Are LLMs proof of Wittgenstein's use theory of meaning?

In PI §43 Wittgenstein writes "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language”.

For me it seems the way LLMs are working (words -> tokens -> weights) is exactly what Wittgenstein is describing as "use / usage". LLMs are analysing the usage of words and are creating statistical weights to "replicate" the usage.

Another way of putting it: LLMs can speak (use language) but can not think.
Thinking is similar to speaking (using language) but its not the same.

What do you think?

In the past, I've read some descartes, hume, russell, spinoza, kant, collingwood etc. for school, and have some knowledge in formal logic. I've read the blue book portion of the blue and the brown book, and I absolutely have no idea how to interpret what he is trying to say. It seemed to me that he has a very specific way of vocabulary usage that I didn't understand. Is there such a thing as 'intro to wittgenstein', or like a guide of how to understand Wittgenstein? If so, what would you recommend?

edit: thank you for the comments! I did only mention that I had difficulties with his word usage but it is absolutely true that I also struggled with his style of writing etc.

More specifically: if concepts like mind, self, body, and consciousness derive their meaning from the language-games in which we use them, would changing those language-games actually transform how we conceptualize conscious existence—or would that simply create a new vocabulary for the same underlying phenomena?
How would Wittgenstein himself respond to such an extension?

Hi this might be repetitive but which works of his to start with as someone who has little to no idea of Wittgenstein.

Anything i should about him beforehand? Essential context and all?
Plus when did u first read him?

Just read some of “lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief” (some is enough— we know this by some people being nice etc !) I think he is right in quoting speech but not right in quoting people because a person might definitely say it, as the person speaking is also definitely saying those things, therefore, as a result there is no problem in him writing what they said— it is very convenient, it makes the only reasonable thing for him to do be what he wants to ask from them, at most, because it’s not the least thing to do whenever possible. So my problem would be that he wasn’t able to know what people say some of the time all of the time, since he knew how to use the speech that people use all of the time, he did use the speech people use fortunately— he had a point— but I don’t think he respected the speech people use, I think he saw it as useful information , now, this is in good regards to paperwork and documentation being another thing not a whole big thing— as in, he knew how to include communication, but that inclusion, was , I think, completely unavoidable as he completely understood what people said, this is harmful; it makes the fortunate-unfortunate dynamic look like everything at once. Wittgenstein was willing to communicate and the willingness wasn’t specifically fatal; it was able, but he didn’t exactly show compromise or compassion because there is a lot of comfort in knowing what people say all of the time— he was completely honest but he didn’t know how to behave—if knew what people say some of the all of the time it would show rather than what he did being a showcase.

The Tractatus seems to place strict limits on what can meaningfully be said about the subject, while the later Wittgenstein dissolves many philosophical problems by examining how psychological concepts function within language-games and forms of life. But does this therapeutic approach leave open a substantive ontology of consciousness, or does attempting to posit an irreducible “consciousness” already commit the philosophical mistake Wittgenstein wants us to overcome?
Put differently: if consciousness is not an object hidden behind behavior, but neither is it simply reducible to behavioral or linguistic criteria, what exactly is the grammatical status of claims about consciousness? Is there a coherent middle position between metaphysical mental substance and eliminative dissolution?

I want to wake up every day to the sight of Wittgenstein’s unfathomable gaze delving into the depths of my soul, to remind me that the philosophical problems that torment me do not really exist

Is logical syntax essential to the world? Or is it a derivative of logical form that becomes apparent when representing reality? Or is logical form a derivative of it?

Logical form is the combinatorial potential of objects so you could say that by mapping all internal relations you could obtain the entire logical syntax. Which would make logical syntax and logical form into an egg and chicken problem.

And is then the logic of depiction (method of representation) just a more or less imprecise game of capturing logical syntax?

Edit: small correction: in describing logical syntax as all the internal relations, it is more correct I think to say it is a sublimation of all types of relations. Not all instances of all those relations.

Hello,

My interest in philosophy has primarily been in ancient philosophy and continental philosophy, but I hope to soon explore Wittgenstein. I am wondering if someone could give me the scoop on what texts I should be aware of before jumping into his work and if there’s a text that you would recommend that provides necessary background before jumping into the Tractatus. I’m mainly interested in later Wittgenstein, but obviously to fully understand his later project I assume it is necessary to understand his earlier work.

It’s not the best recoding, but if you look closely, you’ll notice a slight smirk as he says this.

The six years was worth it. And that is an atomic fact.

I’m putting together a big personal project: printing and binding one huge 'master volume' of Wittgenstein’s main / most important / most interesting works. I’m doing it 2‑up on A4, double‑sided, booklet style, so it’ll end up being a brick. Before I commit, I want to hear what others think should go in.

Right now I’m planning to include the early stuff like the Notebooks 1914-1916 and Tractatus, and Philosophical Remarks, then the later works like the Blue + Brown Books, Philosophical Investigations, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, On Certainty.

If you’ve read him deeply or done any big binding projects, I’d love to know what you think is essential, what’s skippable, and whether this should stay one monster volume or be split into two. Keen to hear what people would include.

If I split it in two volumes, should I separate them by publication date, or should I have one volume that has his 'essential' works i.e. works such as Tractatus and PI and then the second volume containing his lesser known material?

Thanks

I’m curious why there seems to be more fictional accounts of Wittgenstein than most other philosophers? I agree of course that he’s a fascinating figure, but perhaps not so much more than Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant, and Camus to name just a few.

I ask this in part because I stumbled upon the novel The World as I Found it by Bruce Duffy the other day and bought it because of its fictionalized account of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and GE Moore. Has anyone read this and if so, what did you think?

I have both books. Which one first??

what do you guys think of ‘settle the name yourself’ from philosophical investigations as a sort of comeback/insult?

The remark about the lion has a strange afterlife in the LLM debate. People quote it and move on. The line is doing more work than that. If a lion could speak we could not understand him, not because of grammar or vocabulary, but because the lion is in a form of life that does not overlap ours, and linguistic meaning is grounded in the form of life shared between speakers. The remark sits near the close of Philosophical Investigations Part II like a warning about what language can and cannot carry across alien existences. The current AI moment looks like the case Wittgenstein was warning about, in a stronger form than he probably imagined.

I recently gave a talk at the 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Porto using the lion remark to motivate the critique of LLMs. You can watch it here.

The lion case is symmetrical to the LLM case but in the opposite direction. The lion has a form of life, just one we cannot enter; genuine understanding fails because we cannot share it. The LLM has no form of life at all, no embedded existence, no stakes in any world; there is no there there for the linguistic output to refer to. The output is statistically conditioned on a vast record of agents who were in forms of life, but the system itself is in none of them. Searle's Chinese room makes the same point through symbol manipulation. Bender's octopus thought experiment updates the case for statistical learning, where an octopus listening to two speakers eventually predicts what they will say without ever encountering the world the words point at. The three cases say the same thing in three registers: linguistic meaning is not in the words; it is in the form of life that uses them.

If this is the right reading, the question for the Wittgenstein literature is which post-Investigations debates (Cavell on acknowledgment, McDowell on second nature, Brandom on inferentialism, Diamond on the realistic spirit) have the resources to do the most precise critique of LLMs without collapsing into a generic anti-representationalism. Which of those traditions do you think has the strongest toolkit?

137 years and still as perplexing and flummoxing as ever.

Our lives wouldn't be the same without you  !!

I am deep diving in to Umaswati's Tattvartha Sutras, or in the English title That Which Is, and I was stricken with the impression that the short numbered statements in the Tractatus are similar in form and feel to the sutras. After some skimming the wikipedia I learned that all sutras tend to be in this form, with no particular sentence containing a whole truth, but with the collection of sutras more broadly gesturing towards some insight.

I have been quite captivated by the tenets of Jainism in particular, as one of the three core beliefs "anekāntavāda (non-absolutism or many-sided reality" is described as a very strong view on non-dogmatism. I am reading from a secular queer anarchist perspective, so I appreciate a religious text which implies "to hold these words as dogma/authority is to misunderstand them, and to misunderstand the human nature of your fellow person."

It reminds me of Wittgenstein's assertion that to seek meaning/sense in his words is to render them useless.

Can anyone offer some parallels, or further reading contrasting the mystical view of understanding our human peers in a way which transcends the mere language?

I should also add that I find Wittgenstein's philosophy to be among the only "person-first" philosophy I've read, taking a cue from the mental health field's "person first" or "client centered" care. While I haven't read the P.I. at this point, I appreciate it's attitude towards disillusionment from the bewitchment of language as the goal of philosophy, suggesting that "people already KNOW what they mean by their words, and philosophy should be a process of interview rather than collection of the 'correct knowledge' ".

Please let me know what yall think!

This is a potential counterargument (or more likely a misunderstanding of my reading) to Wittgenstein's definition of probability in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus at proposition 5.15

If Tr is the number of the truth-grounds of the proposition "r", Trs the number of those truth-grounds of the proposition "s" which are at the same time truth-grounds of "r", then we call the ratio Trs:Tr the measure of the probability which the proposition "r" gives to the proposition "s".

First potential problem:

Consider the sentences:
r: There is a sheep right there
s: There is grass nearby

r increases the probability of s, but they don't share any common truth grounds.

I suppose this is because it is not increasing the probability on formal, logical grounds.

Second potential problem:

Consider the sentences:
r: There is an animal right there, and it is a sheep
s: There is an animal right there, and it is a blue whale

These sentences have a common truth ground, namely: "There is an animal right there", but one doesn't increase the probability of the other?

I suppose this might be because this theory of probability only works for elementary propositions, but why would he not clarify that if that is the case?

Sorry for intrudeding but I figure this is the best subreddit to ask this question in so...

I'm doing an essay on April Greiman and I keep reading that she based the name off of one of her most famous works "Does it make sense" off a L.Wittgenstein quote where the answer is supposedly "If you give it a sense, it makes sense." The problem is I can't find the actual full quote or if it even it really exists, just other people paraphrasing it.

Does anyone here know which of his writings he says this in? Thanks

Hello all. I've recently finished up my second reading of the tractatus, and I've only found it more fascinating since my first go. I've been interested in the resolute reading of the tractatus, particularly after reading James Conant's "Elucidation and Nonsense" chapter from The New Wittgenstein.

For Conant, nonsense is particularly the lack of sense, and not a category of sorts. He also argues that the conceptions of nonsense according to the positivist (where nonsense is the misuse of logical syntax) and the ineffable (with "two types" of nonsense, mere nonsense and elucidatory nonsense) readings of Witt. are the same, as they still posit some "thing" being "outside of language" (either the category "nonsense" outside of language, or various "things" (ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, etc.)which are somehow unsayable). As far as I could decipher from Conant, he thought nonsense was the "product" of performing the Tractatus's method of clarification (the "only right way to do philosophy" for Witt.) on something that could not be given a determinate meaning.

Afterall, Wittgenstein explains in 5.473, in regard to the proposition "Socrates is Identical," that "the proposition is senseless because we have not made some arbitrary determination, not because the symbol is in itself unpermissible." The idea of nonsense as indeterminate meaning is quite illuminating, and I think it is in accord with 6.53, as nonsense is what we reach in attempting to dialectically clarify what is meant in any given metaphysical statement, for instance.

I'm curious to hear your takes are in regard to Conant's essay and "defining" nonsense.