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Humour

Abbott and Costello meet Wittgenstein

Tim Madigan on some philosophical comedians.

“A mathematician is bound to be horrified by my mathematical comments, since he has always been trained to avoid indulging in thoughts and doubts of the kinds I develop.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar

The philosopher Saul Kripke, in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, discusses what he calls “The Wittgensteinian Paradox.” A skeptic doggedly proclaims that 68 plus 57 equals not, as one might expect, 125, but 5. The skeptic has a ready answer for every dissent: what we think of as a ‘plus’ sign is really a ‘quus’ sign, to ‘count’ is really to ‘quount’ and ‘independence’ is really ‘quindependence’, at least until we reach the computation 68 + 57, wherein the old rules fail to apply. We blindly apply rules of addition without understanding the nature of those facts, and so cannot say that the answer ‘5’ is wrong without first appealing to a rule which is disputable.

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