A.C. Grayling - Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, Univ. of London

Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty

AC Grayling

Wittgenstein's On Certainty (hereafter OC) is a collection of provisional notes, recording a journey not an arrival . But it is not difficult to see an intended destination for the journey, nor is there anything obscure about the territory being travelled. Yet OC has some surprising and unexpected features. For one thing, it recapitulates certain old attitudes in Wittgenstein, harking back to, but making different use of, Kantian traces in the Tractatus, here in the form of a roughly sketched (and possibly naturalistic) anti-realism similar in striking respects to Kant's empirical realism. For another thing it appears to represent Wittgenstein's acceptance, at last, of philosophy's legitimacy as an enterprise. In all his earlier work he explicitly premissed the claim that philosophy is a spurious enterprise, arising from misunderstandings about language. In OC he takes a central, traditional philosophical problem–the problem of scepticism and knowledge–and tries to formulate a refutation of scepticism, and a characterisation of knowledge and its justification. And he does this by engaging with another attempt to do so, namely, Moore's.

In order to evaluate the ideas it contains I shall therefore take OC at face value–as an unfinished enquiry, the ideas in which nevertheless strongly indicate the finished theses it works towards–and proceed as follows.

First, there are two main themes in OC, which are, at the least, not comfortably consistent with each other. One is a reply to scepticism, and as such contributes recognisably to the theory of knowledge. Indeed it is a reinvention almost from scratch of views familiar, and usually more fully argued, elsewhere in philosophy, of a broadly foundationalist stamp. In this respect it carries forward, or unfolds, themes already suggested in the Philosophical Investigations (henceforth PI). Alongside the first theme–or more accurately, wrapped round it as a vine about a tree–is the other, not comfortably consistent, theme, a relativistic one which undermines the claims constituting the first theme. After stating each theme I discuss the tension between them, suggest the best way out of it, and indicate how OC itself, and materials from PI, affords Wittgenstein's own different basis–a fudged one–for resolving the tension.

Wittgenstein's conceptions of doubt, certainty and knowledge, his persistent conflation throughout OC of contingent propositions with those he identifies as 'grammatical' propositions, and his revealing conflation of scepticism with idealism, are central to understanding the themes of OC, and I discuss them in their due places, concluding with an overall evaluation.

My exegetical task is effected by suitably anatomising OC. The view I shall call OC1 and which constitutes a version of a foundationalist refutation of scepticism, and therefore a contribution to the theory of knowledge, has two components, the first of which is that scepticism is answered by appeal to the fact that beliefs inhere in a system, and the second of which is that this system of beliefs rests on foundations which give those beliefs their content. Here are some passages exemplifying the first component of OC1 (all emphases are Wittgenstein's):

83. The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference (WR249).

88. It may be for example that all enquiry on our part is set so as to exempt certain propositions from doubt, if they are ever formulated.

94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. 105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system ... The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which our arguments have their life.

162. I have a world picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting (WR252).

341. The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges upon which those turn.

Here are some passages exemplary of the second component of OC1:

103. And now if I were to say "It is my unshakeable conviction that etc.", this means in the present case too that I have not consciously arrived at the conviction by following a particular line of thought, but that it is anchored in all my questions and answers, so anchored that I cannot touch it.

162. I have a world picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting (WR252).

411. If I say 'we assume that the earth has existed for many years past' (or something similar), then of course it sounds strange that we should assume such a thing. But in the entire system of our language-games it belongs to the foundations. The assumption, one might say, forms the basis of action, and therefore, naturally, of thought.

512. Isn¹t the question this: 'What if you had to change your opinion even on these most fundamental things?' And to that the answer seems to me to be: 'You don't have to change. That is just what their being "fundamental" is.'

599. To say: in the end we can only adduce such grounds as we hold to be grounds, is to say nothing at all.

OC1 thus states that scepticism gets no purchase because our beliefs inhere in a system (the first component) which rests upon foundations (the second component), which latter non-negotiably constitute the conditions upon which our beliefs have content‹and which therefore constitute the conditions even for doubting, which, therefore again, cannot take the foundations for their target. The justification for the foundations is thus effected by a "transcendental argument" : restated, it is that foundational beliefs (expressed by what Wittgenstein calls, in senses of 'logical' and 'grammatical' special to OC, logical or grammatical propositions; see e.g. 51, 56-8) are what make the system possible, and it is within the system that claims to knowledge and challenges of doubt are alone intelligible. A clever encapsulation of the transcendental argument is given at 248: 'I have arrived at the rock-bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.'

The view I shall call OC2 and which is not comfortably consistent with–perhaps, indeed, undermines–OC1, is to be found in paragraphs 65, 95-9, 166, 174, 192, 211 (WR254), 253, 256 (WR257-8), 307, 336 (and compare 559)–and perhaps also in paragraphs 5, 33, and 607. Here are some exemplary passages:

65. When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology ...

97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughts may shift.

99. And the bank of the river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited.

166. The difficulty is to realise the groundlessness of our believing.

256. On the other hand a language-game does change with time.

336. But what men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters.

OC2 is relativism. Relativism is the view that truth and knowledge are not absolute or invariable, but dependent upon viewpoint, circumstances or historical conditions. What is true for me might not be true for you; what counts as knowledge from one viewpoint might not do so from another; what is true at one time is false at another. Paragraph 97 arguably shows that the relativism implicit in this aspect of OC is of a classic or standard type. Its presence in OC is entirely consistent with its presence elsewhere in the later writings: one remembers the lions and Chinese of PI. What was left open in those earlier relativistic remarks was the degree of strength of the relativism to which Wittgenstein was committed. OC2 constitutes a claim that the framework within which claims to knowledge and challenges of doubt equally make sense is such that its change can reverse what counted as either. That is classically strong relativism.

To get a good feel for the tension between OC1 and OC2, compare 103 (where a given belief 'is anchored in all my questions and answers, so anchored that I cannot shake it') with 97-9 ('the river-bed of thoughts may shift'); 494 with 256; both 512 and 517 with any of the relativistic remarks cited, for example 559; and any of the relativistic remarks with 317 and 599, which latter is worth repeating here: 'To say: in the end we can only adduce such grounds as we hold to be grounds, is to say nothing at all'.

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