…and I didn’t get it from some kinda’ stupid ‘web-site’, it’s from the Bartlett’s Roget’s Thesaurus that I love to read! There you can see it as:

“Why philosophy is so complicated? It ought to be entirely simple.” Philosophy (4).

But its not an exact quote! The exact quote is:

“Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought, after all, to be completely simple. Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as complicated as the knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its methods for arriving there cannot be so.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

    As it happens, the ‘Internet version’ of the original is ‘slightly simplified’… down to a level of impersonal chewing gum for lazy brains of disrespectful ‘users’ of course. But this may be a clue for our careful deliberations about language too. There is a minimal necessary level of complexity for our (and their) understanding of this roaring world of (mostly useless) information. How about turning this into a guiding principle for our job of construction? I think I can do it.

    Here’s the idea: it may seem counterintuitive but I feel that it may be a way to overcome the complexity of the task of algorithmic description of meanings; what if we start building the necessary descriptions of phenomena and make them as minimal as possible, but in a way that languages are constructed, not as mathematical (axiomatic) description is built? Language doesn’t require knowledge of exact definitions of words, it requires a degree of similarity in experiences associated with words. Is this too complex? :) Let’s reexplain it once again then…


completely-simple

Later.