8/13/2019 Paintitscience.com-World Pt1 Observation

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paintitscience.com http://paintitscience.com/observation/

World pt.1 Observation

What was f irst? #Chicken or #egg? I try to reconsider the problem f or the case of #o bservation and

#f orms. Part 1

What is the world? We can f ind an apparently simple answer in the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus by

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein claims The world is all that is the case which is clarified in proposit ion

1.12 The world is the totality of f acts , not of things. Reality, theref ore, is an eff ect o f observation and

language the medium in which the observation becomes sharable and thus part of a reality.

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8/13/2019 Paintitscience.com-World Pt1 Observation

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Observation and the way we look at things, not reality, become the most relevant f actor to whatever we

understand as the world because by observing and focuss ing we actually create things. That said, we

might think that it is probably not t he best to s tart with the world, or as Luhmann writes:

Die Theorie beginnt () nicht mit einer Einheit, mit einer Kosmologie, mit einem Weltbegriff,

mit einem Seinsbegriff oder dergleichen, sie beginnt mit einer Differenz. [Theory doesnt start

with unity, with cosmology, with a conception of "world", with a conception of "being" and

suchlike. It starts with a difference.]

Continued in part 2.

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