This was translated and reworked into a sort of semi-fictive narrative two years ago. The original essay was written in Malay 3 years ago and published at jalantelawi.com early last year. I think I still have a lot to work on but these are just some ideas I was/am contemplating.
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While eating al-fresco in sunny Kuala Lumpur, some friends of mine got into a philosophical discussion that culminated into a hot debate. Yoga, a newly minted philosophy graduate from a university up north in Malaysia, as well as a fan of the logical-positivist tradition of A.J. Ayers and his group, got into a disagreement with Yu-Min, a graduate student in mathematics, who argued that Wittgenstein was contemptuous of the so-called Vienna Circle and found them irrelevant. Neither could they agree on how Wittgenstein and Popper would have responded to the statement:
The hen is crossing the road.
In order to stop their escalating quarrel (both had at least downed 2 bottles of whiskey between them), I decided to invite them to my home to test out a new software programme that my boyfriend, Juan, had been working on recently as part of his graduate school project in MIT. He had put it on his FTP site and I had downloaded it so that I could mess about with it. This programme is basically an AI simulator, part of a bigger project; where personalities, works, and the thoughts of knowledge builders and creators of the past are basically keyed into the system and simulated through three dimensional mapping of information networks. It is actually a very exciting project, built for educational purposes. If you remember watching a Star-trek episode with the characters reliving their fantasies in the Holodeck, this programme is based on the same concept, except that instead of getting holographic projections, the simulator projects the known characterisation of a particular philosopher, scientist or musician onto the textual screen, and you can post questions to them. It is a more intuitive and technologically sophisticated version of Ask Jeeves and Google, but less advance than the Holodeck. Since this particular part of the software I had downloaded happened to have programme libraries of the famous philosophers of the Western world, I decided to run it pass Yoga and Yu-Min. They were of course sceptical, though Yu-Min, a programming geek, is more receptive.
“I don’t believe that an inflexible man-made programme can actually channel the thoughts of any living (or dead) person,” said Yoga scornfully.
“Well, you don’t have to believe. Just see how it works. It does not try to simulate every quirk in a person, but it isn’t hard to simulate the essence of one’s philosophy. Also, Juan mentioned that this project involves many linguists, so they have helped to ensure that the language is stylistically as close as possible to the written language of these people,” I explained.
Having powered up the programme, I went to the menu to see whether Wittgenstein and Popper were on the list. I saw Popper’s name and clicked on it. As a text-box popped up, I typed in the statement
The hen is crossing the road.
In a few seconds, out popped Popper’s answer across the monitor screen. It comes with audio as well, so we can hear the ‘voice’ of Popper speaking
Popper: The hen crosses the road. I have no qualms or objection to the above statement as long as it has verisimilitude. The truth of the statement is unchallenged as long as no dissenting witness comes along to say that the hen did not cross the road, hence proving the falsity of the above statement. Or he might state that the hen is not really a hen, ergo an under-developed rooster. Once we could verify the abovementioned statement (though it is not universally or absolutely verified), we can proceed to observe if the hen faces a problem while crossing the road, enumerate possible solutions, elimination of improbable solutions and then to finally re-think the problem in light of possible new solutions. But, as aforementioned, there is no one absolute criteria to determine the truth-value of the above statement. It depends on the truth-content. Hence the statement could not be absolutely ascertained. There might be other eye-witnesses who say that the hen is not really crossing the road, but looks like she is doing it. Yet, the empirical values obtained from the observations of these witnesses will not totally verify the truth-value of the above statement since prejudices exist.
As Yoga and Yu-Min starred dumbfounded at the screen, I quickly searched for Wittgenstein and typed in my query. This was what came out, together with the audio.
Wittgenstein: How do we know that it is a hen? Could it be a rooster in disguise? Maybe we consider it a hen since it fits our perception and taxonomic classification of a hen, that it has no comb and wattle. But would such categorisation verify the above statement absolutely? Or could the hen be just a sign without a signifier or meaningful application? Could we show that the hen is related to the object crossing the road? Let’s say that we could verify that the hen is really crossing the road, is the hen conscious that she is crossing the road? Is she conscious of the fact that she has no language to describe her consciousness? As a human who realises that there is a hen doing a form of work, we can explain our observation with the idea that “the hen is moving in a direction perpendicular to traffic-flow.” How does this statement differs from the statement “The hen is crossing the road”? Maybe the hen is not crossing the road, but is a mere illusion in the mind of the observer.
“Wow!” exclaimed Yu-Min and Yoga simultaneously.
“How can I get a copy of this programme?” asked Yoga.
“You can copy this onto your drive or CDs, though you might need to zip it up. It is has a few separate files that you need to compile and run. The instructions are here with the files,” I replied.
As it was late into the night, Yoga and Yu-Min went home. Before leaving, Yoga mentioned that he would drop by tomorrow afternoon with some blank CDs to copy the programme.
Before going to bed, I composed an e-mail to Juan, telling him about having tested his ‘progeny’ on some friends and the date of my flight back to Massachusetts.
*Epilogue
The two possible answers above have been derived from a study of Popper’s Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach and Wittgenstein’s compilation of philosophical ideas, Philosophical Investigations. We could surmise that their perspective and priorities differ. However, the two answers given could be considered logical and probable, viewed through different ends of a tunnel. Enthusiasts and philosophers who work from the approach of logical positivism (which was quite popular until the 1960s) promoted Wittgenstein’s philosophy as an important work in logical positivism. Yet, I would detract from such view because logical positivism views that truth could be arrived at via induction and logical analysis. From what I gathered, Wittgenstein has never explicitly stated such ideas, nor has he subtly argued so. He has moved away from his original ideas found in the Tractatus logico-philosophicus by the time he wrote his Philosophical Investigations. His position in philosophy is at best, ambivalent, and deeply misunderstood by many philosophers. According to him, no real action could be determined by rules, each action could be adjusted to the rules. An example that he had given are two men from a tribe playing chess, and that they go through the whole motion of playing chess. If we were to observe them at it, we will unanimously agree that they are playing chess. But what if they decide to shout, scream and stamp, and the behaviour could be translated to the movement of the chess pieces? Would they still be really playing chess or even a game? Wittgenstein did not provide a solution on logical analysis, because what is deemed logical to one person might not always be logical to the next. Yet, he supports the inductive theory when he said that “games” could be determined by their “family traits”. In such a manner, he had given a definition to “games” by correlating their known features. Hence, a game becomes the cause as identified from the effect.
Popper also argues against the idea of logical positivism which he claims is centred around the verification principle, stated as:
A statement is only meaningful if it is formal (with an abstract determination regarding quantities or numbers”, a module of modern mathematics and logic), or through an empirical verification (with experimental determination of facts and essentialism), which are a priori analytic and a posteriori synthetic. A priori synthetic is said not to exist.
According to Popper, Hume is the source of inductive problems, by giving contradictory answers when trying to solve logical and psychological problems. In a logical problem, Hume has stated that we should not conclude based on repeated experiences when explaining a situation which we have never experienced. However, in Hume’s psychological problem, he stated that we have been conditioned to think that a situation which we have not experienced will obey the conditions of situations which we have experienced. Popper thus restated Hume’s logical problem as
Could the assumption that a universally applicable theory is true be verified empirically; that is by assuming the truth-value of some of the test-statements or observable statements (which are said to be derivable from experience)?
Thus Popper, by restating Hume’s problems, provides a less contradictory version to Hume’s earlier statement: that an experiment that is repeated could verify the universality of a theory. With the above statement, Popper has started a debate that would dismantle the logical analytical assumption that had been built by the positivists. Both Popper and Wittgenstein are alike in that they do not believe in determinism. The difference between them is how Wittgenstein holds on to the assumption that a philosophical question need not be meaningful and could exist as a philosophical puzzle whereas Popper is of the opinion that philosophical problems should simulate real-world problems. A characteristic of Wittgenstein Popper objects to is his subjectivism. For Popper, knowledge can only grow if we examine hard facts. While it could not be denied that Popper has much influence in the development of psychology and the sciences, Wittgenstein has contributed immensely to ways we view language, consciousness, ideas and mathematics, especially theoretical mathematics. Much of Wittgenstein’s ideas are still being hotly debated today. Perhaps writing vaguely but profoundly contributes to that. So, dear readers, you can decide whether the chicken did cross the road, or was knocked down while Popper and Wittgenstein were having their altercation.
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