page 3 of Wittgenstein on Scepticism and Certainty

Strawson brackets Wittgenstein with Hume as a naturalist because of 'resemblances, even echoes' in OC, but says that Wittgenstein does not make 'explicit appeal to Nature'. As we have just seen, this is not so; the appeal is explicit enough. Strawson goes on to cite passages constituting the foundationalist component of OC1 as 'echoes' of naturalism. I think one should keep these two –isms clearly apart; they are not the same thing, and do not entail each other. The naturalistic streak in OC is not as strong as Strawson claims; it is a mere echo indeed, much muffled, as things stand, by OC2. But it suggests a genuine alternative, suitably worked up, as a way of protecting OC1 from OC2.

IV

What explains Wittgenstein's inability to shake off OC2-type views is his muddling together contingent or empirical propositions with those he calls 'grammatical propositions'– see e.g. 57, 58, 136: Wittgenstein somewhat vaguely describes these latter as propositions which have the "peculiar logical role" of fixing the framework–giving the meaning, setting the conditions of intelligibility–for ordinary discourse; they cannot be called into doubt without thereby impugning the whole discourse for which they stand as foundational. This is the fatal flaw that generates the OC1-OC2 conflict. It is simply demonstrated: inspect 93-4, 106-111, 128-9, 143, 159, 167, 234, 273-4, 449, 505, and 614. Here are examples:

93. Everything that I have seen or heard gives me the conviction that no man has ever been far from the earth. Nothing in my picture of the world speaks in favour of the opposite.

106. If now the child insists, saying perhaps there is a way of getting [to the moon] which I don't know, etc. what reply could I make to him? ... But a child will not ordinarily stick to such a belief and will soon be convinced by what we tell him seriously.

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 ... If I wanted to doubt the existence of the earth long before my birth, I should have to doubt all sorts of things that stand fast for me (WR255).

These are offered as examples of beliefs 'standing fast', but one notices that in 93 and 106 the beliefs mentioned are contingent (true when Wittgenstein wrote them, but false if uttered now), while in 234 grammatical beliefs (everyone has forebears) and contingent ones (there are cities) are mixed together indiscriminately. There are examples of what might uncontroversially be called foundational beliefs–('there are physical objects', 51)–and when Wittgenstein addresses the problem at 318-323 ('But there is no sharp boundary between methodological propositions and propositions within a method' 318, and see 319) he does not resolve it, but turns directly to a claim about rationality that forms part of his positive account of knowledge, as if, whether or not a proposition is grammatical or contingent, its sense-giving foundational role is conferred on it by its being what 'the reasonable man believes' (323).

The rationality view is, indeed, unexceptionable, in having it that one of the marks of systematic propositions is the epistemically normative authority they exercise. Both grammatical and contingent propositions can be systematic in this way, for among the latter there can be propositions of a high degree of generality which key given areas of discourse, the sense of which presupposes the truth of the proposition: and the proposition is contingent. One can pluck from history examples of such propositions which have since been shown false, with the consequent withering of the discourse, as if its artery had been pinched closed.

But such propositions are not transcendental or grammatical. They are scepticism-rebutting only with respect to challenges to the less general propositions which assume them, and themselves lie open to sceptical challenge of that same internal variety. Their defence against it is supposed to rest on appeal to the system they belong to, that is, to genuinely grammatical propositions. But Wittgenstein at times accords them a status indistinguishable from genuinely grammatical propositions; at 136, for example, he speaks of 'a lot of empirical propositions which we affirm without special testing; propositions, that is, which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions.' The difficulty is clearly apparent here: for these 'special empirical propositions' turn out not to be empirical in the ordinary sense: 'We don't, for example, arrive at any of them as a result of investigation' (138). So they are a priori; and therefore to explain the sense in which they are also 'empirical' we must suppose them akin to Kant's synthetic a priori propositions. But these latter are transcendental in the way Wittgenstein¹s grammatical propositions are, when he describes them with more care; and as 318-9 shows Wittgenstein is alive to the difference. So the problem remains.

I have no brief here to reconcile Wittgenstein's views in this connection; I simply point out the conflation to explain the presence in OC of OC2. The explanation is that if one includes among the foundations of the system propositions which are in fact contingent even if they have some kind of special status in their language-games, one is bound to accept that their status might change. Hence OC2; and hence the inconsistency in OC as it stands.

V

The well-known, and persuasive, central tenet of OC is its view that claims to knowledge only make sense where the possibility of doubt exists. Knowledge and doubt are correlative notions, and both knowledge claims and expressions of doubt get their content from their inherence in a framework of assumptions stable both for claims and challenges to them. We take from this the idea the thought that were matters otherwise we would be disabled from grasping that such-and-such a doubt relates to such-and-such a claim to know–that they compete, so to say, over the same epistemic territory. Knowing and doubting are internal to a framework (a language game, a practice), and the framework is its own court of appeal. All this depends on OC1 (and is threatened by OC2).

Many passages in OC urge this view. Among the key paragraphs are 121-3 (WR249), 317, 341-2, 354, 450, 519, and 625. Here are exemplary passages:

354. Doubting and non-doubting behaviour. There is the first only if there is the second.

450. A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt.

519. Doubt itself rests only on what is beyond doubt.

I take as key passages those that focus on doubt because what Wittgenstein's theory of knowledge responds to, taking its cue from Moore and via him the tradition of debate, is scepticism. He offers the other barrel of the shotgun too, in the long debate he has with himself from 483 until the end on 'I know' ('I know that my name is Ludwig Wittgenstein'). Getting his central tenet from those paragraphs requires the complete disentanglement of the contingent and grammatical levels of knowledge, which Wittgenstein here thoroughly mixes; yet the underlying work is already done by the respective components of OC1 described in I above.

As in Moore and the tradition of debate that sees scepticism as sharpening the point of epistemological concerns, the resolution of the crux about doubt yields the required account of knowledge. The thesis of OC, resting on its principal OC1 theme, is clear (and cogent). Of course it only sketches a kind of view; it amounts to recognising that theories of knowledge like, say, Kant's–framework-invoking theories–are on the right lines. Now one would like to see the hard detail of such a theory.

The role of certainty in Wittgenstein's view invites comment. A response sometimes offered to the familiar traditional Cartesian quest in epistemology is to point out that certainty is the wrong goal, because it is a psychological state one can entertain with respect to falsehoods: you can be certain that Red Rum will win next week's Derby, yet lose your shirt. One might accordingly argue that the goal should instead be knowledge, so understood that it is definitionally something more than the psychological states (believings) an epistemic subject has to be in as a necessary condition for entering the richer, truth-constrained, relation in which 'knowing' consists. However: Moore followed his predecessors in the Cartesian tradition by seeking to forge a connection between enjoying, as an epistemic subject, a particular kind of certainty, with the unsustainability of scepticism about what that attitude addresses. One can make 'being certain' the criterion of knowledge when the proposition one is certain of is entertained as such without option, that is, at risk of incoherence or loss of meaning. Wittgenstein, in his turn, follows Moore in adopting this strategy, but offers a deeper explanation of why there is no option: he in effect plays Kant to Moore's Hume.

Consider 8, 30, 42, 193, 194, 308. Wittgenstein acknowledges the difference between knowing and being certain, and offers an account of why the latter is sufficient for the former in the optionless cases: namely, that the certainty is (not identical to, but) a function of indubitability, which in turn is a function of the framework. Certainty is not identical with indubitability because it is a psychological state whereas indubitability is a property of a sense-constituting propositions of a definable class, viz. the grammatical propositions.

Note that Wittgenstein's apparent inability to hold apart genuinely grammatical and contingent propositions destabilises this thesis too, for relative indubitability will not do for certainty, as the remarks in the cited paragraphs clearly show. So this is indeed an aspect of OC in need of housekeeping.

Is there a lost opportunity in OC? Its argument is rooted in the same intuitions as the private language argument and its related rule-following considerations, in rejecting the 'I'-perspective of the Cartesian tradition, accepted without question or even awareness by Moore, in which the quest is for radical agent-certainty, without a backdrop of publicity constraints on the articulation of thoughts, and arguing in its place for a perspective which admits its debts to a 'we' perspective, in which, that is, the speaking and knowing agent is indebted for his capacities in these respects to the resources of an epistemic-linguistic community (see 440). But this makes it all the more striking that Wittgenstein does not use the private language argument against scepticism, for this argument at very least

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