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• one's own possible future experiences
• the way one should respond to another person
• an interpretation of what is said
• new ideas and ways of looking at the world
For example, if the non-technical music literature is examined, such as record re-
views, concert reports, descriptive, as opposed to analytical, music histories and
biographies, it becomes evident that the common experience does not have to be
even the music itself in order for one person to describe an experience to another.
The rich and extensive use of metaphor suggests that emotional resonance and asso-
ciation to a commonly understood situation can be employed to trigger what, to the
author of the description, is his “accurate” emotional response to a piece of music.
Communication, in this case, will depend mostly upon our shared humanity, some-
times upon our personal experiences but unlike computers, little upon any external
referential semantics. This point is explained in Chap. 13.
8.3
A Philosophical Paradigm of Meaning for Computing
The implications of such observations on the communication of internal experience
are radical. They have led us to take Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
as a paradigmatic
description of the current state of computer science. We will treat the tractatus as
theory of formal computer languages and use it to describe how programming lan-
guages have meaning. We can take this step because the Church-Turing Thesis shows
that the Turing Machine (the classical computer) is equivalent to Lambda calculus
and recursive functions. Lambda calculus and recursive functions together form the
description of functional programming languages (e.g. ML, LISP).
David Gooding (University of Bath, private communication 2004) notes that:
The Tractatus was modelled on Hertz' Principles of Mechanics. Hertz believed that his topic
would be a full and final statement of the principles of mechanics; Wittgenstein thought that
Frege, Russel and Whithead had done the same for mathematics and that he would do the
same for language.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein creates a formal analysis of language and in particular,
shows how it relates to the world through 'objects'. What exactly an object is emerges
from exploring its role in a language. I now look at the statements in the Tractatus
labelled
Tn
where n is a number indicating the statement's level in an argument.
There are seven major statements (e.g.
T2
) and the point indicates a branch of further
statements made from the initial statement (e.g.
T2.01, T.02
).
•
T2
, What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.
•
T2.01
, A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things)
•
T2.02,
Objects are simple.
•
T2.021,
Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be
composite.
•
T2.0251,
Space, time and colour (being coloured) are forms of objects.
