Chains of Life: Turing, Lebensform, and the Emergence of Wittgenstein’s Later Style

Abstract

This essay accounts for the notion of Lebensform by assigning it a logical role in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Wittgenstein’s additions of the notion to his manuscripts of the PI occurred during the initial drafting of the book 1936-7, after he abandoned his effort to revise The Brown Book. It is argued that this constituted a substantive step forward in his attitude toward the notion of simplicity as it figures within the notion of logical analysis. Next, a reconstruction of his later remarks on Lebensformen is offered which factors in his reading of Alan Turing’s “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ (1936/7), as well as his discussions with Turing 1937-1939. An interpretation of the five occurrences of Lebensform in the PI is then given in terms of a logical “regression” to Lebensform as a fundamental notion. This regression characterizes Wittgenstein’s mature answer to the question, “What is the nature of the logical?”

Wittgenstein on Forms of Life

“…18 Another figure who might have had a relevant role at this stage is Alan Turing. In particular, Wittgenstein's reading of Turing's paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" (Turing 1936-7), the conversations between the two, and possibly also some discussions with the mathematician Alister Watson on Turing's work before Turing's paper was published might have contributed to pushing Wittgenstein toward a conception of logic and language as deeply human, embedded in human activities, and utterly unconceivable in abstraction from them (Floyd 2016(Floyd , 2018(Floyd , 2020. Far from being a computational reductionist, as he has often been portrayed, Turing was in fact interested in and worked on the human foundation of logic and on machines as they can be used by human beings.…”

Alguns Pensamentos a Respeito de Wittgenstein e Educação

“…In fact, Juliet Floyd (2016Floyd ( , 2018 has convincingly indicated another important change in Wittgenstein's thinking, this time probably brought about from his interactions with Alan Turing and a mutual influence respective their reactions to the Gödelian demonstration that Hilbert's decision problem can have no solution at all: while Turing proposed a step-by-step recursive procedure to compute numbers in a machine by finite means, intending that there can be many, and consequently not just one, procedures in which we can actually decide questions, Wittgenstein turned his attention to the general idea of rulefollowing in a variety of distinct language games within ordinary life, an extensive and deeply discussed topic throughout all the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein, 1978). Just at that time, actually in 1936, when he wrote the first manuscript version of the Philosophical Investigations (MS 142), Wittgenstein started using the concept of "forms of life" in relation to language games (Wittgenstein, 2009, § § 19, 23).…”

Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media

“…It is no accident, I believe, that Wittgenstein developed his notion of a Lebensform , a form of life with words, after ingesting Turing's landmark paper (Turing, /7) introducing the idea of what Alonzo Church called a ‘Turing machine’ (Floyd, ). Wittgenstein needed something philosophically deeper than the idea of a ‘culture’.…”

“…I think we might consider drawing the translation closer to that of Emil Post's (human) idea of a ‘worker’, simply translating this as a machine that ‘symbolizes its own ways of working’ . As I have established elsewhere, these remarks were first drafted by Wittgenstein after he held a discussion group at Cambridge with Turing and their mutual friend Alister Watson in the summer of 1937: they are definitely a response to Turing's analysis of an ‘effective’ step in a formal system in his (1936/7) paper ‘On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem ’ (Floyd, , p. 25, n. 33; Floyd, ). I shall argue here that Wittgenstein's remarks are not intended to contradict or critique a functionalist philosophy of mind, as readings from Putnam and Kripke onward have assumed; instead, Wittgenstein is noting that Turing used—just as had Wittgenstein before him—the idea of portions of human activity with words as the actions of unthinking ‘machines’ ( cf .…”