Olm the Water King
across the universe
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2014
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Take a Wittgenstein class: He explains the problems of translating language, computer science, and artificial intelligence.
The Limits of Language
Wittgenstein explains why we always misunderstand one another on the Internet.
By David Auerbach
The best class I took in college was on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Until that point, I had avoided philosophy of language as simply being too esoteric and hermetic to be of use. David Pears, a prodigious yet modest and approachable figure visiting from Oxford, changed my mind. In large part because of Pears’ instruction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy has been directly relevant to my thinking about computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. When other scholars were thinking that language and thought could be reduced to a universal, logical language, Wittgenstein turned the matter to practical questions and raised incredibly inconvenient questions that gained traction in artificial intelligence in the 1970s, 40 years after he was working on them.
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