Monday, December 08, 2008

Bullshit or Not: Wittgenstein Edition

There's an old sketch film called Amazon Women on the Moon and one of the bits is a parody of the old Leonard Nimoy show, "In Search Of..." called, "Bullshit or Not?" with the tagline "Bullshit or not? You decide." It's a line I like so much that I've stolen it for an irregular series of posts.

This turn's quotation comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a short book with an arrogant title that Wittgenstein himself neither gave it nor liked.

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.62 ...The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.
Is our world limited by our language?

So, bullshit or not? As usual, feel free to leave anything from a single word to a dissertation.