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Showing posts from September, 2015

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language

So said Ludwig Wittgenstein. I did not stumble on this beguiling jewel of language reading Wittgenstein. Nein. That would require too much grit, wit and deutsche. I found it reading an intriguing article in Slate by David Auerbach titled " The Limits of Language ", subtitled " Wittgenstein explains why we always misunderstand one another on the Internet" . It was very prescient of Ludwig, who died in 1951, to do this for us. He just knew that the Internet was going to be a poor medium for us to communicate in. Some may claim he was merely saying that humans are poor at communicating sometimes, but then they would clearly not get Witt. Mr Auerbach's  proposition appears to be that because the later period Ludwig held that the meaning of what we say can't be abstracted away from the context in which we say it, this means that the inherent abstraction of our communication on the Internet results in our words losing their appropriate context and therefore