User talk:Trossi01/Analytic philosophy

Greg's Comments on Sandbox version of April 28 2023
Comments on Tay Wikipedia Analytic Philosophy

1.     Why did you swap the order of “Ideal Language” and “Logical Atomism”?

2.     Briefly defining/ characterizing ‘Logical Atomism’ is a very good idea. However, I think your brief description is not quite specific/ narrow enough (= lots of views besides Logical Atomism would satisfy the stated definition). (There’s also a typo: ‘part’ should be ‘partS’)

3.     I appreciate the thought behind adding more detail about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, including the Picture Theory. But I think this is probably too much detail for this particular spot; these details should instead be in the Wittgenstein section of the ‘Logical Atomism’ Wikipedia page. That said, I do think a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_atomism#Wittgenstein's_principles

makes sense here, for people who want this level of detail that you’ve written up. And if you go over to the “Logical Atomism” page, and see anything worth improving over there, then you could/ should totally make these changes there. In other words: see if some of the content you’ve written here for the “Analytic Philosophy” page could be incorporated into the text of the “Logical Atomism” page’s section on Wittgenstein/ the Tractatus

4.     “Ideal Language” section:

a.     (a) The original/ current Wikipedia page surprised me by picking the dates 1910-1930. I think it’s too narrow on both ends: Frege’s Begriffschrift (Concept-Writing), which is typically considered the founding document of modern logic, was published in 1879. And Carnap (and others like him) also were continuing to use ideal languages into the 1930s and 40s if not even later.

b.     (b) There are a couple things about your second paragraph that are not quite accurate. For example, you write: “which are essentially basic facts learned through sense perception such as "Fido is a dog," as it cannot be broken down any further.” Strangely enough, Russell (at least at some points in his career) would reject that example. Russell thought that “Fido” was not REALLY a name, but instead was a disguised definite description (e.g. ‘Fido’ abbreviates ‘The dog who is owned by Greg and Karen F-A as of April 15, 2023.’). In that phase, Russell thought that particular instances of the words ‘this’ and ‘that’ were the only genuine logically proper names. And ‘dog’ is also probably too ‘theoretical’ to be basic for Russell: color, texture, shape and similar sensory properties are the basic ones; we INFER something is a dog, on the basis of its more directly observable traits.

c.     (c) That “Additionally” is somewhat weird: “Fido is a dog” is “a single predicate… describing a quality” of a particular thing. (Also: I know Langer uses ‘term’ to mean an individual object, like you, me, or Mt. Everest, but everyone else uses ‘term’ to refer to a bit of language, e.g. a name-- instead of the thing named)

5.     “Logical Positivism” section.

a.     (a) “ This doctrine claimed that human knowledge”: this should probably be “This doctrine claimed that SUBSTANTIVE human knowledge” or something similar: in at least one non-ridiculous sense of ‘know’, the Logical Positivists would say that we know the truths of logic (and math), but we certainly don’t know them via “empirical means”.

b.     (b) “ Essentially a critique of published philosophical works ”: I would say maybe “Often a critique” or something similar—it doesn’t critique SOME philosophical works, and you might think that the critique of previously existing philosophy is more a side-effect or by-product of the view, as opposed to its essence.

c.     (c) Why did you delete the bit you deleted? I think it makes sense to (more or less) keep it, and incorporate what you’ve written with it.

d.     (d) “For them, philosophy concerned the clarification of thoughts, rather than having a distinct subject matter of its own”: that’s straight out of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, right? (and repeated by Schlick)

e.     (e) “The positivists adopted the verification principle, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience. This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless” This is correct. But it is making basically the same point as contained in the first paragraph of the “Logical Positivism” section (last half of that paragraph). So it should be incorporated up there. RudyCarnap (talk) 20:36, 28 April 2023 (UTC)