objectivity
