Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Wittgenstein and On Certainty

Andy Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317676362
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Ludwig Wittgenstein is arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. In On Certainty he discusses central issues in epistemology, including the nature of knowledge and scepticism. The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Wittgenstein and On Certainty introduces and assesses:

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• Wittgenstein's career and the background to his later philosophy
• the central ideas and text of On Certainty, including its responses to G.E. Moore and discussion of fundamental issues in the theory of knowledge
• Wittgenstein's continuing importance in contemporary philosophy.

This GuideBook is essential reading for all students of Wittgenstein, and for those studying epistemology and philosophy of language. On Certainty, Wittgenstein's final work, addresses a category of "world-picture" propositions discovered by G.E. Moore. These challenge Wittgenstein's enduring commitment to a well-defined category of empirical propositions, and help to generate a critique of scepticism. Developing Wittgenstein's view that scepticism is self-undermining, the Guidebook offers a combative yet therapeutic interpretation that locates On Certainty between the standpoints of Kant and Hume.

1

WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT AND METHOD

1.1. THE THEMES OF ON CERTAINTY

On Certainty focuses on a rather heterogeneous class of apparently empirical yet indubitable propositions, such as “The Earth is very old”, “My name is Andy Hamilton”, “The person opposite me is N.N., whom I have known for years”, “The colour of human blood is called ‘red’ (in English)”, “I have hands”, and “No human has yet left the solar system”. Other examples are found at OC 234:

I believe that I have forebears, and that every human being has them. I believe that there are various cities, and, quite generally, in the main facts of geography and history. I believe that the earth is a body on whose surface we move and that it no more suddenly disappears or the like than any other solid body: this table, this house, this tree, etc.

Wittgenstein found the philosophical questions arising from these propositions so compelling that he devoted the last months of his life to thinking about and writing on them. He was fascinated by the way in which the propositions seem to arise from experience, but are nonetheless immune to doubt.

I call these propositions Moorean propositions, in reference to their discovery by G.E. Moore, which Wittgenstein drew on. They are not the kind of propositions that philosophers normally address, and they do not amount to philosophical claims; the propositions are not normally stated, and sound odd when they are.¹ They appear empirical, but most philosophers would agree that they are no longer available for empirical investigation. One is tempted to say that they have accrued such an overwhelming amount of evidence that any attempt to justify them further seems absurd. The philosophical difficulty concerns how their certainty should be acknowledged or explained.

Moore himself regarded them as empirical, but Wittgenstein is not satisfied that they are either in the metaphysical sense of “factual” or “contingent”, or the epistemic sense of “liable to be supported by evidence”. While querying their empirical status, Wittgenstein is not tempted to treat them as belonging to any traditionally non-empirical category of certain truths – what OC 470 refers to as “the indubitable truths”. According to a central project of Western epistemology since Descartes, such indubitable truths form the bedrock of certain knowledge. On Certainty rejects that project. In particular, it denies that “The Earth is very old” or “I am called Andy Hamilton” are foundations in any post-Cartesian sense.

According to a familiar historical narrative, the search for foundations of human knowledge has involved one of two broad approaches. For rationalists, including Descartes himself, foundational “indubitable truths” are known by pure reason, or are otherwise self-evident – they are knowable a priori, independently of confirmation by experience. Examples of such truths include arithmetical truths such as “2 + 2 = 4”, and logical truths such as “If Socrates is a man and all men are mortal, then Socrates is mortal”; and avowals such as “I have a headache” or “I believe that the Conservatives will win the election”, and self-verifying propositions such as “I am thinking”. In contrast, empiricists who seek foundations tend to privilege observation-sentences or reports of immediate experience, such as “The meter reading seems to be 2.5” or “That’s a red patch”. It is these certainties of reason or experience that Wittgenstein calls the “indubitable truths” (OC 470).

On Certainty denies that there are foundations of knowledge, whether these are rationalist, empiricist or Moorean propositions. For Wittgenstein, the latter form a heterogeneous class, distinct both from those non-empirical propositions considered certain by Descartes and his successors, and from the experiential certainties stressed by empiricists. Consider Wittgenstein’s examples “I am called L.W.”, and “This is N.N.”:

Why is there no doubt that I am called L.W.? It does not seem at all like something that one could establish at once beyond doubt. One would not think that it is one of the indubitable truths.

(OC 470)

… what could make me doubt whether this person here is [my old friend] N.N., whom I have known for years? Here a doubt would seem to drag everything with it and plunge it into chaos … the foundation of all judging would be taken from me.

(OC 613–14)²

There are many things that we seem justified in regarding as certain, but for which we find it difficult to adduce evidence. An example is that water boils at 100°C (at 1 atmosphere of pressure), a “very elementary [proposition] in our text-books”:

What kind of grounds have I for trusting text-books of experimental physics? I have no grounds for not trusting them. And I trust them. I know how such books are produced – or rather, I believe I know. I have some evidence, but it does not go very far and is of a very scattered nature. I have heard, seen and read various things.

(OC 600)

Such propositions are so fundamental to our understanding of the world that it seems impossible for us to deny them. Many of them once functioned as empirical truths, but now lie “apart from the route travelled by enquiry” (OC 88). On Certainty contrasts “transcendent certainty” with mundane or “life” certainty (OC 7) – “My life shows that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there …”. For Wittgenstein, being “exempt from doubt”, in the case of Moorean propositions, is not a psychological phenomenon, like someone being unable to doubt their son’s innocence.³ It is a matter of logic, in Wittgenstein’s broad sense, not one of psychology.

Moorean propositions seem to be empirical, Wittgenstein holds, yet turn out not to be. That is – to reiterate – they are not empirical either in the metaphysical sense of factual or contingent, or in the epistemic sense of liable to be supported by evidence. Unlike ordinary empirical propositions – a brief selection would be “The River Wear is in flood”, “It was sunny yesterday in Durham”, “The boss is off work because of illness”, “There’s no cheese left in the fridge” – they are not normally open to doubt. Rather, Moorean propositions function more like a kind of framework within which genuinely empirical propositions operate. Wittgenstein compares Moorean propositions to a river-bed, which must remain in place for our linguistic and epistemic practices to flow smoothly; he also likens them to the hinges of a door, which must remain fixed for language to function. For this reason Wittgenstein suggests that they make up what he calls a world-picture, a body of often unspoken and unanalysed beliefs that forms the basis of an individual’s or society’s belief-system; they are, as Wittgenstein puts it, “the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false” (OC 94). As we see, one could perhaps talk of our common-sense world-picture, or a Christian or scientific world-picture.

These Moorean propositions are certainties, perhaps, but not in any ordinary sense; they are not “the indubitable truths”, and indeed – in a novel move – Wittgenstein regards them as neither known nor doubted. Echoing his view of mathematics and other areas of discourse, Wittgenstein treats them as normative or rule-like, and therefore empirical only in appearance:

“I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgement.” But what sort of proposition is that? … It is certainly no empirical proposition. It does not belong to psychology. It has rather the character of a rule.

(OC 494)

The rules of chess are one model. “The king moves one square” is a rule of chess, in that a game in which the king does not move one square is not chess. If someone says “I doubt that the king moves only one square”, their utterance is a perplexing; it is not clear what game, if any, they think they are playing.⁴ Similarly, Wittgenstein suggests, a context in which it is not accepted that I know that I have hands is not one in which questions about evidence, doubt, knowledge, belief, certainty, etc. can be asked or settled; it is not our normal “language-game”. It is not that Moorean propositions ground the practice, as foundational propositions are normally regarded as doing. They are not “rules of grammar”, more like “presuppositions of a language-game, practice or discipline”. Wittgenstein’s suggestion is just that, unless they are accepted, the “game” of empirical enquiry cannot be, or is not being, played.⁵ Nothing like this view of Moorean propositions is found in Moore, who treats them as well-established empirical claims.

Wittgenstein controversially maintains, in his non-epistemic model of Moorean propositions, that they lie beyond the possibility of both knowledge and doubt. Clearly, this is an unusual kind of “certainty”. Some writers treat them as bedrock or basic certainties, required for judgment to be possible. But there is a tension between regarding something as both a rule and a “certainty”, even a “non-epistemic” one, i.e. one that can neither be known nor doubted. In learning-contexts, even “non-epistemic certainty” seems the wrong term. “Certain proposition” masks the difference we want to stress – that “This is a hand” usually works as a rule, not as a factual assertion.⁶ So instead of “Moorean certainties”, I call them “Moorean propositions”.⁷

A succinct statement of On Certainty’s concerns is found at OC 308. There, Wittgenstein claims that the very possibility of making judgments rests on accepting Moorean propositions:

… we are interested in the fact that about certain empirical propositions no doubt can exist if making judgments is to be possible at all. Or again: I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition is one.

What “we are interested in” is a useful summary of On Certainty’s concerns: Moore’s discovery of a class of what for him are indubitable propositions, that according to him are empirical, but which Wittgenstein argues are not; the resulting contrast between knowledge, and a kind of certainty that should not be described as knowledge; and the relation of that contrast to the debate over scepticism. The result may be one of On Certainty’s key insights: that propositions that appear to function empirically are in fact framework propositions or rules.

This insight rests on Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning, as we see later – and indeed, his conclusion may be more radical. At various points in On Certainty he questions the very concept of an empirical proposition, which had been central to his philosophy from the beginning. He now believes that it is more problematic than he had thought. At OC 402 he criticises his earlier remark at OC 308 that Moorean propositions have “the form of empirical propositions”; this description “is itself thoroughly bad”, he writes. He may be wondering whether “empirical propositions” is a correct or valid category.

On Certainty perhaps suggests that the divide between a priori and empirical is not an absolute one; that our understanding of conceptual possibilities is conditioned by experience. His student Rush Rhees reported that in 1944, Wittgenstein talked with him for several weeks about the relations of grammatical and empirical propositions, suggesting that the distinction between them was not sharp. Rhees argues that this suggestion, found at OC 309 and OC 319, was new to On Certainty.⁸

Discussion of these issues in On Certainty goes to the heart of questions of truth, meaning and the nature of propositions that preoccupied Wittgenstein throughout his career. Here, he develops the ideas of the Philosophical Investigations, notably the latter’s claim that propositions have no essential features, drawing out the implications that Wittgenstein had not previously realised they had.⁹

The preceding themes are considered in Chs. 5–7 of the Guidebook, following an introduction to Wittgenstein’s thought in Chs. 1–4. At least as much attention is devoted subsequently, in Chs. 8–11, to a further major theme, the bearing of the Moorean propositions on the question of scepticism. Moore presents his propositions in the context of debate over scepticism, and they figure in his defence of what he called a “commonsense view of the world”, against challenges from sceptical and idealist philosophers. As a “commonsense” philosopher, Moore responded to scepticism with a “dogmatic” defence of everyday beliefs. In his “Proof of an External World”, he tried to show that he knows that “I have a hand”, simply by holding up his hand and saying “I know I have a hand”.

Like Moore, Wittgenstein rejected metaphysics, and scepticism; but he regarded Moore’s attempt to refute them as misconceived. “This is a hand” or “I have a hand”, Wittgenstein argues, are not normally – including in the circumstances of Moore’s Proof – possible objects of kn...