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Philosophical Grammar

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certain other reviewers of this book may have missed the point. Not that it isn't okay to miss the point from time to time, Sometimes it's a good thing to miss the point, but its not very useful in a book review. The short reason as to why this book is worth reading is because it was edited by Rush Rhees who has a different point of view on Wittgenstein than many of his other literary executors which is worth being exposed to. The mid-sized reason is that this is "Middle Period" Wittgenstein, and it is interesting to watch a great mind question itself in the way that Wittgenstein is beginning to do here. The long reason is that there are ideas here that are referenced in the Late Wittgenstein and which shed light on the ideas Wittgenstein comes to in On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, and Zettel.

So in short, pay no attention to reviewers who lack the background to understand what this book is for, or who don't know how to read a book like this. If you've not yet been exposed to Wittgenstein, don't start here. Read Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty first. Read the Blue and Brown Books. Browse through Zettel and Philosophical Remarks. Those all contain a more cohesive picture of the man's thought. For people with some background on Wittgenstein looking for more to ponder, well, that's what I got from this book. And it's valuable.

like all his works logic is the most remarkable issue

Once feature of this book that is always fascinating is that one can take any paragraph in it and generate a plethora of ideas and commentary, that might even fill volumes. This book is not unique in that regard, but in fact most books of philosophy have this characteristic. They allow the mind to go forth untamed and engage in speculations that are unconstrained by experience or laboratory experiments. Philosophical reasoning is to be distinguished therefore by its freedom to say and write what it pleases, unlike the case for scientific reasoning, which is highly constrained by observation and experiment. There are some interesting points made in this book, some of them having intersection with what is now going on in artificial intelligence, computational grammar, and linguistics. Readers can also gain insight into the school of logical atomism, which the author was of course very much a part of.

The book is organized as a collection of disjointed paragraphs, which little or no correlation between them. Many of them are quite interesting and thought-provoking, especially if read in the context of the field of artificial intelligence. It is doubtful though that any of these ideas could be refined in such a way as to make them useful in the goal of building thinking machines. They are just too loosely structured to be codified in a language that would run on a machine. Speculative ideas unfortunately are like that. The ideas in the book might perhaps though put one in a certain frame of mind that would permit more acceptance of various claims made in artificial intelligence. Conversely, it might very well increase the doubt on those claims. Such is the nature of philosophical grammar: its expressive power and rich information content permits a wide range of interpretations.