What do Philosophers "get" that Physicists don't?

Retrieved from "Karl Muller's answer to What do philosophers 'get' that physicists don't?"

One physicist “got” something that a lot of philosophers still don’t, and this was Niels Bohr, when he said:

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

Understanding physics means understanding the limits of language, a subject that centrally concerned the philosopher Wittgenstein (who actually trained in aeronautical engineering and nuclear physics in Manchester before the First World War.) His famous Tractatus concluded by saying: “What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. The End.” Bohr went further, saying something that will probably be sneered at by many physicists of today:

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

I went through a degree course in physics without the issue of language being raised once. My master’s degree ended up being in the language of the science classroom, and I found myself clinging to Wittgenstein and his notion of “language games” as absolutely the only concept in this entire realm that made a scrap of sense. Language is always located in a social context, and cannot be separated from it. You need to study the game in which the word is used, to grasp its meaning. If you want to look for “consciousness” in quantum physics, watch two quantum physicists talking, and look very carefully for any signs of it.

The philosopher and “spiritual scientist” Rudolf Steiner said that language was only adequate to the material world. You can say: “Here is one stone placed upon another.” And what you say will be adequate to the material world. But to say what was going on in the minds of the people who placed those stones, what they mean, what symbolism they have—well, that can be a different story for every person, and can never be fully articulated in language. I discovered this in Jerusalem, where every single rock has at least three completely separate mythologies.

Language is not adequate to express spiritual experiences. This is a fundamental dividing line. The moment you are speaking of inner experiences, you become like Wittgenstein, who says (to paraphrase): I never actually hit the target with my words, but if you watch around where I’m shooting, you’ll begin to see that I’m always aiming at the same moving target, and you’ll get an idea of what I’m actually trying to say. In fact, this may be the one and only place he actually did hit the target, it’s a perfect description of his process.

Steiner also gives the only picture of the evolution of language I’ve ever seen that makes sense. He says it is divided into three phases: the Chinese era, when language had to be beautiful, as in angelic; then came the Roman era, when it had to be accurate, and adequate to the material world in building roads and bridges; and now the modern era, when language needs to become good, when people want to see that your words are positive and having a beneficial effect. It’s actually going to be the Russian era, Russian is notoriously opaque and poetic and a language of the future. It’s not an accident that they don’t have the definite article “the”, so they’re always asking the deep questions in the physics corridor, like “What is time?”

You can say what you like about Steiner’s long view, but what he’s saying is manifestly “good”, in that it’s encouraging manifestly positive and honest language. So I feel he’s being consistent and leading by example.