/lit/ - Literature

>>14851157
Based. Heisenberg not only read Wittgenstein but discussed his ideas with Russell.This is taken from an interview:

>DP The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein originally started out by thinking that words were related to facts in the world, then later reversed his position to conclude that the meaning of words lay in their use. Is this reflected in quantum mechanics?

>I should first state my own opinion about Wittgenstein's philosophy. I never could do too much with early Wittgenstein and the philosophy of the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, but I like very much the later ideas of Wittgenstein and his philosophy about language. In the Tractatus, which I thought too narrow, he always thought that words have a well-defined meaning, but I think that is an illusion. Words have no well-defined meaning. We can sometimes by axioms give a precise meaning to words, but still we never know how these precise words correspond to reality, whether they fit reality or not. We cannot help the fundamental situation - that words are meant as a connection between reality and ourselves - but we can never know how well these words or concepts fit reality. This can be seen in Wittgenstein's later work. I always found it strange, when discussing such matters with Bertrand Russell, that he held the opposite view; he liked the early work of Wittgenstein and could do nothing whatsoever with the late work. On these matters we always disagreed, Russell and I.

>I would say that Wittgenstein, in view of his later works, would have realized that when we use such words as position or velocity, for atoms, for example, we cannot know how far these terms take us, to what extent they are applicable. By using these words, we learn their limitations.