To be precise, I accepted the probability of the application doing better than I would have in that situation proposed by you. It was not my point.

You seem uninterested in my questions regarding our responsibility for how these results are used.

I've been asking it questions about Wittgenstein's Tractatus and it does well. — Sam26

That is a highly contested realm of interpretation. It sounds like you have found expressions you endorse. Since you are available for challenge for what you endorse, whatever element you wish to advance will be what you advance. That is different from noting the success rate of a Bar Exam.

Unless, of course, you are the last resort for understanding Wittgenstein.

Not an area of my expertise. I should have kept it to the limits of general comparison and left it at that.

There, again, you have been given an array of choices of some of what can be given to you as array of choices.

Can we pluck Plato's discussion of truth out of his work and set it down next to the other salt-shakers?
Is Nietzsche concerned with "truth" as the best option out of other possibilities as offered?

The selection offered narrows the conversation to where nothing can come up from behind as an unexamined condition of the choices.

I'll bet it would do better than you in a university setting. — Sam26

That certainly must be the case in survey courses. Not so much when called upon to directly engage with works and discussion of them with others.

I don't consider it authoritative. I view it as a summarizing algorithm to produce Cliff notes.

I don't want it to do a better job of grouping ideas so as to find the most general point of view. I question the value of the most general point of view. It leads towards distinctions without a difference.

My problem with those answers is that it treats all of those categories as accepted individual domains when so much of philosophy involves disputing the conditions of equivalence implied in such a list.

However, the more serious press noted the disaster of Horse Face’s testimony yesterday. — NOS4A2

A nice counterpoint of reasoned argument combined with personal denigration. The apprentice learns from the master.

Witt is thinking, I believe, of the realist/idealist/, empiricist/rationalist debate. — 013zen

He denigrates that distinction in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Investigations. It is one of the persisting themes preserved from the early works and carried on into the later ones.

I agree with your view. I had a more scholarly beginning, but my actual work life has benefited from spending that time learning how to learn.

That influence also helped me be a better teacher on the job. My problems with particular practices are very similar to other people's problems. That helps counter the natural tendency to be an asshole.

That question takes different shapes.

In the realm of strictly psychological models, theories of development range from the Vygotsky approach, where those elements are never completely separated, and the black hole of Lacan, where they never actually meet.

The question of where philosophy ends and psychology begins is either germane or not. It is not clear how the disagreements in that conversation relate to the disagreements amongst the self-identified psychologists. Nonetheless, it would be a stupid world if these endeavors did not touch upon the same reality.

I know, I am not much help, so far.

I understand Le Rochefoucauld to be saying that a narrative and a motive for acting for oneself is shaped by education. So, there is a "paying of dues" associated with both environments. And that sense of expenditure does play a part in self-image as well as defending one's place in the world.

What Le Rochefoucauld is also pointing out is that we love that element in ourselves.

I think the expectations within a family play a big role in how education is experienced as the training outside of that realm. Having to give an adequate account of yourself is important, both when you can and cannot. For some, it is a complete revolt from family where that account begins. My coming of age was more fortunate.

I became attracted to the idea of the liberal arts as a way to become more capable for my own purposes. The study involved finding out the idea was entangled with so many other people and their purposes.

But I also had an education quite separate from the practices of scholarship when I learned a number of the building trades. My schooling was some preparation for that, but it would have all died out if it was not part of the actual learning while working. This process did involve learning some skills in a formal way but they, too, were part of a continued practice over many decades.

Those different origins in my learning have many differences but the critical element of agency is central to both. As Kierkegaard said, freedom is the ability to do something.

Another intersection of the different processes relates to Le Rochefoucauld saying: "Education is a second self-love."

The welding together of pleasure and pain etches a deep mark into the wax in both cases.

I agree that the 'machine learning' is not impressive as a tool of new interpretation and discovery. It always has the tone of a college paper cribbed from reading Cliff notes. It is a sophisticated version of "I know you are but what am I?

Understood.
I am interested in your actual response.

Who are these people who want me to think this way?

Or is your comment a rhetorical device?

Some of the actual scholars of the texts do promote such views. Others do not. A concerted engagement with the texts is needed if one is to decide for oneself.

Thank goodness. Do you think the emerging romantics who want to go back to the Greeks count as philosophy or is this just a romantic nostalgia project? — Tom Storm

I was not aware of such a movement. Does that category include those who have read a lot of Greek texts?

Asking for a friend.

including yourself? Just curious.

Saying "possibly" adds a wrinkle to simply noting one is at a loss of words. Can one observe a limit only when considering how to supersede it?

If I can share a "subjective truth", what makes that possible? Where should one look for that possibility?
Does not the question ask for a world where the investigation will take place? Have you not invoked that world by asking the question?

Pray tell, what is your opinion on the state of global education. For me, the critical thinker is resilient to rhetoric and propaganda, the fact learner is however....not. — Benj96

It does happen that way. But it also happens in the opposite direction.

The power of universal literacy and an informed consensus is the engine of democratic life. What people do with their education, however, is widely various. The academy has given birth to the normative as well as the revolutionary. Those who learned through applied skills can be as closed minded or open minded as those from other backgrounds. The Liberal Arts happen where they are alive and kicking.

You have the attention span of your hero.

Do you always deflect from challenges by not answering questions?

I disguise it by bringing the topic up?

How does that observation relate to the money behind Trump?

A consistent feature of your program is that the clear connection between the very wealthy and the "effete political class" never appears in your analysis. Private interests can and do direct public affairs. The shock you delight in the discomfiture Trump elicits has nothing to do with why he is an asset for certain interests.

Wittgenstein does not say that the picture that presents the facts is something in the mind. — Fooloso4

I would go further and say that Wittgenstein is opposed to the framework of things in themselves versus things for us.

Kant's depiction of intuitions, as the portal of experiencing what exists, can be imagined as a condition of the person. In the Tractatus, the vivacity of perception is expressed as an observation that does not require that set of assumptions:

3.1. In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses. — ibid.

That suggests you agree with Russell in a way that I do not. Russell says:
— Paine

I apologize, I must have been unclear in my writing. I was trying to say that, from Russell's perspective, such seems to be the case. I do not agree with Russell on this point. — 013zen

When you said:

Witt does seem to disregard his own statements, and say quite a bit about what shouldn't be said...but, that's because this isn't the agenda of the work, despite discussing many relevant positivist ideas, and problems. — 013zen

Do you agree with Bertie that Witt disregarded his own statements?

For my part, I disagree with a particular observation made by Russell:

That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, he contends, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure. — ibid. emphasis mine

Russell is reading an isomorphic mirroring where Wittgenstein is not. The problem is not with correspondence between separated items but the nature of representation. Before propositions are discussed in Tractatus, depictions are observed from different points of view.

One feature of the following statements is that they condition each other as well as build to a larger argument.

2.151. What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way.

2.141. A picture is a fact.

2.151. Pictorial form is the possibility that things are related to one another in the same way as the elements of the picture.

2.1511. That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right out to it.

2.172. A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it. — ibid.

The mutual conditioning here is important because taking "a picture is a fact" out of context would seem to collapse the difference between the depiction and what is depicted. But the limit to depicting a "pictorial form" restores the distance from "reality." The act of making pictures is one of the events that happen. The problem is that we lack the vantage point to make a picture of making a picture using that process. The statement is not reversible, allowing one to say: "a fact is a picture." Saying that would void the quality of "reaching out" to what it is not. Observations like these are explicit claims by Wittgenstein of "expressiveness" and not a resort to mysticism as Russell describes.

Stating what cannot be represented qualifies all the assertions about what can be. Talking about "possibility" keeps returning to the limits of what the argument can uncover. The following are examples of this boundary:

4.0312. The possibility of propositions is based on the principle that objects have signs as their representatives.
My fundamental idea is that the ‘logical constants’ are not representatives; that there can be no representatives of the logic of facts. — ibid.

4.12. Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it—logical form.
In order to be able to represent logical form, we should have to be able to station ourselves with propositions somewhere outside logic, that is to say outside the world. — ibid.

4.121. Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.
What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.
Propositions show the logical form of reality.
They display it. — ibid.

It can be (and has been) argued that articulating the boundary in this way is a paradoxical attempt to stand both "inside" and "outside" the world despite arguing it cannot be done. But that aspect is quite different from Russell's suggestion that ideas banned from entering through the front door are sneaking in through the back.

Witt does seem to disregard his own statements, and say quite a bit about what shouldn't be said...but, that's because this isn't the agenda of the work, despite discussing many relevant positivist ideas, and problems. — 013zen

That suggests you agree with Russell in a way that I do not. Russell says:

The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of language, the meaning of a sentence is determined as soon as the meaning of the component words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must, however the language may be constructed, be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr. Wittgenstein’s theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, he contends, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure. — ibid.

The text does not support this addition to the thesis. The portion I quoted brings the "same structure" idea into question.

PI is, I personally think, an attempt to say something similar but, in his own style, so to speak. While structurally, the works are very similiar, the manner in which the ideas are presented is clearly not only written for people like Russell and Frege. — 013zen

On this point, it is worth mentioning that Russell was not a supporter of the thesis of Tractatus but hoping it was not true. From Russell's introduction:

"What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the skeptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages, or by some other exit. The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr. Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region. Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions. His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said. It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort."

I don't think Russell understands what is being attempted. The scope of the work is mischaracterized when he says:

"Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language, and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense."

The relationship between a means of expression and what is shown by it is what is being discussed. Russell treats it like an inventory being smuggled in through a sleight of hand. Wittgenstein speaks of language in the context of it doing something. The propositions within 3.4 and 4.0 do not reflect Russell's description. 4.002 has this:

Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced.

Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.
It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is.

Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes. — ibid

Since you take an approach where philosophical positions can be precisely located in an encyclopedic fashion, consider this entry from an encyclopedia:

Logical empiricism is a philosophic movement rather than a set of doctrines, and it flourished in the 1920s and 30s in several centers in Europe and in the 40s and 50s in the United States. It had several different leaders whose views changed considerably over time. Moreover, these thinkers differed from one another, often sharply. Because logical empiricism is here construed as a movement rather than as doctrine, there is probably no important position that all logical empiricists shared—including, surprisingly enough, empiricism. And while most participants in the movement were empiricists of one form or another, they disagreed on what the best form of empiricism was and on the cognitive status of empiricism. What held the group together was a common concern for scientific methodology and the important role that science could play in reshaping society. Within that scientific methodology the logical empiricists wanted to find a natural and important role for logic and mathematics and to find an understanding of philosophy according to which it was part of the scientific enterprise. — SEP, Logical Empiricism

Regarding the last sentence, the Tractatus argues for a cesura between strictly scientific matters and the problems of philosophy where thinkers like Whitehead and Russell do not.

Yes. Arguably, that was Plato's big mistake. The relationship between part and whole is quite different in the two cases. He assumed it was the same. — Ludwig V

There are problems with making the argument that justice is the same in the individual and the city. My point is that the individual is seen as being made up of components that have different means and ends. A consistent theme throughout the Dialogues is that the best relationship amongst these parts is the source of virtue and true happiness. The pursuit of that relationship is deemed more worthy than the expression of traditional norms.

And so we have Socrates goading Antyus:

Soc: Isn’t it obvious that, if excellence can be taught, this man would never have had his own children taught these subjects whose instruction costs money, 94D and not have had them taught the very subjects that produce good men, when that instruction costs nothing? Or was Thucydides perhaps a mediocre fellow after all, who did not have so many friends among the Athenians and her allies? He also belonged to an important family, and he had great influence in the city and throughout the rest of the Greek world. So, if excellence were indeed teachable, he would have found someone to make good men of his own sons, some fellow-citizen or some stranger, 94E if he did not have time to do it himself because of his civic concerns. In any case, friend Anytus, it seems that excellence is not teachable.

Any: Socrates, you seem all too ready to speak ill of people, so I would like to give you some advice, if you are prepared to heed me. Be careful, because in any city it is probably easier to do a person harm rather than do them good, but this is especially 95A so in this city. But I think you know this yourself. — Meno, 94C

Again, I am just looking for a specific country that is a good example of his theory. — Fermin

I am not familiar with the text of this summary you refer to but Hobbes lived through the English Civil War and justified the monarchy on the basis of that experience. It was not a thought experiment for him.

Neither does the Republic. I have a feeling that he didn't recognize that society is for the benefit of the individuals comprising it, not the other way about and I mind a great deal about that. — Ludwig V

The dialogues are a far cry from stating "All men are created equal." There are many contested "histories" looking into how that talk came about. The dialectic did not start there.

But I disagree with saying that the benefits of individuals were not of paramount concern.

The opening dispute in the Republic is over whether the administration of justice is an arbitrary rule disguised as a universal truth. The model of the good city is built from the analogy of a person living the best possible life, not the other way around.

The limits to our knowledge of the Good expressed in the Republic are echoed in the Laws.

The discussion of pleasure in the Philebus is centered on the intersection of universal conditions and the experience of an individual human being.

The resistance to the philosophers as an assault upon traditional values was expressed in many different ways by different authors at the time. Talk about educating children was itself found to be offensive. The Meno gives a taste of that.

My two drachmas. Er, four, to be exact.

It does indeed point to the threshold between public and private aspects, or at least between what should be prescribed and what left up to the parties. (I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the reference to the OP.) — Ludwig V

It seems to me that the acknowledgement of not being able to explain the peculiar alchemy that brings a benefit (both publicly and privately) to children speaks to an awareness counted by Midgley to be a terra incognita for bachelors like Plato.

It's one thing to recommend marrying prudently or at least taking prudence into account. But it's quite another to prioritize the "city" in making the decision. — Ludwig V

The City has the prerogative to expect that from citizens. There is a tension in Plato about how love and friendship occur within this prerogative. The personal dynamic seen in Phaedrus and Symposium is absent in Laws except as horizons.

Observing this tension caused me to recommend The Care of the Self to the discussion. As a "history of philosophy", Foucault directly addresses how ideas about marriage changes through different articulations. It is a condition with a history and future challenges.

He did, however, on Plato's telling have some concern for the welfare of his children. I don't know if there is a correlation with his teachings, but it does seem that he preferred to hang out in the marketplace rather than at home with her. — Fooloso4

There is a correlation in Laws, where the qualifications for a suitable bride is discussed:

So when any man, having turned twenty-five years of age, upon due consideration by himself and by others, believes 772E he has found a bride that suits him personally, and is also suitable for companionship and for begetting children, he should marry, indeed everyone should do so before they turn thirty-five. But first he should be told how to find a suitable and fitting bride, for as Cleinias says, every law should be preceded by an introductory preamble of its own. — Plato, Laws, Bk 6, 772D

The matter of a union beneficial to the City is discussed as a balance of dispositions of the couple as well as the development of the children:

Ath: It’s nice of you to say so. Now, to a young man, from 773A a good family we should say the following: you should enter into the sort of marriage that meets the approval of sensible folk. These people would advise you neither to shun marriage to a poor family, nor chase eagerly after wealthy connections and, all other considerations being equal, always prefer to enter a union with someone who has less resources. For this approach would be beneficial both to the city itself, and to the families involved, since balance and proportion are much more conducive to excellence than unbridled excess. And someone who realises that he himself is too impulsive and hasty in all his actions should look for 773B connections to a well behaved family, whereas someone with the opposite natural tendencies should pursue connections of the opposite sort. And there should be one rule for all marriages: each person is to seek a marriage that is beneficial to the city, not the one that pleases himself. Everyone is always drawn somehow, by nature, to a person who is most like himself, and so the city 773C as a whole develops an imbalance of wealth and character traits. That’s how the consequences we wish to avoid in our own city, certainly befall most other cities. Now to prescribe explicitly, by law, that the wealthy are not to marry the wealthy, the powerful are not to marry the powerful, that the slower characters have to look for marital unions with the quick witted, and the quicker with the slower, would not alone be ridiculous but would anger a lot of people. For it is not easy to appreciate that a city should be 773D blended after the manner of a wine bowl, in which the wine, when first poured, seethes madly, but when it is restrained by the good company of another, more sober god, it forms a good, duly measured drink. Now it is virtually impossible for anyone to discern that this is happening in the case of the blending of children, and that’s why we should omit such matters from our laws. We should try instead to charm each person into placing more value upon the equipoise of their own children, than the marital property equality which is insatiable, using words of reproach to deter anyone who is intent upon marrying for money, rather than forcing them via a written law. — ibid. 772E

The limits of legislation noted here is quite different from the language of the Republic. It does echo the concern for the children's well-being in Phaedo. It also points to the threshold separating the public and private aspects of marriage addressed by the OP.

One element to note is that the phrase "social contract" was coined by Rousseau. Applying that idea to what Hobbes was saying overlooks the "I won't kill you if you don't kill me" deal Hobbes was talking about.

Please link to the collection.

What do you think about it?
Are you reading the Leviathan or something else?