WITTGENSTEIN: I won’t say anything which anyone can dispute. Or if anyone does dispute it, I will let that point drop and pass on to say something else.
TURING: I understand but I don’t agree that it is simply a question of giving new meanings to words.
WITTGENSTEIN: Turing doesn’t object to anything I say. He agrees with every word.
TURING: I see your point.
WITTGENSTEIN: I don’t have a point.
These lines have become a bit of a meme in philosophy circles, but, for the record, while all of these lines are attested to in Cora Diamond's edition of "Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics," Wittgenstein and Turing did not have a back-and-forth conversation like this.
I find the unreasonable effectiveness of formal systems to be this: just as the shaman crosses into the "spirit world" and uses their experience there to predict happenings in our world, we can turn statements about bridges and dynamic loads in our world into formal statements, arrangements of symbols, and manipulate them mindlessly according to a formal system, yet the resulting safety margins do indeed predict happenings in our world.
(A city once gave an engineering school the contract to demolish an old bridge. The date was agreed upon, but that afternoon the city had to sent representatives out at lunchtime to insist that even though it hadn't been formally specified in the contract, their intent —and the neighbour's expectations— had always been that the bridge would be blown up all at once, not that little bits be blown off all morning to see how much structure could be removed before collapse...)
This reminds me of the Socratic method that Socrates would use to refute someone's claims. He would first make them agree with a series of statements ("truths") one after the other and then run into a contradictory result thereby showing them how their original thesis was wrong.
The Wikipedia article [0] does a better job of explaning it than I could.
You've noticed that other people's narratives/beliefs are internally inconsistent.
Perhaps you haven't noticed that this technique can be applied to your own narratives/beliefs? Because your beliefs are inconsistent too.
Everybody's beliefs are inconsistent - it's a systemic issue. We know about it. The root cause is the fact that language is recursive and it succumbs to Russel's paradox/liar's paradox.
Philosophers have been using inconsistency as a crutch for guilting people into changing their minds for... ever.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. --Walt Whitman
It didn't really happen so there's nothing to get. Those are seperate quotes taken from different lectures and strung together as though they are a dialogue with a sort of Zen character. See one of the sibling comments by dfaubulich for the actual origin of each of those lines.
Don't bother, it's just the usual nonsense by Wittgenstein, this time related to the rule following discussion. Wittgenstein has not published anything of substance and is the most persistently overrated philosopher of 20th Century. Thanks to his obscurity and an ability to invent interesting puzzles, which he scribbled on little notes, he has gathered a large number of fanatic followers. Ironically, if Wittgenstein was still alive, he'd make relentless fun of most of these followers.
He was good at pointing out problems. The rest of his work consisted of hand-waving.
