Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World

by Susan G. Sterrett

Book Overview

The philosophy of language and experimental research in aeronautics made great leaps at about the same time in the early twentieth century. Strange as it may sound, this was no coincidence. Sterrett explains what Wittgenstein s glimpse of a solution to the problem of language in 1914 had to do with experimental models, which had been so crucial to the Wright brothers solving the problem of flight. On the eve of the First World War in Europe, Wittgenstein...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0131499971
• ISBN13: 9780131499973
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Pi Press
• Length: 329 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

kites,bikes,planes, logic and the mind.

Wittgenstein is a philosopher whose life and work seem to pop up where you never expect to find it. The author makes some fascinating connections between W. and the Wright Bros. ( of all people ! ), with Bertrand Russell, with epistemology, computer logic, and lots more. The book suffers from the absence of photographs, not a single photo of W. himself. There are also a few basic errors such as using "laying" for " lying" . By a PhD., simply unacceptable. Perhaps I should toss the brick at her editor instead because there are others. Another example is in her inaccurate description of the Gnome aircraft engine. A quick Wiki check would have prevented the blunder. A very important foundation stone in W.'s intellectusal development was his refusal to accept Russell's solution to the famous Russell's Paradox. The author I believe should have spent a few more paragraphs on the Paradox itself to help the reader understand how W. used it as a launching pad for his leap into logical symbolism. For this , however, there already exist better books. But I would have bought the book anyway just to learn about the degrees of inherent stability ( comparing bikes to planes) and to enjoy watching her connect these ideas to W.s thinking on fundammental logic and how the mind functions.This book is an entertaining excercise in making connections that I have never heard of and certainly would never have thought of on my own. Buy the book ! Try it. You'll like it and learn a lot you won't find in any textbook.

History of Ideas of Models and Physically Similar Systems

As author, I'd like to provide the synopsis/abstract of my book "Wittgenstein Flies A Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World" as it appears on my own webpage: "Abstract: Wittgenstein told friends on many occasions that he came to see how things in the world can be represented in language by thinking about scale models, and that it occurred while he was a soldier, in the autumn of 1914. This book is the result of investigating the idea that perhaps he meant _experimental engineering_ scale models. It is well known that Wittgenstein had been an aeronautical engineer before going to Cambridge to study philosophy with Bertrand Russell in 1911. Why only in 1914, then, did this insight occur? It so happens that 1914 was the year that the basis of the method of experimental engineering scale models was formally set out and presented, by a philosophically-minded physicist, as a matter of a purely logical principle about any symbolic system that is used to represent physical relationships. In fact, a whole array of discussions about similarity arose in 1913-1914, in physics, biology, and chemistry. The book lays out this previously untold story in the history of ideas, presents a new reading of Wittgenstein's philosophical work (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and explains how many heretofore puzzling claims in it click into a coherent account on this new reading. " However, I don't think you need to have any interest in Wittgenstein to appreciate the history of ideas in the book. I am not aware of another book that gives an account of the historical background to, and a critical-historical review of, the idea of physically similar systems ranging from Galileo to Rayleigh and beyond, including physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry. The book also contains an English translation of Boltzmann's 1894 lecture on Aeronautics as an appendix. .

Very intriguing thesis!

I do not even recall Ray Monk delving into this connection though I will have to go back and look. Looking at the link between modeling in engineering and language analysis certainly seems to supply some intriguing questions with answers.