Doing Philosophy in 2024

I'm not using chatbots myself yet much, not directly, but I'll share prompts with collaborators and get results back, plus I do hands on text-to-image almost daily. Ergo, if asked whether I use AI on the job, I'll definitely cop to it.

Case in point: I was doing text-to-image drawing from one of Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous memes: beetle in a box. LW was a 20th century luminary around whom a huge volume of secondary literature has been generated, about the man, about his philosophies. Ergo the LLM had a lot to train on.

Possible prompt: Write a few pithy paragraphs about the point Ludwig Wittgenstein was trying to make in his Philosophical Investigations when he wrote about the beetle in the box that only he could see into. He was doing philosophy of language, we know that much. Say a few things about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in the context of contemporary philosophy more generally.

In the Facebook Epistemology chatter (General - anything goes), Isaiah posted two audios voicing his concerns about abusing AI: in sum, using it to off-load practicing thinking and thereby rendering oneself dumb minus continuous propping up by AI. 

Fallon circled Perplexity as the best chatbot to use and shared what Perplexity came back with when prompted as shown above (possible prompt).

Perplexity:  

In his later work, particularly in "Philosophical Investigations," Ludwig Wittgenstein uses the "beetle in the box" analogy to illustrate the private language argument. He suggests that if everyone had a box with something called a "beetle" inside, but no one could see into anyone else's box, the term "beetle" would have no public meaning. This demonstrates that language derives its meaning from public use, not private experiences.

Wittgenstein's later philosophy marked a shift from his earlier views in the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," where he saw language as a logical structure mirroring reality. In contrast, his later work emphasizes language as a social activity, where meaning is determined by use within specific contexts or "language games"25. This perspective has influenced contemporary philosophy by challenging the idea of fixed meanings and highlighting the fluidity and context-dependence of language.

KU: the above two paragraphs are quite acceptable. The secondary literature is vast.

KU (copypasta from chat window): 

I appreciate Isaiah's voiced qualms re chatbot abuse. In this particular case I'm in the role of human expert who knows the Wittgenstein stuff really well and wants to see if the chatbot has anything well-informed to offer. 

My friend Daniel whom I conspire with on Math4Wisdom (that Coda I mentioned) has access to Perplexity and I agree it seems one of the best. 

There's another topic "Quadray Coordinates" (see Wikipedia) which hardly anyone but me and a few others know about, meaning there's precious little secondary literature [typo fixed] to train on, and not surprisingly, even Perplexity gave back a lot of crap when Daniel prompted it about quadrays. But I bet down the road, when more training data exists, the quality of chatbot chatter will much improve.