de-mystifying Wittgenstein (and a tribute to Chomsky)

Why is Wittgenstein so idolized? Could it be because he's misinterpreted?

A recurrent theme of this blog is observing, understanding and explaining the draw of the unknown or unpredictable and our drive to understand, explain, and predict and know -- the drive that natural selection gives us and that leads us to great species successes as well as to many cognitive biases and misinterpretations of the world, science and technology among the successes, superstitions among the cognitive biases. Mystery -- what we don't understand -- draws us towards some theory that will explain and predict. 

Seems to me that Wittgenstein tapped into this mysteriousness in his later thinking and that's why it remains admired and hyped, even though his later thinking, clearly understood, is unmistakably and merely an embracing of the logical consequences of his previous logical positivism, not at all a rejection of it, and even though Chomsky's 1956 Syntactic Structures disproved and debunked Wittgenstein's behaviorist reductio ad absurdum conclusions. 

The Wittgenstein admirers deplore the limitations of logical positivism, the limitations most evident in W's earlier Tractatus, and celebrate what they believe is his rejection of those views. Yet the later views are a drawing of the logical consequences of the earlier views, in the form of a reductio ad absurdum, which normally entails rejecting a premise of the theory, but with contrarian cleverness, Wittgenstein instead accepts the absurdity leaving us a philosophy at once mysterious, illogical, and, well, absurd. Like a religionist, he held to the doctrine, accepting the irrationality rather than accept that the irrationality disproved the doctrine, in W's case, verificationism.

What is the private language argument but a reductio of a behaviorist account of mind, leaving the mind as utterly mysterious? What is the questioning of mathematical method but a reductio of a behavioral account of math, rather than, say, understanding math the way most mathematicians do as just a made-up axiomatic system with well-defined functions?

This was the dispute with Popper. Popper argued that verificationism cannot escape the inductive fallacy. And, truly, verificationism is nothing but induction. What's needed for understanding, explaining and predicting, is what C.S.Peirce called abduction: conjectures that identify the conditions that would falsify them. 

You can see already that verificationism is a systematic failure to apply Bayesian reasoning, a case of confirmation bias, and verificationaism is not science at all. What's needed for science is conjectures, tentative theories that stand until proven false. Far from Wittgenstein's contrarian mysteries, Popper offered a straightforward program for theoretical progress. In 1956 Chomsky then demonstrated that the behavioral model didn't even adequately describe language behavior, much less explain it. His conjectures, right or wrong, restored the productive role of the mind that Wittgenstein had effectively banned from science on verificationist grounds no different from the Tractatus, just applying them to the mind. (More on this topic here.)