DANIÈLE MOYAL‐SHARROCK
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 on which those turn.
(OC §341)
Wittgenstein’s last notes were posthumously entitled On Certainty. They constitute his attempt, prompted by G.E. Moore’s “Proof of an External World,” to understand the nature of our basic assurance – our assurance about such things as “Human beings are born and die,” “The earth has existed long before I was born,” “I am standing here,” “I have a body,” “Here is a hand.” As he develops his thought, Wittgenstein employs and considers several options besides “certainty,” but what he rules out from the outset is that this assurance is a knowing: “If you do know that here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest” (OC §1). Of course, he does not leave it there; much of On Certainty is devoted to fleshing out the distinction between certainty and knowledge.
For when Moore says ‘I know that that’s […]’ I want to reply ‘you don’t know anything!’
(OC §407)
In seeking to describe something certain that he cannot prove and that nevertheless seems to him the most indubitable of all, Moore (1939) refers to it as “knowledge” because that is to him the concept that expresses the greatest degree of conviction on our epistemic continuum. Wittgenstein agrees that the objects of Moore’s assurance are those of our most unquestionable beliefs, but disagrees that the certainty in question is of an epistemic nature; he believes this assurance to be of a more foundational breed than knowing:
When I say ‘how do I know?’ I do not mean that I have the least doubt of it. What we have here is a foundation for all my action. But it seems to me that it is wrongly expressed by the words ‘I know’.
(OC §414)
Why does Wittgenstein not take this certainty to be a knowing? Because he adheres to the standard view of knowledge as justified true belief:
One says ‘I know’ when one is ready to give compelling grounds. ‘I know’ relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth.
(OC §243)
If Moore says he knows the earth existed etc., most of us will grant him that it has existed all that time, and also believe him when he says he is convinced of it. But has he also got the right ground for his conviction? For if not, then after all he doesn’t know.
(OC §91)
For Wittgenstein, our certainty that the earth existed long before we were born cannot be said to be justified, for it was never verified: “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” (OC §94). In fact, unlike the objects of our knowledge, we have probably never even thought about many of the objects of our basic certainty:
I believe that I had great‐grandparents, that the people who gave themselves out as my parents really were my parents, etc. This belief may never have been expressed; even the thought that it was so, never thought.
(OC §159)
Of course, we can formulate our certainty of these truisms, and this is what Moore does, but he mistakes these formulations for epistemic claims. This is where Wittgenstein corrects him. He takes Moore to task for confusing knowledge with the non‐epistemic brand of conviction that logically underlies it, and he drives a categorial wedge between them: “‘Knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ belong to different categories” (OC §308). In doing this, Wittgenstein breaks with the traditional presupposition in epistemology that we know our basic beliefs. On his view, beliefs are not necessarily propositional attitudes, and basic belief is described as a non‐propositional attitude: a belief in, not a belief that; a trust or taking‐hold (e.g., OC §150; 509–11). As we shall see, this is not incompatible with his taking them to be expressions of rules of grammar.
But in spite of Wittgenstein’s categorial distinction, some commentators of On Certainty insist on seeing the certainty that underpins knowledge as itself knowledge. As Michael Williams puts it: “Knowledge […] emerges out of prior knowledge” (2001, p.176). To concede that this does not require that the prior knowledge be individually generated but can be “a shared and socially transmitted accomplishment” (ibid.) does not take away from its conceptual link to truth and (ultimate) justification. Moreover, though Williams acknowledges a default background and a pragmatic component of this background, on his view, our “bedrock certainties” are unavoidably propositional. For, he asks, how could our basic beliefs not be propositional, if they are to generate our nonbasic beliefs:
However basic knowledge is understood, it must be capable of standing in logical relations to whatever judgements rest on it. For example, it must be capable of being consistent or inconsistent with them. But this means that even basic knowledge must involve propositional content […].
(Williams, 2001, p.97)
But the message of On Certainty is precisely that knowledge does not have to be at the basis of knowledge. For Wittgenstein, underpinning knowledge are not default justified propositions that must be susceptible of justification on demand but, as we shall see, non‐propositional certainties – certainties “in action” or ways of acting – which can nevertheless be verbally expressed, and whose conceptual analysis uncovers their function as unjustifiable rules of grammar (see Chapter 14, GRAMMAR AND GRAMMATICAL STATEMENTS). (Note: the fact that they can be verbally expressed does not imply they would have propositional content, for expressions of rules have no propositional content.) Hence basic certainties stand to nonbasic beliefs, not as propositional beliefs stand to other propositional beliefs, but as rules of grammar stand to propositional beliefs. Knowledge need not emerge from knowledge: “For why should the language‐game rest on some kind of knowledge?” (OC §477).
To say that our basic certainties underpin knowledge is not to say that knowledge is all they underpin. As Wittgenstein writes: they “form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language)” (OC §401, my emphasis), of our language‐games (OC §403) –which means that they are as much the basis of our false beliefs as of our true ones. Our basic certainties make up our world picture, which Wittgenstein refers to as a “mythology” (OC §95), not in the sense that it is a mystifying picture, but in the sense that it is a picture that is not grounded in – that is, justified by – science (knowledge).
The non‐epistemic nature of our basic certainties is ascertained by the logical absence of justification and verification as regards our assurance of them. This shall now be fleshed out in an examination of the other features shared by basic certainties that further preclude their being knowledge claims.
Wittgenstein’s deliberations in On Certainty bring him to see that our basic certainties share the following conceptual features; they are all:
There are cases where doubt is unreasonable, but others where it seems logically impossible.
(OC §454)
Our basic certainties are not objects of subjective or psychological conviction, but of logical conviction: “I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment” (OC §494). Doubt here is tantamount to having lost the bounds of sense: “If someone said to me that he doubted whether he had a body I should take him to be a half‐wit” (OC §257).
Nor is it possible to be mistaken about a basic certainty: if I believed that I am sitting in my room when I am not or that my biological parents are wolves, it isn’t my possibly being mistaken that would be under investigation, but my sanity or, at any rate, my knowledge of English. A mistake results from negligence, fatigue, or ignorance, for instance; we cannot say of someone who believes that they were never born that they are “mistaken”:
In certain circumstances a man cannot make a mistake. (‘Can’ is here used logically, and the proposition does not mean that a man cannot say anything false in those circumstances.) If Moore were to pronounce the opposite of those propositions which he declares certain, we should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented.
(OC §155)
In thus logically closing the door to doubt and mistake as regards our basic certainties, Wittgenstein closes the door to universal skepticism, and thereby also to the contextualism Williams attributes to Wittgenstein (1991, p.26). On Williams’s neo‐Humean reading, Wittgenstein believes skeptical doubt to have no bearing in the pragmatic air of ordinary life, but to be legitimate and serious in the context of philosophical reflection. But this is a misreading: for Wittgenstein, the Cartesian demon is never a plausible threat; he has no more grip in the philosophical study than he does in our ordinary life. According to Wittgenstein, there can be no context in which our basic certainties can be doubted or justified, for their indubitability is conceptual, not contextual. A basic certainty cannot be doubted in some contexts and not in others; it can never be doubted, whereas the doppelgänger of a basic certainty – that is, a twin sentence that expresses an empirical or an epistemic proposition – can be, and this misleads Williams into thinking that the certainty itself can, in some contexts, be doubted. An example of an empirical doppelgänger of our normally basic certainty of having two hands is the proposition “I have two hands” uttered by someone able to make sure from removing the bandages that were concealing his wounded hands (OC §23).
What may have given Williams the impression that Wittgenstein defends a form of contextualism is the difference he marks in On Certainty between the use of “I know” in ordinary life and its use in philosophical discourse:
What I am aiming at is also found in the difference between the casual observation ‘I know that that’s a…’, as it might be used in ordinary life, and the same utterance when a philosopher makes it.
(OC §406)
But Wittgenstein suggests we treat these knowledge claims differently not because he thinks we know our basic certainties in ordinary life and not in the philosopher’s study, but because Moore’s being a philosopher ought to constrain him to use “I know” with technical precision; that is, exclusively in cases of true justified belief; whereas this cannot be demanded of the ordinary person: we cannot and should not expect her to use “I know” only when it is “justified true belief” she means by it. Wittgenstein refuses to admonish or correct our ordinary use of language, but the philosopher must be made accountable:
So if I say to someone ‘I know that that’s a tree’, it is as if I told him ‘that is a tree; you can absolutely rely on it; there is no doubt about it’. And a philosopher could only use this statement to show that this form of speech is actually used. But if his use of it is not to be merely an observation about English grammar, he must give the circumstances in which this expression functions.
(OC §433)
For when Moore says ‘I know that that’s a…’ I want to reply ‘you don’t know anything! – and yet I would not say that to anyone who was speaking without philosophical intention.
(OC §407, original emphasis)
And so, for Wittgenstein, a non‐philosopher may say “I know” in cases where a philosopher may not, but this does not imply that the non‐philosopher knows where the philosopher does not.
It isn’t, as Williams claims, that skeptical doubts are unnatural doubts (1991, p.2), and therefore sustainable only in the artificial or unnatural conditions of philosophical reflexion, but that they are not doubts at all. Williams seems not to have noted that, in On Certainty, Wittgenstein elucidates the concept of doubt in two ways: he shows that universal doubt is impossible, and he shows that not everything that has the appearance of doubt is doubt:
If someone said that he doubted the existence of his hands, kept looking at them from all sides, tried to make sure it wasn’t ‘all done by mirrors’, etc., we should not be sure whether we ought to call that doubting. We might describe his way of behaving as like the behaviour of doubt, but his game would not be ours.
(OC §255)
In some cases, what looks like doubt is only doubt behavior. Of course, where doubt has no rational motivation or justification, it may have (pathological) causes (OC §74), but normal doubt must have reasons. It isn’t enough to say or imagine we doubt: genuine doubt, like suspicion, must have grounds (OC §§322, 458). If Williams thinks skeptical doubt possible, it is because – like Moore and most philosophers since Descartes – he takes the mere articulation of doubt for doubt: “One gives oneself a false picture of doubt” (OC §249).
Wittgenstein’s recognition that the skeptic’s doubt is only doubt behavior is spurred by his realization that it is hinged on the very certainties it dismisses. For, were she not hinged on some certainties, the skeptic could not even formulate her doubt:
If I wanted to doubt whether or not this was my hand, how could I avoid doubting whether the word ‘hand’ has any meaning? So that is something I seem to know after all.
(OC §369)
But more correctly: The fact that I use the word ‘hand’ and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings – shews that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language‐game, that the question ‘How do I know…’ drags out the language‐game, or else does away with it.
(OC §370)
Its being essential to our making sense means that this certainty underpins all our questions and doubts (OC §341), including the skeptic’s (attempted) universal doubt, thereby invalidating it. At “the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language)” (OC §401) is an essential certainty, a certainty endorsed every time a doubt (towards it) is formulated. What we have here is a knockdown objection to universal skepticism.
Although Hume may be seen to have progressed from Descartes when he admits that skeptical doubt is not sustainable in ordinary life, it takes Wittgenstein to recognize that universal doubt is not sustainable at all, inside the study or out – and this, not for pragmatic but for conceptual reasons: “A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt” (OC §450); “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” (OC §115). Wittgenstein has demystified skeptical doubt; he has shown that the skeptic is only under an illusion of doubt (OC §19).
Basic certainty, as depicted by Wittgenstein and as it operates in our life, cannot be subsumed under “knowledge.” For it has no truck with truth or justification. To say that basic certainties are logically indubitable is not to say that they are necessarily true. There is no question of truth or falsity in the bedrock: “If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false” (OC §205). The indubitability of our certainties does not result from our having confirmed them, but stems from their not being susceptible of confirmation or falsification at all. Basic certainties are logically impervious to doubt. At some point, justification and doubt lose their sense; where the spade turns, there is the ungrounded ground, where “justification comes to an end” (OC §192).
I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions.
(OC §248)
In spite of the abundance of foundational images and remarks, commentators have denied the presence of foundationalism in On Certainty on the grounds that basic certainties, as depicted by Wittgenstein, lack some of the traditional features of foundational beliefs. But, as previously mentioned, Wittgenstein’s basic certainties have their place in a foundationalist structure as the grammatical underpinnings of our beliefs. This is a modification of foundationalism, not the absence of it.
There can be no mistaking Wittgenstein’s foundationalism; it is both explicitly stated – “At the foundation of well‐founded belief is belief that is not founded” (OC §253); “What we have here is a foundation for all my action” (OC §414); “the matter‐of‐course foundation for … research” (OC §167) – and repeatedly illustrated: our basic certainties are said to be like the “substratum of all [our] enquiring and asserting” (OC §162), “the rock bottom of my convictions” (OC §248). What is also clear is that their ungrounded or unjustified nature is not a pragmatic but a logical feature of basic certainties: “it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted” (OC §342; first emphasis mine). In fact Wittgenstein explicitly denies that absence of justification as regards basic beliefs might be due to practical considerations: “But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption” (OC §343). He is unequivocal in declaring that “the end [i.e., our basic belief] is not an ungrounded presupposition” (OC §110) and that he does not want “to regard this certainty […] as something akin to hastiness or superficiality” (OC §358).
For Wittgenstein, it isn’t, as Williams suggests, that the justificatory process need not actually occur (though grounds must be produced on demand), or that it need not be self‐conscious (2001, p.35), but that objective certainty is groundless by nature: “I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified” (OC §359). If our certainty stems, or could stem, from justification, it is not a basic certainty: “I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness” (OC §94).
Crispin Wright holds a view in substance not very different from that of Williams. He accepts the groundlessness of what he calls “hinge propositions” while at the same time upholding (what he takes to be) their rational nature. He seeks to do this by thinning down the type of rationality at work here. Wright argues that absence of justification does not imply absence of a warrant to believe; there is “a type of rational warrant which one does not have to do any specific evidential work to earn”; this nonevidential or “unearned warrant” or “warrant for nothing,” he also calls “entitlement” (2004b, p.174). It is an “entitlement to trust”; and trust, though not as robust as belief proper when it comes to rationality, “is not per se irrational”; Wright still finds enough reason in trust: “Entitlement is rational trust” (2004b, p.194). How rational? The prevailing answer seems to be: that our forming basic beliefs “falls short of the ideals of our reason” does not prevent it from being rational; we accept strategic entitlement in order to avoid cognitive paralysis (2004a, p.50), and so there is still rational merit here. By now, however, it has become clear that the rationality in question is pragmatic, and not properly cognitive or epistemic; that the substance of Wright’s argument lies in pragmatism, and so the same objections apply to him as to Williams (above). A more recent attempt at adulterating reason without emasculating it completely is Wright’s suggestion that “basic judgments” are made “for no reason that can be captured via the modus ponens model” rather than “made for no reason at all” (2007, p.499). However, having rightly rejected John McDowell’s account of reasons furnished by experience as inadequate, Wright does not then offer an account of his own, therefore making no advance on his attempt to dilute Wittgenstein’s groundless certainty into a certainty with some grounds (reasons) – of the pragmatic kind.
Pace Williams and Wright, for Wittgenstein, basic certainty is where reasons or justifications come to an end, full stop. His is a logical, not a pragmatic, account of some things having to hold fast for us if we are to speak and act with sense.
That basic certainties lack some of the features of foundational beliefs as traditionally conceived should not prevent them from being foundational. In fact it is precisely their differing from the rest of our beliefs in being non‐propositional and non‐epistemic that makes for the success of Wittgenstein’s foundationalism. It is the realization that what we have traditionally taken to be propositional beliefs, rationally posited or arrived at, are in fact ungrounded or logical ways of acting that allows Wittgenstein to put a stop to the regress of justification.
The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.
(OC §166)
If our basic certainties are not arrived at by reasoning, they are not arrived at by induction either. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks:
‘The certainty that the fire will burn me is based on induction.’ Does that mean that I argue to myself: ‘Fire has always burned me, so it will happen now too?’ Or is the previous experience the cause of my certainty, not its ground?
(PI §325)
And in On Certainty, he replies:
The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions.
(OC §87)
Of course, many natural phenomena are unquestionably predictable – e.g., that human beings are born and die, that mountains don’t spring up in a day. On an empirical reading, our basic certainties are rational conclusions that we come to (tacitly or not) from having observed such regularities. Wittgenstein opposes this: “No, experience is not the ground for our game of judging. Nor is its outstanding success” (OC §131). But to say that our certainties are not grounded (that is, justified) by regularity of experience and recurrent success is not to rule out all impact of experience on our certainty. Recurrent experience and success sometimes do contribute to the formation of our certainties, but they do so non‐inferentially and non‐inductively; that is, through conditioning, which includes training and repeated exposure, not reasoning: “Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language‐game is conditioned by certain facts?” (OC §617) This is what Wittgenstein means when he speaks of experience as a cause rather than a ground: “This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground” (OC §474).
We think we come to the basic certainty that “Human beings need nourishment” in the same way we come to a conclusion from reasoning. This confusion is due to our assuming that some reasoning must always take place for certainty to occur: “Normal thought envelops even our basic judgments with a rhetoric of reasons,” notes Wright (2007, p.140). But Wittgenstein insists that although we do invariably invoke (an implicit) reasoning to explain our most basic beliefs, in fact no such reasoning takes place: we do not arrive “at the conviction by following a line of thought” (OC §103). Our basic certainty is not rational but a‐rational, animal: “I want to conceive it as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal” (OC §359). Whether it starts out as instinctive (e.g., our certainty of having a body) or is the result of conditioning (e.g., “This is (what we call) a table”), basic certainty is best described as an involuntary reaction, and not as a thought:
It is just like directly taking hold of something, as I take hold of my towel without having doubts.
(OC §510)
And yet this direct taking‐hold corresponds to a sureness, not to a knowing.
(OC §511)
Basic certainty is not the result of judgment; that is the province of knowledge. Knowledge is rationally grounded in reality, in nature, in experience: “Whether I know something depends on whether the evidence backs me up or contradicts me. For to say one knows one has a pain means nothing” (OC §504). And in the same way that it is nonsensical to claim “I know I have a pain” as if I had discovered it by observation, it is nonsensical to claim that “I know I exist” or “I know external objects exist” for the same reason.
My certainty that I exist, that I am sitting at my desk, or that human beings need nourishment to exist is as logical and unreasoned as “2+2=4.” It is a certainty that is not justified by reality (thereby guaranteeing the autonomy of grammar), but logically underpins all I can say or doubt about reality. In order for our words and deeds to make sense, we must take as starting points such regularities as “Human beings need nourishment”; what Wittgenstein has understood is that these are not empirical, but logical (or grammatical) starting points.
Passages in On Certainty point out a peculiarity of Moore‐type certainties, such as “There exists at present a living human body, which is my body,” “This body was born at a certain time in the past” (1925, p.33). They look like empirical propositions, but what they express is indubitable, non‐hypothetical. In fact, we can say of them what we say of mathematical sentences: “Dispute about other things; this is immovable – it is like a hinge on which your dispute can turn” (OC §655).
Wittgenstein asks himself whether Moore‐type certainties might be a kind of hybrid, but this possibility does not pass muster. It is not that rule and empirical proposition merge into one another (OC §309), but that what looks like an empirical proposition is not always one. Here again, as is so common in our philosophical speculations, we are misled by form:
That is, 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.
(OC §308)
Wittgenstein’s view is that Moore‐type propositions, though they have the form of empirical propositions, are in fact rules of grammar:
So one might grant that Moore was right, if he is interpreted like this: a proposition saying that here is a physical object may have the same logical status as one saying that here is a red patch.
(OC §53)
When Moore says he knows such and such, he is really enumerating 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.
(OC §136)
“A peculiar logical role”: in other words, a grammatical role. As Wright puts it: “the unwavering – dogmatic – confidence we repose in these propositions […] attaches to them in their role as in effect rules” (2004a, pp.35–6). But what Wright does not see is that inasmuch as our basic certainties are rules, they cannot be propositions, empirical or otherwise. This is not a mere technical point: the non‐propositionality of basic certainties is one with their being “animal.” And if for Wright: “There is no animal in epistemology!” (Kirchberg 2003 Q&A), Wittgenstein has no qualms about saying that he wants to conceive of certainty as “something animal” (OC §358–9).
It can be argued that for Wittgenstein, for a sentence to be a proposition, it must be susceptible of truth or falsity (see e.g., AWL 101; PLP 288; BT 61 [76]). And inasmuch as basic certainties are neither true nor false – “the ground is not true nor yet false” (OC §205) – they cannot, on Wittgenstein’s view, be propositions. Indeed, one passage in On Certainty leaves no doubt as to the non‐propositionality of our fundamental certainties: “the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true” (OC §204). So why does Wittgenstein, in other passages, refer to our fundamental beliefs as “propositions”? The inconsistency is partly justified by the fact that the non‐propositionality of basic certainties is not immediately clear to Wittgenstein in On Certainty, and so out of philosophical habit and in reference to Moore’s “propositions,” he calls these certainties “propositions.” Of all the insights Wittgenstein comes to in On Certainty, basic beliefs being ways of acting (and not propositions striking us as true) is the most groundbreaking, and must therefore have been the most difficult to achieve and process. He does, however, make the point here:
Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; – but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language‐game.
(OC §204)
While Annalisa Coliva and Duncan Pritchard both agree that basic certainty is non‐epistemic, they find my non‐propositional reading problematic. This seems to reflect the general resistance of epistemologists in admitting the “animal” into their midst. Here is Coliva:
I […] think that Wittgenstein’s definitive view on the nature of certainty wasn’t that it is of an animal, non‐propositional nature. But, of course, there is no denying that, at least at places, he also talked of this kind of certainty. Hence, the question is: how do the propositional and the non‐propositional account of certainty go together, if they do?
(Coliva, 2010, pp.172–3)
Coliva’s way of reconciling the two is to see basic certainties as judgments (and therefore propositions) that have a normative role (and therefore non‐propositional; they are, like rules, exempt from doubt) (2010, p.80). This is not the view, explicitly voiced by Wittgenstein, that the same sentence can at one time express a judgment and at another a rule of testing (OC §98), but that a “hinge proposition” is both at once; Coliva writes: “‘Here is my hand,’ ‘The Earth has existed for a very long time,’ ‘My name is AC’ […] play a normative role, while also being judgements.” This, claims Coliva,
can be evinced from the fact that they constitutively contribute to the determination of what would count as, for instance, normal conditions of perception, evidence for or against historical or geological empirical judgements, normal conditions of human functioning and so on.
(Coliva, 2010, p.142)
But I fail to see how this makes them judgments. If I appeal to “2+2=4” or “This is (what we call) red” or “Human beings die” as “evidence” (say to a child, a non‐English speaker, or an alien), I am not appealing to a judgment.
Pritchard also finds the non‐propositional reading of basic certainties problematic, particularly because of what is known in the literature as “the closure principle.” This is how he succinctly puts it:
The key difficulty facing the non‐propositional reading is to see how it ultimately amounts to anything more than simply embracing a mystery. […] How could one recognise that a certain historical event (e.g., the battle of Austerlitz) took place at such‐and‐such a date, and that this entails that the universe has been around for more than 5 min, and yet not adopt a positive propositional attitude (e.g., belief, or something similar) to the entailed proposition?
(Pritchard, 2012, p.266)
I would reply that “The universe has been around for more than 5 min” is not an “entailed proposition” at all but a formulation of the certainty on which recognizing that the battle of Austerlitz took place in 1805 is hinged. It may look like an entailment, but is only an apparent or otiose entailment. We have not deduced the certainty that the universe has been around for more than five minutes from recognizing that the battle of Austerlitz took place in 1805, for that certainty logically underpinned that recognition. The claim that the battle of Austerlitz took place in 1805 could not be meaningfully formulated were it not for the underlying certainty that the universe has existed for more than five minutes. However, rather than the latter, Pritchard chooses to place an über hinge as the underlying certainty. What is this, and why do that?
Pritchard agrees that at the basis of our rational practices is an a‐rational, non‐propositional commitment, but he must reconcile this with what he takes to be the entailment of “hinge propositions.” He does this by suggesting we think of “hinge propositions” as
in effect just exemplifying a general hinge conviction that we are not fundamentally in error in our beliefs about the world. That general conviction, however, need not take the form of a commitment to any particular proposition, even though it might manifest itself in various commitments to specific propositions which exemplify that general conviction.
(Pritchard, 2011, p.282, my emphasis)
So that the general conviction, which he calls an “über hinge commitment” (2012, p.267) provides the needed non‐propositional basis, while the specific hinge commitments take the form of (entailed) propositions. This is how we get the essential non‐propositionality as well as the putatively required propositionality. The hinge proposition “The universe has been around for more than five minutes” would then be the entailed expression of the non‐propositional über hinge commitment that one is not radically and fundamentally mistaken in one’s beliefs.
My first remark here is that Pritchard‘s über hinge commitment – “We are not fundamentally in error in our beliefs about the world” – seems to be a reification of an aspect of hinge certainty or of a hinge certainty. If, as Pritchard writes (above), the general conviction need not take the form of a commitment to any particular proposition, how does an über hinge commitment manifest itself before it gets codified? Is it a kind of general trust without an object? Are we hinge‐committed to nothing before the general hinge commitment gets individualized? This sounds like a general force distributed amongst occurrences, and smacks of the metaphysical. The kind of picture (e.g., of the will) Wittgenstein tried to wean us away from.
On my reading, basic certainties are non‐epistemic, non‐propositional, unjustified certainties that can only manifest themselves as ways of acting. These ways of acting in the certainty of x, can be philosophically rendered as grammatical rules or as non‐propositional beliefs or beliefs‐in, and this applies to all our basic certainties. Putting these certainties into words for the benefit of philosophical elucidation is a mere heuristic aid; it no more makes our certainties into propositions than the alleged codifications of a general hinge commitment does.
On Pritchard’s view, rejecting the closure principle puts the non‐propositional reading in a quandary “given that we do seem very able to formulate the propositions expressed in hinge commitments, and recognise their logical relationships to other propositions which we rationally believe and know” (2012, p.269). But the fact that we are able to formulate our hinge commitments should not lure us into thinking that this evinces their propositionality; as to the logical relationship between basic certainties and propositions, it is that between rules and propositions. And it is precisely their being rules that makes basic certainties logically ineffable in the language‐game.
Thus it seems to me that I have known something the whole time, and yet there is no meaning in saying so, in uttering this truth.
(OC §466)
Articulating a basic certainty in the language‐game does not result in a display of certainty, but in a display of nonsense. It is perceived as queer; incomprehensible; a joke; a sign of madness; or a piece of philosophy (OC §§553, 347, 463, 467). This is because grammatical rules are nonsense: they have no sense; they determine sense. “This rod has a length” is, on Wittgenstein’s view, as nonsensical as “This rod has no length”; the latter is nonsense in that it contravenes a rule of grammar, the other in that it expresses a rule of grammar (PG 129). This explains why he writes: “‘There are physical objects’ is nonsense” (OC §35). It is nonsense because it expresses a basic certainty and a basic certainty functions like a grammatical rule.
To utter a basic certainty in the flow of ordinary discourse is to utter a rule where no reminder of the rule was needed. If I were to say to the cloakroom attendant as I hand him my token: “This is a token,” he would look at me perplexed. Why am I saying this? “The background is lacking for it to be information” (OC §461); the information the attendant requires in order to retrieve my coat is what the number on the token is. That this is a token is the ineffable hinge upon which his looking for the number on the token – and eventually my coat – revolves. Our shared certainty that “this is a token” can only show itself in our normal transaction with the token; it cannot qua certainty be meaningfully said. To utter a basic certainty within the language‐game invariably arrests the game. Conversely, think of the fluidity of the game poised on its invisible hinges: I hand the attendant my token, he glances at the number on it and fetches my coat. Our foundational certainty is operative only in action, not in words.
We might be tempted to think that the ineffability of basic certainties in the language‐game makes them mere Gricean implicatures, those “bizarre things we ‘should not say’ [but which] would, for all that, be true,” as Charles Travis puts it (1997, p.95). But it is precisely this reference to truth – as also the implicatures’ conceptual link with intentionality, knowledge, and inference – that preclude any nontrivial rapprochement between them and basic certainties. To say that basic certainties are ineffable is not merely to point out the superfluity of articulating the obvious; it is to stress their logical unsayability. For Wittgenstein, sayability is internally linked to meaning and use:
Just as the words ‘I am here’ have a meaning only in certain contexts, and not when I say them to someone who is sitting in front of me and sees me clearly, – and not because they are superfluous, but because their meaning is not determined by the situation, yet stands in need of such determination.
(OC §348)
In certain contexts, the words “I am here” are sayable (say, in a game of blind man’s buff where a child lets his playmate know: “I am here”); in other contexts, where the same words serve neither to inform, nor to express or describe, they are useless, and therefore meaningless: they say nothing. It is important, however, not to confuse the relevance of context here with Williams’s contextualism. As we saw earlier, for Wittgenstein our basic certainties are conceptually, not contextually, non‐epistemic and indubitable: if something is susceptible to doubt, it is not a basic certainty (though it may look like one).
Basic certainty is a kind of non‐propositional, inarticulate, animal trust in certain things: “I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination” (OC §475). Moore and Wittgenstein have given some of our certainties articulation. This is important in that it allows us to individuate and elucidate the objects of our basic certainty, but it can also be misleading: it can give the impression that our basic beliefs are propositional, epistemic, and intellectual. We must remember that formulating and elucidating our animal certainty does not make it into an intellectual or propositional certainty. Our basic certainty is animal through and through. We can verbalize it, but the verbalization of a basic certainty is never an occurrence of basic certainty. Our basic certainty manifests itself exclusively in action. It is, as we shall see, a logic in action.
The fragments of a world‐picture underlying the uses of language are not originally and strictly propositions at all. The pre‐knowledge is not propositional knowledge. But if this foundation is not propositional, what then is it? It is, one could say, a praxis.
(G.H. von Wright, 1982, p.178)
As Wittgenstein writes: “it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language‐game” (OC §204). Indeed Moore’s saying “I know that ‘here is a hand’” conveyed no certainty that was not already visible in his speaking about his hand, in his ostensibly showing it to his audience, or simply in his unselfconsciously using it. In the same way, our certainty that “Tables, chairs, pots and pans do not think” shows itself in our treating them as unthinking, inanimate objects. Our basic certainty that “There are physical objects” shows itself in our reaching out to pick a flower, but not a thought. Basic certainties are grammatical rules whose only manifestation qua basic certainty is in action:
That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
(OC §342)
In deed [in der Tat], certain things are not doubted. Logic is embedded in our practices – in our deeds: “Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs, exist, etc., etc., – they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc., etc.” (OC §476, my emphasis). Our life, our deeds, show that we do not, cannot, doubt some things if we are to proceed to doubt and knowledge.
With On Certainty we come to see that our basic beliefs are not propositional beliefs that lie dormant in some belief box tacitly informing our more sophisticated thoughts. The basic belief verbalized as “I have a body” is a disposition of a living creature that manifests itself in her acting in the certainty of having a body. When asleep or unconscious, this belief remains a disposition, but becomes occurrent in any normal use she makes of her body – e.g., in her eating, running, her not attempting to walk through walls as if she were a disembodied ghost. The occurrence of certainty resembles an instinctive reaction, not a tacit belief. My basic certainty that “I have a body” is much the same as a lion’s instinctive certainty of having a body. In both cases, the certainty manifests itself in acting embodied; in my case, however, it can also manifest itself in what I say; in the verbal references I make to my body, as when I say “I lost weight.” Similarly:
Doesn’t “I know that that’s a hand”, in Moore’s sense, mean the same, or more or less the same, as: I can make statements like “I have a pain in this hand” or “this hand is weaker than the other” or “I once broke this hand”, and countless others, in language‐games where a doubt as to the existence of this hand does not come in.
(OC §371)
Their being ineffable does not prevent our certainties from showing themselves in what we say, but here too, certainty is beyond being justified or unjustified – in every case, something animal (OC §359).
Far from devaluing knowing, Wittgenstein reaffirms its role in our epistemic practices, but he also makes two major adjustments: first, he removes it from its position as the most fundamental of our assurances, and secondly, he points out the erroneous conflation of knowing and claiming to know that results from our impression that the latter, when done in earnest and in the appropriate circumstances, guarantees knowledge (OC §21). In the position traditionally held by knowledge, Wittgenstein places certainty. A certainty that is both animal and logical. By this he means that its indubitability, though essential to our making sense, is not the result of thought and can only manifest itself as a way of acting.
The skeptic may then claim partial victory in Wittgenstein’s affirmation that we don’t know that external objects exist or that we are not brains in vats; but the more radical victory is on the side of certainty: “That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted” (OC §342). With this, Wittgenstein recognizes that the real certainty that underpins our investigations – in fact, all that we say and do, our language‐games generally – is an enacted, not a propositional certainty:
But is it wrong to say: ‘A child that has mastered a language‐game must know certain things’?
If instead of that one said ‘must be able to do certain things’, that would be a pleonasm, yet this is just what I want to counter the first sentence with.
(OC §534)
And with this, Wittgenstein’s enactivism has an impact on epistemology.
I have attempted in this chapter to elucidate Wittgenstein’s account of basic certainty by fleshing out the features that define it. Other commentators have, in their own accounts, left out some of these features: basic certainty has been deemed epistemic but not justified; non‐epistemic but not animal; unreasoned but not a‐rational; a‐rational but propositional; non‐propositional but not completely so; and so on. These come down to two main difficulties: it is difficult for epistemologists to give up the idea that knowledge is our fundamental form of conviction. This would mean, as Pritchard puts it, “granting that an awful lot of what we take ourselves to know is in fact unknown” (2012, pp.268–9). But that it is psychologically repugnant for philosophers to say they don’t “know” that the earth exists, etc., is a psychological, not a logical difficulty (for our more fundamental certainty is there to make skepticism logically nonsensical). Once this is crossed, the next real barrier is non‐propositionality. Propositionality is difficult for the epistemologist to give up because its absence makes room for the “animal” in epistemology; with non‐propositionality, we seem to give up our grip on the rational. But what On Certainty shows us is that our distrust of the a‐rational (the animal) and our reliance on propositions are excessive. It is only by realizing that putting ways of acting into propositions is an artificial intellectualization designed to harness the animal, that we can take, as Wittgenstein did, the uncompromisingly revolutionary step to stop the regress of justification.