Customer Reviews

Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World

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As author, I'd like to provide the synopsis/abstract of my book "Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World" as it appears on my own webpage:

"Abstract: Wittgenstein told friends on many occasions that he came to see how things in the world can be represented in language by thinking about scale models, and that it occurred while he was a soldier, in the autumn of 1914. This book is the result of investigating the idea that perhaps he meant _experimental engineering_ scale models. It is well known that Wittgenstein had been an aeronautical engineer before going to Cambridge to study philosophy with Bertrand Russell in 1911. Why only in 1914, then, did this insight occur? It so happens that 1914 was the year that the basis of the method of experimental engineering scale models was formally set out and presented, by a philosophically-minded physicist, as a matter of a purely logical principle about any symbolic system that is used to represent physical relationships. In fact, a whole array of discussions about similarity arose in 1913-1914, in physics, biology, and chemistry. The book lays out this previously untold story in the history of ideas, presents a new reading of Wittgenstein's philosophical work (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and explains how many heretofore puzzling claims in it click into a coherent account on this new reading. "

However, I don't think you need to have any interest in Wittgenstein to appreciate the history of ideas in the book. I am not aware of another book that gives an account of the historical background to, and a critical-historical review of, the idea of physically similar systems ranging from Galileo to Rayleigh and beyond, including physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry.

The book also contains an English translation of Boltzmann's 1894 lecture on Aeronautics as an appendix.

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The first chapters of this book are excellent. It begins with a fascinating history of the development of flight. The writing is clear and engaging. Sterrett convincingly connects the history of flight to its possible influences on Wittgenstein's thinking. The next few chapters delve deeper into aeronautical engineering, summarizing technical developments by physicists and engineers whose work Wittgenstein may have read.

Unfortunately, the quality of the editing in these later chapters falls off steeply. The quantity of typos rises beyond a standard level for professional publishing. The explanations becoming increasingly opaque to the lay reader without an engineering background. As an earlier reviewer pointed out, simple, valuable aids to reader comprehension are omitted (e.g. Figure 3 is mentioned many pages before it shows up without any reference to where it will be). I felt like I got a pretty good grasp of what Sterrett was trying to say in these chapters, but it was frustrating and required more effort than it should have.

The book redeems itself towards the end by offering useful insights into Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Although I am no expert on the Tractatus, I feel that Sterrett's book sheds valuable light on Wittgenstein's terse and sometimes inscrutable exposition.

Overall, I think the book was worth reading. I won't recommend it to friends without a philosophy background because it simply gets too dense and confusing in the middle for anyone without drive to understand. I would recommend it to those with a special interest in Wittgenstein's philosophy. What would have made this book brilliant is a good editor. It's probably not Sterrett's fault when her prose is not clear or when the reader aids aren't working. What she needed was for some non-specialists to read through the book and point out every place where things weren't clear. She is obviously capable of writing clearly (she pulls it off in several chapters), but it's hard for a writer to see the confusing points in her writing because she knows exactly what she's writing about. I almost suspect that the editors assumed that the material was over their heads and that the intended audience would get it. I feel like I'm part of the intended audience, and I few added explanatory notes would have made it much clearer.

It's worth giving it a try. The early chapters are great. If you struggle in the middle, you can always skim to the last chapters and catch some interesting takes on Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein is a philosopher whose life and work seem to pop up where you never expect to find it. The author makes some fascinating connections between W. and the Wright Bros. ( of all people ! ), with Bertrand Russell, with epistemology, computer logic, and lots more.
The book suffers from the absence of photographs, not a single photo of W. himself. There are also a few basic errors such as using "laying" for " lying" . By a PhD., simply unacceptable. Perhaps I should toss the brick at her editor instead because there are others. Another example is in her inaccurate description of the Gnome aircraft engine. A quick Wiki check would have prevented the blunder. A very important foundation stone in W.'s intellectusal development was his refusal to accept Russell's solution to the famous Russell's Paradox. The author I believe should have spent a few more paragraphs on the Paradox itself to help the reader understand how W. used it as a launching pad for his leap into logical symbolism. For this , however, there already exist better books. But I would have bought the book anyway just to learn about the degrees of inherent stability ( comparing bikes to planes) and to enjoy watching her connect these ideas to W.s thinking on fundammental logic and how the mind functions.This book is an entertaining excercise in making connections that I have never heard of and certainly would never have thought of on my own. Buy the book ! Try it. You'll like it and learn a lot you won't find in any textbook.

As a newly arrived student at Cambridge University Ludwig Wittgenstein bluntly demanded of his tutor, Bertrand Russell, to tell him whether or not he had any talent for philosophy - "if not, I shall become an aeronaut." His pre-Cambridge aeronautical and engineering studies (including at an experimental kite-flying station) are briefly discussed by his biographers, Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, without, however, attaching much importance to their relevance for his subsequent philosophical work. Although it is part of Wittgenstein lore that he was led to philosophy through a preoccupation with the foundations of the mathematics he was using for his engineering studies, until now no one has suggested that there was a close linkage between his work on aeronautics and his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. This is Susan Sterrett's thesis.

Sterrett does have some interesting things to say about the kinds of aeronautical problems which would have preoccupied Wittgenstein during his studies, and about the role played by leading theoretical physicists, like Ludwig Boltzmann, in exploring the foundations of heavier-than-air flight. She also has some illuminating insights into the parallelism between Wittgenstein's ideas on how language can represent reality and the work of physicists on how the models used in aeronautical experiments can represent the real thing, a flying machine.

Unfortunately, however, the book doesn't much further our understanding of this period in Wittgenstein's life, not least because of its heavy reliance on secondary sources (in particular the biographies by McGuinness and by Monk). It also veers between labouring over some quite obvious points (I lost count of the number of times the reader was reminded that Wittgenstein was born in 1889) and explanations of scientific and engineering concepts that left this philosopher, for one, floundering. If this book was intended for a general readership it seems to have missed its mark.

In the final analysis, however, Sterrett fails to establish her central claim - that the leading idea of the Tractatus was derived from an obscure mathematician called Edgar Buckingham. We're asked to believe that Wittgenstein was influenced by a mathematician he never mentioned in any of his work, published or unpublished, or in conversations with friends and pupils. Yet, if nothing else, Wittgenstein was punctilious in recording his influences, including people who influenced him in surprising ways. Moreover, Buckingham's paper was published in an obscure American journal in mid-1914 when Wittgenstein had already returned to Vienna and was preparing to go to the Russian front. The only person flying a kite, it seems, is Sterrett herself.

I do not even recall Ray Monk delving into this connection though I will have to go back and look. Looking at the link between modeling in engineering and language analysis certainly seems to supply some intriguing questions with answers.

A reviewer of my book, `Concepts: A ProtoTheist Quest for Science-Minded Skeptics,' was critical of my not having cited authors "... such as Hegel, Wittgenstein and Rorty ..." and for not making "... aspect[s] central to postmodern narrative construction ... part of [my] approach." In order to understand what he's taking about, I've since read several books about Wittgenstein. Admittedly, based on my previous readings of scientists who dismiss postmodernism as unscientific, I had not open-mindedly explored postmodern authors. Sterrett's grounding Wittgenstein in the technology of the turn of the twentieth century appealed to my engineering background so I thought she might provide the key to my understanding.

In her first chapter Sterrett cites Wittgenstein seemingly equating the recording of music in a groove of a phonograph record with its musical score. This struck me as a gross misunderstanding. The groove contains a recording of the air vibrations which we hear as musical sound whereas the musical score is an encoding, a transcription of that sound into the `language' of musicians. The recording of sound in the groove is similar to remembering that sound in one's brain; that is, a phonograph can reproduce that sound just as a person can imagine, hum, sing, whistle or play it on a musical instrument from memory without having to transcribe it into its musical score. Thus the recorded sound is not the equivalent of the musical score.

But it really doesn't matter whether that analogy is valid if that's what inspired Wittgenstein to his insights about philosophy; so be it. Thru-out Sterrett's book she speculates about what in Wittgenstein's milieu may have influenced him and helped shape his thinking; for example see pages 203-5. For a Wittgenstein scholar, this may make fascinating reading, but for me it was only marginally helpful in understanding his ideas, altho I found her history of the early days of aeronautical research interesting. It also took me back more than fifty years to my course in fluid mechanics.

What I gained about Wittgenstein's ideas from reading Sterrett is the distinction between facts and propositions. A proposition is an attempt to depict a fact in some language, whatever that language might be. A musical score is a `language' of musicians. A formula is a mathematical `language'. And of course there are many spoken/written languages that are only intelligible to those who know that language. These `languages' are attempts to encode perceived reality, facts, into propositions, that is, statements about reality that humans can comprehend provided they know that language. Then there's the relation between language and models. I would argue that, while languages may be analogous to models, they're not the same, any more than the musical score is the same as the record groove.

Curiously, Sterrett only covers Wittgenstein's thought processes up to his "Tractatus" eventho later, as reported by other authors, he reconsidered and rejected much of what he'd said in the "Tractatus". Another minor quibble: on pages 182, 185 & 201 she refers to Figure 3 with no mention of where to find Figure 3; it doesn't appear until page 225.