Words matter. They are the vehicles of thinking

From "Land-based spells brings crisis" by Reuven Brenner in Asia Times Online.

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Note: The article explores the current economic instability. In doing so, it highlight how our description can have a funny way of confusion the facts. In other words, we can convince ourselves (though our language) that a unstable economic idea can and will work, even though experience and the facts would prove otherwise.

"Words matter. They are the vehicles of thinking: while they can shape accurate perceptions, they can shape misperceptions too. As it turns out, and not for the first time in history, there is not much "real" about this asset class. The question is, what do you do with it?

"John Law and followers, who come up with theories based on 'real' estate', or 'real' bills' doctrines (unconstrained by having a "unit of account" too), make implicit assumptions that they know what is 'real'. But as one can readily see, many things perceived "real" can melt into thin air in a flash. Perhaps we would be far better from now on using the French word for 'real estate' - 'immobilier'. 

"... Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, was right when he stated that: 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.' Indeed, 'real estate' 'QE,' 'bubbles' ( attributed to random variations in people's mood rather than any concrete laws and regulations), erecting statues to heroes of subsidized 'immobility' (unread, unwatched, not listened to statistical 'cultures' being a good example) have all 'bewitched' many for centuries, though 'bothered and bewildered' a few." 

“We can also imagine a case where someone goes through a list of propositions and as he does so keeps asking “Do I know that or do I only believe it?” He wants to check the certainty of each individual proposition. It might be a question of making a statement as a witness before a court.”

— Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 486

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent

From "Is silence golden?" By Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini in the Financial Times Magazine (18 Jan 2013)

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"Is Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism, 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' a profound truth? Or is it a banal truism, along the lines of 'That which you cannot move, you must leave where it is'? It may sound platitudinous, but if you think about what exactly lies beyond the limits of language, matters soon become much more opaque.

"Consider all those occasions when words are simply not enough, such as when we try to express some of our deepest emotions. Phrases such as “I’m sorry for your loss”, “I love you” and “that’s awful” can all be true yet sound pathetically inadequate compared to the intensity of our feelings or the enormity of what has happened. Perhaps that is why the tradition of a minute’s silence for the dead is so powerful: it is not so much a mark of respect as an acknowledgment that nothing we can say or do is up to the task of capturing what has been lost."

Google is always influencd by context

From "Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph" in The Guardian (19 Jan 2013)

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"We may think we are learning all the time from Google, but by virtue of this ongoing trillion-click analysis, it is learning far more from us.

"In this way, as far back as 2002, Singhal introduced a refinement based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on how the meaning of words is always influenced by context. Searches for ambiguous terms began to look beyond the search terms for other related words. So a phrase such as 'hot dog' would be understood in relation to mustard and baseball games, not overheated canines. 'Nuance,' he says now, 'is what makes us human.'"

Is the world really the case?

From "What do Lindsay Lohan and Wittgenstein have in common?" by Sarah Nardi

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"And that, patient reader, brings us to Wittgenstein, who began the Tractatus with the proposition "The world is everything that is the case." It sounds simple enough on its face but think about it long enough and it's a devastating mindfuck. How can we ever know with certainty what is or is not the case? Language? Language is a social construct. If you and I agree that the sky is blue, is it necessarily the case that the sky is blue? What is blue, really? It's a sound we've all agreed to make in reference to a visual phenomenon. But because what we've all agreed to call blue can only be perceived on an individual sensory level, how can we know with certainty that we're all perceiving the same thing in the same way? Follow this thinking long enough and you may end up where Wittgenstein once did, believing that we can never know with certainty anything beyond ourselves. We can't know anything of the external world because we can't confirm anything as objectively being the case.

I often think of Wittgenstein when considering photography because much in the way we assume words correspond to reality, we think of photographs as representations of objective truth. Photography is the medium of documentary, after all. And though we all know it can be staged and manipulated according to the photographer's point of view, we assume that photography, to a significant degree, captures elements of reality as they objectively exist. But does it? Is there any such thing as an objective reality or does everything in our world rely on the context that we ourselves create?"