JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post (History of Nothing series)
Watching the performances of the U.S. president for these thousand+ days—particularly exemplified in the wind/”wind mill” address–seeing him teetering and as always ready for a fall that never happens, put me in mind of an old character, Humpty Dumpty. This doesn’t apply for what happened to Humpty Dumpty in the old rhymes, but for what he said in Mr. Carroll’s book:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
–Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking Glass, (1871), Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). This one isn’t doesn’t have such a cushioned fall through the rabbit hole, and has very sharp edges all the way around. Carroll introduces us to the reverse in this world, having Alice step through a mirror into a realm that is a reflection of sorts of what her world once was, including the example of logic above that so fits the U.S. situation at the top of the turtle stack. Or bottom–das macht nichts.
Communication when the speaker uses a private truth table is difficult (for the listener).
And then I wondered about whether or not Wittgenstein had ever read Carroll, which is way more of a question that I can answer in one of these quick posts with the one-hour time limit imposed—suffice to say that it is something interesting to pursue.
For now, a good quote from the early W:
“Roughly speaking, to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all.”–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus… 5.5303.)
For an interesting read not quite on the point of whether W read C, see: George Pitcher, “Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll”, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Spring-Summer, 1965), pp. 591-611