Category: Philosophy

Why I read Wittgenstein

I have never been able to attach myself to a single philosopher as my guru. There are those who find all their philosophical enlightenment in Aristotle or Confucius, in Kant or Nietzsche or Marx, in Heidegger or Derrida. I have never been able to follow them. As soon as I read a philosopher, critical questions start swirling in my mind. That’s certainly also true when I read Wittgenstein.

Why then do I keep returning to the works of some philosophers? As, for instance, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or his Philosophical Investigations.  I am drawn most of all to Wittgenstein’s minimalism: to the way he strips away all the incrustations that have over time accumulated around the questions of philosophy.  He seeks to bring philosophy down to the ground, to liberate it from its baroque excrescences. He is not afraid to ask the simplest question and look for the most straightforward answers.  Wittgenstein’s thinking is an antidote to all the system building that has gone on over the last two thousand years. The vast structures and labyrinths of philosophical thinking.

Philosophical minimalism has still not been fully identified as a particular form of philosophical thought. Take Wilhelm Wundt’s three hefty volumes of his Logic and then put them beside the slim 70 pages or so of Frege’s Begriffsschrift. The former is now forgotten, while Frege’s monograph has started a new phase in the history of logic. Wundt’s Logic covered everything from epistemology to the methodology of science, Frege reduced logic to a theory of truth and truth relations. And compare the Tractatus with Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. The two works cover more or less the same ground. But how much more fastidiously so in Wittgenstein’s book.

To appreciate this minimalism does not mean that one can (or should) imitate it. My own mind works in a different direction. I think in historical terms.  I call myself a philosophical historicist and this historicism seems far removed from the minimalism of Frege’s or Wittgenstein’s work. But philosophical minimalism is a good antidote to the entanglements of traditional philosophy and as such perhaps also useful in clearing one’s mind for a more detached, historical vision of philosophy.

 

How many philosophers does it take to learn to be human?

The last of these Congresses took place five years ago in Athens and now Tokyo and Melbourne are hotly competing to host the next one in 2023. An Australian team is handing out cuddly koala bears to garner votes in the coming selection. There must be something to these events. Countries and cities must consider it a matter of prestige to host this event. And aren’t there also more tangible benefits to be derived from it?

This is the first World Congress I am attending and I can’t say that I am enamored with mass meetings of philosophers. My feelings are similar to those of Ludwig Wittgenstein. When the British philosophers arrived one year for their annual meeting in Cambridge, they found one lonely passenger on the station platform waiting to leave town — none other than L.W.

But I am less fastidious and curious to see this congress in action. Besides, I have an invitation to speak and thus an opportunity to present some of my current work. A number of friends will be attending the conference and it will surely be pleasant to see them. Things, however, turn out to be more complex than that. Some of the listed participants never show up; some are there but you never find them. At the same time I run unexpectedly into some old acquaintances. And I meet all kinds of new people. It turns out that the formal conference sessions prove often less interesting than the spontaneous encounters in the corridors.

Such conferences are a thoroughly modern invention. They depend on the fact that we are living far from each other and the possibility, at the same time, of traveling great distances. They allow us to huddle together as a group with shared interests and also to get to unusual places and see new parts of the world. We would, probably, all be better off, if we had stayed at home doing quietly our work. But the incessant churning of the modern world drives us around like the entire rest of the world.

Wittgenstein and von Humboldt on the description of the world

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus begins with two stark assertions about the world and these are followed by a series of further remarks on the same topic later in the text. These assertions deserve more attention than our interpreters have given them so far because they open up to some of the deepest layers of the Tractatus as I have tried to show in an essay entitled “Wittgenstein’s World.” I now want to turn to a second, closely connected topic that Wittgenstein also addresses in the Tractatus that calls equally for more examination. It is the topic of our relation to the world. The Tractatus speaks of this in three interconnected ways. Where the book had begun with an assertion about the world being all that is the case, it ends with the admonition that we must “see the world rightly.” (TLP, 6.54) Throughout the Tractatus as well as in later writings, Wittgenstein speaks of the seeing of things and of seeing them in the right way. We should therefore ask what it means to see the world in the right way. Second, Wittgenstein also talks in the Tractatus of our view or views of the world. There is, he says, a modern view of the world (Weltanschauung): “At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena.” By contrast “the ancients,” i.e., the world view of the ancients, stopped with God and Fate as unassailable. Both the moderns and the ancients, Wittgenstein adds, “are right and wrong.” “But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.” (TLP 6.371-6.372) Somewhat later he remarks on the same topic: “The view of the world sub specie aeterni is its view as a – limited – whole.” (TLP, 6.45 The notion of a world view is again one that Wittgenstein comes back to in other writings. We want to ask what a world view consists in, according to him, what it means to have a world view, and what it is to see the world as a limited whole.

Finally, the Tractatus speaks of descriptions of the world. “Newtonian mechanics,” we read, “brings the description of the world (Weltbeschreibung) to a unified form.” In the unusually detailed passage 6.341, Wittgenstein imagines different nets superimposed on a surface of irregular spots. Each net can be used to give a description of the surface “in a unified form.” The form of the net, he asserts, is arbitrary but a description of the surface in terms of one net may be simpler than one in terms of another net and for that reason presumably preferable. “To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world. Mechanics determines one form of the description of the world.” And in conclusion, he emphasizes once again: “Mechanics is an attempt to construct all true propositions that we need for the description of the world according to one single plan.” (TLP, 6.343)

My intention here is to focus first of all on the notion of a description of the world and to work myself forward to an examination of the notion of world view as Wittgenstein uses it, and to raise finally the question what it means to see the world rightly.

Von Humboldt’s Weltbeschreibung

In 1827, Alexander von Humboldt, the famous explorer of the Americas and natural scientist, delivered a much-acclaimed series of lectures in Paris and Berlin in which he sought to bring his entire knowledge of the natural world together into a single narrative account. Almost twenty years later he began to work this material into the form of a book. Its first volume appeared in 1845. Three others followed in the years up to 1859. To indicate the scope and intention of the work von Humboldt revived a term from Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy and called his book: Kosmos. “What provided me the main impetus,” he wrote, “was the desire to see the manifestations of bodily things in their general context, nature as a whole moved and animated by inner forces.” He had, so he added, initially conceived of a description of the earth (an Erdbeschreibung) based on the knowledge he had gathered in his journeys. But his perspective had widened and he was now trying to give an account encompassing everything on earth and in the heavens and so he subtitled his book: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung which we might translate as “Project design for a description of the physical world.”

To von Humboldt’s surprise, his book became an instant bestseller, was quickly translated into the major European languages, and reprinted a number of times during the following decades. After that it was largely forgotten, surpassed by new scientific discoveries and attitudes. But more recently the book has gained some new readers because of its holistic and ecological perspective. In the present context, Humboldt’s work is of interest to me because of the light in throws on Wittgenstein’s use of the somewhat unusual term “Weltbeschreibung.” This is not to suggest that Wittgenstein had read von Humboldt’s work. I am unaware of any evidence to that effect. But given the fame of the work we should not exclude the possibility. Von Humboldt’s thinking and terminology may also, of course, have reached Wittgenstein in another, more indirect fashion. His remarks on the topic of a world description anticipate, in any case, some of Wittgenstein’s thoughts though they also diverge from him in other significant respects. But I assume that Wittgenstein’s thinking on the topic profited in both respects either directly or indirectly from von Humboldt’s treatment.

Von Humboldt’s animating thought was that of the world as a whole. He wanted to achieve, as he put it, “insight into the order of the universe (Weltall).” In the third volume he restated the point once more by explaining that “the main principle of my work … is contained in the drive to understand the phenomena of the world as a principle of nature, to show how in particular groups of these phenomena their shared determination has been recognized, i.e., the rule of great laws, and how one rises from these laws to the investigation of their original interconnection.” Von Humboldt was clear that natural science would always have to do with the investigation of particulars. The project of a world-description was by no means itself a science. “What I call a physical world-description … does therefore not lay claim to the rank of a rational science of nature; it is a thoughtful reflection on the empirical phenomena as a natural whole (als eines Naturganzen).” He even called his book at times very modestly “conversations about nature.” He also spoke of it as a poetic and artistic work and as nature painting (Naturgemälde), analogous, perhaps, to a landscape painting. Von Humboldt was not even sure whether we could ever come up with a complete world-description and he certainly didn’t assume that he was giving one. The natural sciences are still developing, he wrote, and their researches may never come to an end. Often we lack knowledge of the causal relations. The kind of world description that was now possible was therefore, in fact, “only in some parts a world-explanation. The two expressions can as yet not be considered to mean the same.” For all these reasons, von Humboldt called his book a mere “Entwurf” for a world-description – a project design, as I translate the term; we might also say a sketch.

He qualified his project moreover, by calling it a “physical” world-description or a description of the physical world. It was the material universe that concerned him, not any separate ideal or spiritual reality. But he wanted to describe this physical world in an integral manner from the most distant stars to the smallest plants on earth. His account was meant to unite the “uranological and telluric spheres,” as he put it, the astronomical and the terrestrial domain as well as their interconnection. He saw human life, moreover, as part of this whole, not as separated from it. “Nature is for thoughtful reflection a unity in a multiplicity, a combination of a manifold in form and mixture, an encompassing notion of natural object and natural forces as a living whole.” The human species reworks the material that the sense present and “the products of such mental labor belong just as essential to the domain of the cosmos as the internally reflected phenomena.’’ The diversity of human cultures and human languages are part of the cosmic whole. “World-description and world-history are for that reason located in the same experiential plain.”

While he considered the project of a physical world-description as new, von Humboldt assumed that even our most primitive ancestors had a dark feeling “of the unity of the natural powers, of the mysterious tie that connect the sensory and the supersensory.” But in the absence of sufficient empirical knowledge, these world views had been expressed in numerous, different, and sometimes fantastic forms. In the Introduction to his first volume von Humboldt promised, among other things, a “history of world views, i.e., of the gradual dawning of the concept of the interaction of forces in nature as a whole.” In the end he limited himself, however, to a summary account of this development from the early Greeks to Newton. The ancient Greeks had initially venerated “the rule of spiritual powers in human form.” More abstract forms of world view had been developed by the Ionian and Pythagorean philosophers. Von Humboldt treated with sympathy, in particular, the Aristotelian view of the world but then jumped quickly to an “expansion of cosmic views” in the 13th and 14th century. With a mere reference to Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and his Liber Cosmographicus, and Peter d’Ailly, he jumped to Giordano Bruno, Kepler and his Mysterium cosmographicum, Descartes and his Traité du Monde, and from there to what he called Newton’s “immortal work.” Newton, he wrote, had taken an essential step in the development of world views; he had “elevated physical astronomy into a solution of one of the great problems of mechanics, a mathematical science.” His words made clear that he saw Newton as a forerunner to his own physical world description.

Two points stand out in von Humboldt’s story. The first is his pre-occupation with the concepts of unity, oneness, wholeness, of “inner links between the universal and the particular.” He would sometimes speak of this totality (Weltall, Naturganzes) in a scientific spirit as held together by universal laws (Weltgesetze), as something to be accounted for in the spirit of Newton with the help of a mathematized science of mechanics; but he would also allow himself at times a more Romantic characterization of this totality as a “living whole,” as something built on a world plan (Weltplan) and embodying an all-encompassing idea (Weltgedanke).

The second important is that he considered this concern with the totality of the world a an essential human drive for “the first, highest, and inner purpose of intellectual activity consists in the discovery of natural laws, the exploration of the orderly structure of natural formations, insight into the necessary connection of all changes in the universe.” But contemplation of the world as a unity had in addition a still deeper meaning. It gives aesthetic (and implicitly moral) satisfaction. Nature, von Humboldt wrote “is the realm of freedom” and it can provide us with a deep sense of freedom. What we call the enjoyment of nature is entrance in to this freedom (Eintritt in das Freie).” The early pages of von Humboldt’s Kosmos are for that reason devoted to impress on his readers the idea of the enjoyment of nature. This enjoyment is by no means diminished, it is, in fact, deepened, by a proper scientific understanding of the world.

The Wittgenstein Project

My project is simple but demanding. I am trying to reread Wittgenstein from the beginning without, however, relying on any established interpretations. My question is whether we can look at his work with fresh eyes. Ignoring the halo of secondary writing that now surrounds that work does not mean that I will always end up disagreeing with what previous interpreters have said. But my plan is to re-discover their insights where they are such and otherwise go my own way.

In doing this, I want to look more thoroughly at Wittgenstein’s own words than has previously been done. I don’t know how far I will get with this but completeness is not my goal. It is rather to start with the first sentence of the Tractatus and work myself forward from there as far as I can manage.

This will obviously be slow going, So far I have not got far beyond the first sentence of the Tractatus. Thinking about any particular sentence or phrase will, of course, often take me both backwards and forwards in Wittgenstein’s writings. So my approach will be less atomistic than it might sound. As far as my thoughts on the first sentence go, I have put two things down in this website. There is a power point file on the topic (in English) and there is the text of a lecture on it (in German).

I am about to add part of a third piece that explores Wittgenstein’s notion of a “world description.”

Who am I?

Rene Descartes said famously that I am a thinking substance and thus, presumably, that every self or subject is a thinking substance. That claim is, however, flawed. Does the statement that I believe this or that mean that there is a substance somewhere that believes this or that? Does the claim that I am in pain mean that there is a substance somewhere that is in pain? In these two cases we are not making factual statements about substances but we are affirming a belief of our own and expressing our own pain. Wittgenstein concluded that we don’t, in fact, use the word “I” to refer to anything. There is no such thing as the I, the self, or subject that the word “I” could refer to. Following Lichtenberg, he suggested that our grammar may mislead us. We tend to assume that a noun has meaning always by referring to some object and we hold that the same is true of the pronoun “I.” But both assumptions are wrong. We should think, instead, of sentences like “I am in pain,” Lichtenberg said, as we do of “It is raining.” In the latter case there is obviously no it that does the raining and so, similarly, we should conclude that there is no I that has the pain.

But this Lichtenberg-Wittgenstein view has difficulties of its own. Let us grant that we say “I am in pain” in order to express pain. Wittgenstein goes so far in this case as to maintain that we could actually replace the sentence with a moan to the same effect and thus with something that doesn’t contain the word “I” at all. But what about “Yesterday, I was in terrible pain”? This must be a true or false statement about an incidence of pain. It is certainly not an expression of pain. But the statement doesn’t mean that somewhere or other there was terrible pain yesterday. It means to say that I was the one who suffered. But who then is that I?

When I am asked who I am, I will usually recite certain facts about myself. But when I think about myself, I think rather of my life experiences, my hopes and aspirations. Others may identify me with some external characteristics: the appearance of my face, the sound of my voice, certain characteristic ways of moving. To myself I am, however, someone with certain experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts etc. And here I get back to the theme of privacy, to the fact that the large body of my experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts, etc. is not in practice accessible to others. The one who I am is not a substance with its own identity from the first moment of my existence. I become myself, I become who I am, rather, in the course of my life, as experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts accumulate. But this being who I have become is not fully transparent to others. I relate to it in a way in which I don’t relate to anyone else. I am a being with hidden, secreted corners and I am aware that others are in this respect just like me. (The question of the nature of the self and that of the degree to which our sensations, feelings, thoughts are private belong thus together.) Click here

In proposing this view, I am turning one of Wittgenstein’s arguments on its head. It is one of the few explicit arguments in his Tractatus – one that concern the self or subject. Wittgenstein argues in that passage that there cannot be a thinking self. Such a self, he says, would have to be simple, but a thing that thinks must have an internal complexity in order to entertain thoughts since facts and propositions have both a complex structure. I want to turn this argument around and conclude that a thinking self cannot be a simple substance but must be complex and that its complexity is determined by the complexity of its experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts.

One conclusion Descartes and his followers drew from their picture of the self as a simple substance was that this self could not come into existence or cease to exist through the normal processes of growth and decay. These would be always processes of composition and decomposition but in a simple substance there would be neither. This seemed to him to give us some assurance of the immortality of the soul. The alternative picture of a complex soul or subject allows us, on the other hand, to see this subject precisely as something that is formed in a natural way and that dissolves again in a natural fashion as our experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts disintegrate and fade away.

Wittgenstein on the Puzzle of Privacy

“In what sense are my sensations private? – Well, only I know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. – In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word ‘to know’ as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people often know when I am in pain. – Yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain.”

Readers of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations will be familiar with this intriguing passage (PI, 246). But there are reasons for being dissatisfied with it. Wittgenstein’s argument appears effective against those who postulate an absolute division between body and mind. But this hardly exhausts what we need to say on the topic of the privacy of sensations, feelings, experiences, memories, thoughts, etc. Yes, it is true that people often know when another person is in pain. But even more often they don’t. We might grant Wittgenstein that sensations, feelings, etc. are not in principle private, but practically they often are. And that they are, we might add, is practically inevitable. Much of what goes on in us never sees daylight. Do I tell people all my dreams and if I do, will I succeed in communicating to them what made them disturbing or funny? Do others know what I feel and think when I shave myself in the morning in front of the mirror? Do I speak of the twinge in my ankle as I walk to work? Do I communicate all the associations and memories that some words in a book evoke in me? None of this happens and others could not even in principle come to know all these things about me. Nor do I or could I know all that they think and feel and experience in their lives.

Hence, the disconnect that always exists between us. As a result, there is an element of uncertainty in all our social relations. There is the reality of misunderstanding, also of coldness and cruelty. Yes, Wittgenstein is right when he writes that it is possible to see that another person is in pain. In such cases, there is no question of a laborious inference from the person’s behavior to his feeling. The pain is manifest in the sufferer. But Wittgenstein passes over the fact that we do just as often not see that pain. Or we may see it in someone close to us and fail to notice it in a stranger. This disconnect produces frictions in our relations with each other. It leads to breakdowns of friendships and marriages. At the level of politics, it produces hostility and war. Over the course of human evolution, our inner life has, no doubt, become increasingly richer and therefore more difficult to discern for others. At the same time, we have learned to expand the range of our words and the vocabulary of our gestures so as to be able to communicate more effectively with each other. The inner life and the external expression bear, moreover, reciprocally on each other. My most private thoughts are, no doubt, shaped by the words I have learned from others and the words I use are imbued with feeling. The boundary between the inner and the outer is thus blurred. That is something, Wittgenstein establishes, no doubt, in his reflections on privacy. But there still exists a boundary and that it exists gives shape to our social practices and our political institutions. Privacy is a political issue precisely because it is a practical fact and that is something Wittgenstein has failed to notice.

There goes philosophy — Claremont Graduate University closes its philosophy program

The Digital media outlet INSIDE HIGHER ED reports that Claremont Graduate University has just closed down its philosophy department. “We were each given the day before an offer to continue as contract employees,” one of the two tenured professors in the department said, according to the report. “The offers were unacceptable in form and content, and presented as take-it-or-be-fired. We ignored them and got fired the next day.” According to the interim university president of Claremont Graduate University, Jacob Adams, the decision was “in recognition of a unique combination of market, enrollment and limited faculty resources that militated against the program’s sustainability, even academic viability.” According to Adams, the trustees considered that Claremont “is not a comprehensive university,” but rather a “graduate university offering degrees in selected fields with unique programs of study and opportunities to study across disciplinary boundaries.” In this spirit, Claremont is now undertaking “a process of program reprioritization.” The university’s news release cites a number of other institutions to have closed graduate programs in recent in years, and such closures — for reasons similar to those at Claremont — are on the rise. Click here

The implications of this decision are surely complex. There is no doubt that there are too many Philosophy Ph.D.’s being produced and too many Ph.D. programs  churning them out. Just a few years ago, Berkeley advertised one position in philosophy and received some 600 applications. That year there were 300 job openings in philosophy altogether in the US. Some of the Berkeley applicants may, of course, have already been teaching somewhere, but we must assume that many of them were left without a job. The closure of Claremont’s small philosophy department will not make much difference to this situation. But it may indicate that a larger retrenchment is on the way and that is surely to be welcomed.

At the same time, such a retrenchment will mean a reduction in the number of teaching positions available and this spells trouble for those who are now getting ready to enter the job market. It is, moreover, far from clear that we are facing only a limited retrenchment. The humanities as a whole are now under pressure. One reason for this are steeply increasing tuition fees. These force students to concentrate on subjects that promise well-paid employment. They also induce them to cut their time to a degree to a minimum and thus makes them forgo the luxury of taking courses in the humanities including philosophy. The number of humanities and philosophy majors has been sinking as a result across the country and so has the enrollment in humanities and philosophy courses meant for non-majors. Meanwhile, newly emerging technical subjects are in need of funding which they may seek to cover by stripping or eliminating other programs in their Universities.

We can’t put all the blame, however, on outside forces. Philosophy and the humanities in general need to rethink where they are and what they are doing. Too often their work has become an insider business. A re-orientation is called for. If we are lucky, the current pressure on these programs will help to bring this about. But there is no guarantee.

Disinformation: An Epistemology for the Digital Age

Here is part of a report on “Artificial Intelligence and International Security” that addresses some of the issues that an epistemology for the digital age needs to consider.

Artificial Intelligence and
International Security
By Michael C. Horowitz, Gregory C. Allen,
Edoardo Saravalle, Anthony Cho,
Kara Frederick, and Paul Scharre

Center for a New American Security
July 2018

Information Security

The role of AI in the shifting threat landscape has serious implications for information security, reflecting the broader impact of AI, through bots and related systems in the information age. AI’s use can both exacerbate and mitigate the effects of disinformation within an evolving information ecosystem. Similar to the role of AI in cyber attacks, AI provides mechanisms to narrowly tailor propaganda to a targeted audience, as well as increase its dissemination at scale – heightening its efficacy and reach. Alternatively, natural language understanding and other forms of machine learning can train computer models to detect and filter propaganda content and its amplifiers. Yet too often the ability to create and spread disinformation outpaces AI-driven tools that detect it.

Targeted Propaganda and Deep Fakes

Computational propaganda inordinately affects the current information ecosystem and its distinct vulnerabilities. This ecosystem is characterized by social media’s low barriers to entry, which allow anonymous actors – sometimes automated – to spread false, misleading or hyper-partisan content with little accountability. Bots that amplify this content at scale, tailored messaging or ads that enforce existing biases, and algorithms that promote incendiary content to encourage clicks point to implicit vulnerabilities in this landscape.9 MIT researchers’ 2018 finding that “falsehood [diffuses] significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly” than truth on Twitter, especially regarding political news, further illustrates the risks of a crowded information environment.10 AI is playing an increasingly relevant role in the information ecosystem by enabling propaganda to be more efficient, scalable, and widespread.11 A sample of AI-driven techniques and principles to target and distribute propaganda and disinformation includes:

• Exploitation of behavioral data – The application of AI to target specific audiences builds on behavioral data collection, with machine learning parsing through an increasing amount of data. Metadata generated by users of online platforms – often to paint a picture of consumer behavior for targeted advertising – can be exploited for propaganda purposes as well.12 For instance, Cambridge Analytica’s “psychographic” micro-targeting based off of Facebook data used online footprints and personality assessments to tailor messages and content to individual users.13

• Pattern recognition and prediction – AI systems’ ability to recognize patterns and calculate the probability of future events, when applied to human behavior analysis, can reinforce echo chambers and confirmation bias.14 Machine learning algorithms on social media platforms prioritize content that users are already expected to favor and produce messages targeted at those already susceptible to them.15

• Amplification and agenda setting – Studies indicate that bots made up over 50 percent of all online traffic in 2016.16 Entities that artificially promote content can manipulate the “agenda setting” principle, which dictates that the more often people see certain content, the more they think it is important.17 Amplification can increase the perception of significance in the public mind. Further, if political bots are “written to learn from and mimic real people,” according to computational propaganda researchers Samuel Woolley and Philip Howard, then they stand to influence the debate. For example, Woolley and Howard point toward the deployment of political bots that interact with users and attack political candidates, weigh in on activists’ behavior, inflate candidates’ follower numbers, or retweet specific candidates’ messaging, as if they were humans.18 Amplifying damaging or distracting stories about a political candidate via “troll farms” can also change what information reaches the public. This can affect political discussions, especially when coupled with anonymity that reduces attribution (and therefore accountability) to imitate legitimate human discourse.19

• Natural language processing to target sentiment – Advances in natural language processing can leverage sentiment analysis to target specific ideological audiences.”20 Google’s offer of political interest ad targeting for both “left-leaning” and “right-leaning” users for the first time in 2016 is a step in this direction.21 By using a systemic method to identify, examine, and interpret emotional content within text, natural language processing can be wielded as a propaganda tool. Clarifying semantic interpretations of language for machines to act upon can aid in the construct of more emotionally relevant propaganda.22 Further, quantifying user reactions by gathering impressions can refine this propaganda by assessing and recalibrating methodologies for maximum impact. Private sector companies are already attempting to quantify this behavior tracking data in order to vector future microtargeting efforts for advertisers on their platforms. These efforts are inherently dual-use – instead of utilizing metadata to supply users with targeted ads, malicious actors can supply them with tailored propaganda instead.

• Deep fakes – AI systems are capable of generating realistic-sounding synthetic voice recordings of any individual for whom there is a sufficiently large voice training dataset.23 The same is increasingly true for video.24 As of this writing, “deep fake” forged audio and video looks and sounds noticeably wrong even to untrained individuals. However, at the pace these technologies are making progress, they are likely less than five years away from being able to fool the untrained ear and eye.

Countering Disinformation

While no technical solution will fully counter the impact of disinformation on international security, AI can help mitigate its efficiency. AI tools to detect, analyze, and disrupt disinformation weed out nefarious content and block bots. Some AI-focused mitigation tools and examples include:

• Automated Vetting and Fake News Detection – Companies are partnering with and creating discrete organizations with the specific goal of increasing the ability to filter out fake news and reinforce known facts using AI. In 2017, Google announced a new partnership with the International Fact-Checking Network at The Poynter Institute, and MIT’s the Fake News Challenge resulted in an algorithm with an 80 percent success rate.25 Entities like AdVerif.ai scan and detect “problematic” content by augmenting manual review with natural language processing and deep learning.26 Natural language understanding to train machines to find nefarious content using semantic text analysis could also improve these initiatives, especially in the private sector.

• Trollbot Detection and Blocking – Estimates indicate the bot population ranges between 9 percent and 15 percent on Twitter and is increasing in sophistication. Machine learning models like the Botometer API, a feature-based classification system for Twitter, offer an AI-driven approach to identify them for potential removal.27 Reducing the amount of bots would de-clutter the information ecosystem, as some political bots are created solely to amplify disinformation, propaganda, and “fake news.”28 Additionally, eliminating specific bots would reduce their malign uses, such as for distributed denial-of-service attacks, like those propagated by impersonator bots throughout 2016.29

• Verification of Authenticity – Digital distributed ledgers and machine speed sensor fusion to certify real-time information and authenticity of images and videos can also help weed out doctored data. Additionally, blockchain technologies are being utilized at non-profits like PUBLIQ, which encrypts each story and distributes it over a peer-to-peer network to attempt to increase information reliability.30 Content filtering often requires judgement calls due to varying perceptions of truth and the reliability of information. Thus, it is difficult to create a universal filter based on purely technical means, and it is essential to keep a human in the loop during AI-driven content identification. Technical tools can limit and slow disinformation, not eradicate it.

References

9 Zeynep Tufekci, “YouTube, The Great Radicalizer,” The New York Times, March 10, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html.
10 Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral, “The spread of true and false news online,”
Science Magazine, 359 no. 6380 (March 9, 2018), 1146-1151.
11 Miles Brundage et al., “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention
and Mitigation,” (University of Oxford, February 2018), 16, https://maliciousaireport.com/.
12 Tim Hwang, “Digital Disinformation: A Primer,” The Atlantic Council, September 25, 2017, 7,

Digital Disinformation: A Primer


13 Toomas Hendrik Ilves, “Guest Post: Is Social Media Good or Bad for Democracy?”, Facebook
Newsroom, January 25, 2018, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/ilves-democracy/; and
Sue Halpern, “Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Revelations of Open Secrets,” The New
Yorker, March 21, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/cambridge-analyticafacebook-and-the-revelations-of-open-secrets.
14 Michael W. Bader, “Reign of the Algorithms: How “Artificial Intelligence” is Threatening Our
Freedom,” May 12, 2016, https://www.gfe-media.de/blog/wpcontent/
uploads/2016/05/Herrschaft_der_Algorithmen_V08_22_06_16_EN-mb04.pdf.
15 Brundage et al., “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention and
Mitigation,” 46.
16 Igal Zeifman, “Bot Traffic Report 2016,” Imperva Incapsula blog on Incapsula.com, January
24, 2017, https://www.incapsula.com/blog/bot-traffic-report-2016.html.
17 Samuel C. Woolley and Douglas R. Guilbeault, “Computational Propaganda in the United
States of America: Manufacturing Consensus Online,” Working paper (University of Oxford,
2017), 4, http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/politicalbots/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2017/06/Comprop-
USA.pdf; and Samuel C. Woolley and Phillip N. Howard, “Political Communication,
Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents,” International Journal of Communication,
10 (2016), 4885, http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/download/6298/1809.
18 Woolley and Howard, “Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and
Autonomous Agents,” 4885.
19 Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara, “Social bots distort the 2016 U.S. presidential election
online discussion,” First Monday, 21 no. 11 (November 2016), 1.
20 Travis Morris, “Extracting and Networking Emotions in Extremist Propaganda,” (paper
presented at the annual meeting for the European Intelligence and Security Informatics
Conference, Odense, Denmark, August 22-24, 2012), 53-59.
21 Kent Walker and Richard Salgado, “Security and disinformation in the U.S. 2016 election:
What we found,” Google blog, October 30, 2017, https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblogpublish-
prod/documents/google_US2016election_findings_1_zm64A1G.pdf.
22 Morris, “Extracting and Networking Emotions in Extremist Propaganda,” 53-59.
23 Craig Stewart, “Adobe prototypes ‘Photoshop for audio,’” Creative Bloq, November 03, 2016,
http://www.creativebloq.com/news/adobe-prototypes-photoshop-for-audio.
24 Justus Thies et al., “Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos,”
Niessner Lab, 2016, http://niessnerlab.org/papers/2016/1facetoface/thies2016face.pdf.
25 Erica Anderson, “Building trust online by partnering with the International Fact Checking
Network,” Google’s The Keyword blog, October 26, 2017,
https://www.blog.google/topics/journalism-news/building-trust-online-partnering-internationalfact-
checking-network/; and Jackie Snow, “Can AI Win the War Against Fake News?” MIT
Technology Review, December 13, 2017, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609717/can-aiwin-the-war-against-fake-news/.
26 “Technology,” AdVerif.ai, http://adverifai.com/technology/.
27 Onur Varol et al., “Online Human-Bot Interactions: Detection, Estimation and
Characterization,” Preprint, submitted March 27, 2017, 1, https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.03107.
28 Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson, and Jonathan Albright, “The Future of Free Speech, Trolls,
Anonymity, and Fake News Online,” (Pew Research Center, March 2017),
http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/03/29/the-future-of-free-speech-trolls-anonymity-and-fakenews-online/.; and Alejandro Bessi and Emilio Ferr, “Social bots distort the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election online discussion,” First Monday, 21 no. 11 (November 2016),
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7090/5653.
29 Adrienne Lafrance, “The Internet is Mostly Bots,” The Atlantic, January 31, 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/bots-bots-bots/515043/.
30 “PUBLIQ goes public: The blockchain and AI company that fights fake news announces the
start of its initial token offering,” PUBLIQ, November 14, 2017,
https://publiq.network/en/7379D8K2.

Reading Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the leading philosophical minds of the twentieth century and his thought remains of live interest. But he is not easy to read. Not  that he writes long, complex sentences with obscure philosophical terminology. On the contrary. His prose is simple, straightforward, and exemplary. But his texts are so condensed that it often becomes difficult to follow the course of his thinking.

Twenty years ago, David Stern and I published the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein which was intended to help readers along. The volume became eventually one of the bestsellers in Cambridge University’s companions to philosophers series. We have now brought out a second edition of this work, Some of the contributions to the first edition have stood the time and are reprinted in this new one. But we have also added some great new pieces and included a completely updated bibliography. The volume contains, among others things, now a lucid essay by Kevin Cahill on Wittgenstein’s reflections on ethics and a brilliant piece on Wittgenstein’s concept of seeing an aspect by Juliet Floyd. David Stern has contributed a new essay on Wittgenstein’s changing thoughts in the 1930’s and Joachim Schulte has tackled the topic of “body and soul.”

Apart from a new introductory essay, I have written a piece on time and history in Wittgenstein for this second edition. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on these topics have not yet been fully explored. My goal in this essay is to find a new way of looking at Wittgenstein’s writings. Another aspect of that same project is a lecture on Wittgenstein’s conception of the world in the Tractatus. The power point file for this lecture is available on this website. Click here

“The Owl of Minerva” – Where are we right now in philosophy? In need of a revolution.

Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.

But it appears that our philosophizing is now more seriously falling behind reality. We have entered an age of profound technological change. And this is affecting, in turn, our entire social and political reality. No aspect of human life is any longer stable. The tremors are passing certainly also through the academy. The humanities that were once at the center of academic life seem to be losing their footing. But our philosophers feel and see nothing. They are living in their homespun cocoon of familiar questions and topics and are happy when they have one of their papers published in a professional journal with a minute and diminishing readership.

This has not always been so. Both the “analytic” and the so-called “Continental” tradition in philosophy – the two movements that are still the main sources of our current philosophizing – had once a vitality and importance that is now sadly lacking. They related directly to the most pressing issues of their time: the crisis of mathematics and natural science that began in the late nineteenth century, the shaking up of our traditional conceptions of consciousness and the mind due to  psychology and linguistics, the cultural, moral, and political upheavals of the twentieth century. I often think that there was once a heroic age in analytic philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and others in their company systematically changed the contours of the subject. Similarly, we can make out a heroic period in the broadly differentiated field of Continental philosophy. From Nietzsche, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Sartre and Foucault (and again others in their company) these thinkers grappled with the most difficult issues of their time.

We may be too much in awe of this singularly creative moment in philosophy that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and lasted till the last quarter of the twentieth. But we are already half a century beyond that point and our reality is no longer the same. We are undergoing a revolution in all dimensions of our existence and we need a revolution in our thinking, too.

This is a good and a bad moment for philosophy. Good, because it gives room for adventurous spirits. Bad, because such spirits may not turn up and the subject may dwindle into scholastic irrelevance. Not all the great philosophers of the past have been academic teachers. It is always possible that the most productive philosophical thinking will once again take place outside the academy.

There is, surely, something presumptuous in trying to tell others how they should conduct themselves philosophically. It is also useless. If we want philosophy to take a different course, we have to take it ourselves and, perhaps, others will do the same. The best I can do is to say in a few words, how I myself mean to proceed at this point.

  1. Say “No” to the formalism that holds our thinking in such a straightjacket. We need to overcome our preoccupation with the Kantian conception of philosophy as a “purely conceptual” inquiry. This must be our objective, in particular, in ethics and politics – a move away from abstract normative theorizing into a diagnostic form of ethical and political thinking.  Even logic and mathematics may be thought of in concretely natural terms as a human and historical practice. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics can provide us with clues. Why should we think that a late eighteenth century thinker can be our major philosophical guide in the twenty-first century?
  2. Practice a determined realism – by which I don’t mean an attachment to metaphysical realism but keeping a philosophical eye on the actual, concrete, historical facts. That kind of realism will also be aware of the limits of our understanding of our reality- particularly when it comes to history, society, and politics. Think of varieties of localized skepticism as realistic options.
  3. Develop a philosophy of technology. It is technology that is changing our world. We need to think about the technical instruments but also of the techniques of their use. We need to look also at the social and political effects of technological change. We need to study how technology affects and changes the distribution of power, its dispersion and concentration. We need to have an eye on the destructive potential and side-effects of technological development both in the natural and the cultural domain.
  4. Make politics your first philosophy. We must conceive political philosophy as a comprehensive inquiry into human existence and look at all aspects of philosophy in a political manner. But this requires a broad conception of politics, one that treats politics and ethics as distinct but connected strata.

“The Owl of Minerva” – Where are we right now in philosophy? In need of a revolution.

Hegel famously wrote that the owl of Minerva starts its flight at dusk. He meant to say that philosophy, far from being avant-garde, is, in some ways, always behind its time. For first comes reality and only then, belatedly, comes our understanding of it. Our words and theories are always chasing after the facts.

But it appears that our philosophizing is now more seriously falling behind reality. We have entered an age of profound technological change. And this is affecting, in turn, our entire social and political reality. No aspect of human life is any longer stable. The tremors are passing certainly also through the academy. The humanities that were once at the center of academic life seem to be losing their footing. But our philosophers feel and see nothing. They are living in their homespun cocoon of familiar questions and topics and are happy when they have one of their papers published in a professional journal with a minute and diminishing readership.

This has not always been so. Both the “analytic” and the so-called “Continental” tradition in philosophy – the two movements that are still the main sources of our current philosophizing – had once a vitality and importance that is now sadly lacking. They related directly to the most pressing issues of their time: the crisis of mathematics and natural science that began in the late nineteenth century, the shaking up of our traditional conceptions of consciousness and the mind due to  psychology and linguistics, the cultural, moral, and political upheavals of the twentieth century. I often think that there was once a heroic age in analytic philosophy in which Frege, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and others in their company systematically changed the contours of the subject. Similarly, we can make out a heroic period in the broadly differentiated field of Continental philosophy. From Nietzsche, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Sartre and Foucault (and again others in their company) these thinkers grappled with the most difficult issues of their time.

We may be too much in awe of this singularly creative moment in philosophy that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and lasted till the last quarter of the twentieth. But we are already half a century beyond that point and our reality is no longer the same. We are undergoing a revolution in all dimensions of our existence and we need a revolution in our thinking, too.

This is a good and a bad moment for philosophy. Good, because it gives room for adventurous spirits. Bad, because such spirits may not turn up and the subject may dwindle into scholastic irrelevance. Not all the great philosophers of the past have been academic teachers. It is always possible that the most productive philosophical thinking will once again take place outside the academy.

There is, surely, something presumptuous in trying to tell others how they should conduct themselves philosophically. It is also useless. If we want philosophy to take a different course, we have to take it ourselves and, perhaps, others will do the same. The best I can do is to say in a few words, how I myself mean to proceed at this point.

  1. Say “No” to the formalism that holds our thinking in such a straightjacket. We need to overcome our preoccupation with the Kantian conception of philosophy as a “purely conceptual” inquiry. This must be our objective, in particular, in ethics and politics – a move away from abstract normative theorizing into a diagnostic form of ethical and political thinking.  Even logic and mathematics may be thought of in concretely natural terms as a human and historical practice. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics can provide us with clues. Why should we think that a late eighteenth century thinker can be our major philosophical guide in the twenty-first century?
  2. Practice a determined realism – by which I don’t mean an attachment to metaphysical realism but keeping a philosophical eye on the actual, concrete, historical facts. That kind of realism will also be aware of the limits of our understanding of our reality- particularly when it comes to history, society, and politics. Think of varieties of localized skepticism as realistic options.
  3. Develop a philosophy of technology. It is technology that is changing our world. We need to think about the technical instruments but also of the techniques of their use. We need to look also at the social and political effects of technological change. We need to study how technology affects and changes the distribution of power, its dispersion and concentration. We need to have an eye on the destructive potential and side-effects of technological development both in the natural and the cultural domain.
  4. Make politics your first philosophy. We must conceive political philosophy as a comprehensive inquiry into human existence and look at all aspects of philosophy in a political manner. But this requires a broad conception of politics, one that treats politics and ethics as distinct but connected strata.