unforum

[tanner]

hmmmm -- i still see it as (q and not p)

oh well

and i know what a proposition is --- im just trying to find a word to enter as a solution
got to be more to it that just the notation
but maybe not

[Leeravitz]

Hmmm. The more I look at it, the more the thing does fit the 'Law of Contradictions'. If you actually read Section 6 of the Tractatus, isn't the visual diagram an analogue of what Wittgenstein is getting at about the actual processes of how the human brain understands mathematics, and why logic never proves anything except what it set out to prove, and so cannot, rationally, hope to reproduce schematically the nature of experience and existence?

When you put it like that, it all sounds a bit more dramatic than a simple proposition in notation, which I guess was how Wittgenstein intended it. But I agree: as a silver, this answer seems far too obvious. Maybe, yes, it might have made a valid purple card or the like - a fairly tough one higher up the scale. But this does seem rather too pat a solution, even if it does link to a suitably high - level of abstraction in a way that, say, knowing the names of popular bands doesn't.

Could it be that the graphic is meant to represent in Wittgenstein's notation some other significant proposition in mathematical logic? I'm still wondering if it's meant to be a play on Godel, or Carnap, or someone like that?

[tanner]

[sixsidedsquare]

With all this confusion flying around I decided to find someone who knows the subject a bit better, so I tracked down Jonathan Laventhol (the guy who made that page Tomby linked to). Seems like it turns out that the third post in this thread is right with ~(p . ~q)

Anyway, BIG thanks to Jonathan for this (his anotated diagram is below):

[tanner]

ok -- thats sorted then -- thanks -- was that ~(P v ~Q) and not as the 3rd post said ~(P . ~Q). i nearly understood what i was doing but is there something more to this than just the notation?

mind you its still (q and not p) so i was right (his table and mine are the same)

~(P v ~Q) <==> (Q . ~P)
the only true result comes when p is false and q is true

its not the solve yet but if his table and mine are right then i claim some credit so far -- hahahaha

[Leeravitz]

Yeah, that looks like it makes basic sense to me, as well. I agree with Tanner, though - other than establishing what the workable notation derived from the diagram is, I'm not sure we have an actual name we can put to it. It seems from Jonathan's annotations that there's nothing especially anomalous about the diagram in Wittgensteinian terms - it's more or less how you would establish the validities of propositions utilising his (admittedly complex) visual representations. You know, maybe the MC thinking was, indeed, if it was enough to flummox Bertrand Russell, then it's enough to flummox us...

So, maybe working out the basic proposition *is* good enough. Still and all, it looks like most of the silvers work at more than one level. It's not obvious where all this is leading...

[sixsidedsquare]

Oops, yeah, sorry.

~(p . ~q) isn't ~(P v ~Q) at all

oh well, it looks like everyone else understands much better than me

[BrianEnigma]

Do we have a scan of the map on the card's reverse yet? It does not seem to be in the map piece thread.

[Brevity]

I'm still working on getting access to a scanner with which I can take a 60dpi color scan of the front and back of the card. The digital camera pictures are pretty crappy and I didn't think it was worth uploading the pic of the card back in that form.

[Marrec]

I can't believe I didn't look at this card before. I've been studying Wittgenstein without much success in understanding for two years now and a card with roots in the Tractatus would have made my day... Hmph. Yeh, I don't think ~(P v ~Q) is the full solve. The card asks for the proposition... so perhaps the solve would be 6.120 (That being the proposition in which the diagram appears in the Tractatus), but that seems even simpler. I think there is some kind of inside joke going on here, a tautology in the laguage of the question on the card maybe, though I can't find it. I never liked the Wittgenstein who wrote the Tractatus, he was much easier to understand, though more pig-headed, later in his career.

I'm not ashamed to say I don't understand Wittgenstein or the some of the TLP, but the question has been asked, and as Wittgenstein wrote at the end of his sixth proposition, if a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered... burn me if I know the answer though.

[SteveC]

Regards tanner or the prof's basic bit of logic being the final solution or not, lets not forget, they may have considered it unlikely that we'd easily recognise the notation from a single published use of a since unused form of notation.

That would be a difficult stage #1, then stage #2 would be trying to understand exactly what the result of it was.

If we could recognise elucidate I suspect it would fall as quickly..?

Oh, and BTW, this is NOT the diagram from 6.1.whatever of the tracatus. It's simply a diagram using the same notation (and forming pretty much the same level of complexity)

[Marrec]

[Sasuntsi Davit]

I don't know if the this is right, but the preposition might be one of DeMorgan's Laws...

eg.

"¬(A + B) = ¬A . ¬B"

in our case we have:
¬(P + ¬Q) = ¬(A + B) when A = P and B = ¬Q
then:
¬(A + B) = ¬A . ¬B = ¬P . Q

[tanner]

[Seej]