A taxonomy of hinges?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
1

Following on from @Sam26’s topic in The Other Place, and discussions with @Paine and @Fooloso4*, I thought it might be interesting to discuss the various sorts of indubitability mentioned in On Certainty.

There are a range of examples and metaphors in the text. Claude lists

  1. “hinges”
  2. “the river-bed”
  3. “Bedrock”
  4. “the scaffolding”
  5. “The axis around which our inquiries rotate”
  6. “inherited background”
  7. “Foundations”

Each brings out an aspect of the indubitable. Hinges are the most widely spoken of, despite the term being used only three times in the text. Where the hinge remains fixed, the river bed may move, albeit slowly. There’s something correct in summarily dismissing doubts at bedrock. A scaffolding remains in place while we give our constructs form, and then is removed, so that the construct stands on its own. An axis is not held fast, but is that around which other things turn. Our assigning truth and falsity to propositions occurs against a background of certainty. While these are mentioned in one or two places, “foundation” is mentioned many times, as a hypothesis for further research, perhaps even unmentioned; as an ultimate conviction; as “empirical foundation” for our assumptions; and so on.

We might be able to set out some of the relations between these, and their limitations and uses.

These metaphors concern attitudes towards propositions. There’s also the more recent non-propositional interpretation to consider, “certainty is as it were a tone of voice” or “shown in the way we act”; and ultimately Moyal-Sharrock’s rejection of belief-that for belief-in, apparently with nouns replacing propositions.

In The Other Place, Fooloso4** proposed that hinges referred only to our scientific hypotheses.

While agreeing that hinges are propositional, he cites Crispin Wright in Hinge Propositions and the Serenity Prayer as supporting his contention. I wasn’t able to follow that line of thought. It is clear that Wright agrees with Wittgenstein that hinges are “not merely immune to empirical disconfirmation but beyond supportive evidence too”, but I saw nothing to support the idea that hinge propositions do not apply to other things besides empirical or scientific propositions. Similarly, Fooloso4 cites Annalisa Coliva’s In Quest of a Wittgensteinian Hinge Epistemology in pointing out the place of hinges in “assessing evidence for or against ordinary (mostly) empirical propositions” (note the parenthetical hesitancy). We can again agree with Coliva while not restricting hinges to science.

§342 does not say only scientific investigations; and the remark is embedded in a discussion about doubt and certainty in general. So it is a step too far to restrict hinges only to scientific enquiry or empirical propositions.

“If we want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put” (§343). It may be an obvious point, but perhaps it is worth noting that if a hinge is to stay put, we must at the least believe hinges to be the case. And what is the case, what is true, are statements. Hinges, then, are held to be true propositions. They are, then, true, believed and yet neither justifiable nor unjustifiable, and so not known in the classical sense.

Here we find agreement with Coliva in treating hinges as true statements, and so we are perhaps at odds with Moyal-Sharrock’s account of hinges as non-propositional, animal ways of acting, and so not truth-functional. No doubt a much stronger case for Moyal-Sharrock’s account might be made, something we might pursue in this thread.

For my own part, I’m interested in how those rules that set out how a game is to be played are indubitable, and how these fit into the discussion in On Certainty. The ubiquitous examples are from Chess, where a bishop must stay on the same colour or cease to be a bishop. Moving only diagonally counts as being a Bishop, and to do otherwise is to cease being a Bishop and indeed to cease playing chess. Such constitutive rules strikingly follow what is required of at least some hinge propositions. 12 times 12 counts as 144, such that supposing otherwise is to cease to do arithmetic. This — holding up one’s hand — counts as a hand does not make an empirical deduction from an observation but sets up those games in which we can talk about our hands grasping, pointing, signing and otherwise taking on any role we so choose. It seems to me that at least a large part of our certainties might be eligible to a treatment along these lines. Another thread for this topic.

Up front, I’m not interested here in long and tedious defenses of Wittgenstein’s philosophy generally. If that’s what you want to do, start your own thread.

*I don’t know what your new handles are, if any, so I wasn’t able to link you in with a mention. Indeed, it’s not clear that the new format has a way to link to another user in the way Plush Forums did.

**Wittgenstein’s Toolbox, p. 12

1 Like
Reading Wittgenstein's On Certainty as a Whole: An Interpretive Picture
2

When Coliva says: ordinary (mostly) empirical propositions, she is not expressing hesitancy. She uses the term, “ordinary empirical propositions” several times (4,6,7,10,11,13)

she means that the propositions are mostly ordinary ones. Later on she says:

Yet, for Wittgenstein, saying that it belongs to the logic of our investigations that certain propositions aren’t
doubted simply means that it is a constitutive element of our empirical inquiries that, whenever evidence is
collected for or against any empirical proposition, certain other propositions have to be kept fixed. Hence,
it is constitutive of empirical inquiries, and not just a fact about our nature or pertaining to pragmatics, that
certain propositions are taken for granted.

She goes on to say:

In fact, the idea that Wittgenstein would allow for the possibility of knowledge even when no
reasons can be produced in favor of one’s claim is based on disregarding the distinction between empirical
(ordinary) and grammatical uses of “I know” he draws in On Certainty.

And:

That is, all we get from these and other key passages in On Certainty is the idea that justification and
knowledge do not take place in a vacuum. They always depend on there being certain hinges, which, as such,
cannot themselves be justified or known, yet allow us to acquire evidence for or against ordinary empirical
propositions. They are therefore constitutive of the practice that in turn determines what being epistemically
rational amounts to.

Empirical propositions are propositions about the world. Note that she makes the distinction between empirical and grammatical uses of “I know”. Put differently, empirical knowledge is scientific knowledge.

1 Like
3

Does anybody have access to what Moyal-Sharrock has actually written?

1 Like
4

I don’t believe that hinges are real, there is no such thing. Wittgenstein proposed hinge propositions as what would be required if it is the case that human knowledge is based in certainty. This would provide the grounds for a rebuttal to radical skepticism.

Then he set out to identify some of these hinges. But he could not, with the appropriate degree of certitude, determine any hinges. So he leads us to conclude that there really is no such thing as a hinge proposition, therefore knowledge is not based in certainty, and radical skepticism will persist.

5

I just don’t think “Here is a hand” is a scientific statement; I’d like keep the capacity to differentiate between just any statements about how things are and specifically scientific statements, even is the latter is a subset of the former, and even if the distinction cannot be made exact.

Is this something we can treat as moot, and move on?

6

Neither do I. It is certainly not a philosophical statement. Moore’s intention is to refute the skeptic. “Here is a hand” is supposed to serve as evidence, but evidence is empirical. Evidence requires that there be an external world. There would be no empirical evidence if there was not an external world.

The proposition “here is one hand” may not be a scientific proposition but it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that there be an external world and that there be empirical evidence not of the world but about things in the world.

8

I was not able find the Moyal-Sharrock 2005 essay mentioned previously but did find Wittgenstein’s Razor: The Cutting Edge of Enactivism

I think it would be a mistake to describe her position as “non-propositional.” Perhaps “pre-lingual” is closer to the mark:

Grammar is seen as belonging to the realm of acting19.

Hinge or basic certainty is not a matter of propositions or intellection at all, but takes the form of spontaneous acting in the certainty of… an innumerable array of things. It is much like an unselfconscious know-how:

My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on. – I tell a friend e.g. “Take that chair over there”, “Shut the door”, etc. etc. (OC 7;> my emphasis)

Although I have never uttered or thought the words ‘Chairs are for sitting on’ or ‘Doors can be opened and closed’, what I say about, and do with, chairs and doors shows that I have grasped these conceptual features – though the certainty of my grasp is not a conceptual or
propositional one. Rather:

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)

This sureness which, unlike a knowing, does not originate in doubt or hesitation and which has the characteristics of a reflex action, of an automatism, of an instinct, is then foreign to thought. And this thoughtlessness – that which lays the basis for thought (OC 411), and is therefore itself not (a) thought – is also a wordlessness; it goes without saying:

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)

While the enactivism expressed here is a helpful perspective to view the work, Moyal-Sharrock seems to discard the literal sense of:

  1. That is to say, 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.
9

It’s difficult when we do not have access to shared texts. Chapter nine of Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is called Certainty as Trust: Belief as a Nonpropositional Attitude. The idea, speaking roughly, is that our acts presume a way things are that remains unquestioned until challenged, and it is then that we articulate these as propositional certainties. She rejects the reduction of belief-in to belief-that, and indeed effectively reverses that usual line of thinking, so that for example the belief in the door turning on its hinge is in a sense prior to the belief that the door will turn on its hinge. We trust that the door will open, and this trust is groundless, nonpropositional, indubitable, and grammatical, by which she means it to be at the foundation of our language games (p.194-5).

This of course is a gross oversimplification of a subtle and resilient argument, one with which I have considerable sympathy.

Which gives me a chance to try out the capacity of the new forum to deal with images:

image
image822×538 39 KB

Which, if it has worked, is quite a substantial improvement, @Jamal !

1 Like
10

But…

I’m suggesting not only that there are various different ideas of indubitability involved in On Certainty, but also that they are not all reducible to the one approach. I remain unconvinced that we ought treat On Certainty as if it converges on a single coherent account of indubitability.

Moyal-Sharrock’s project depends on such a reduction, a flattening of the text that actually remains unresolved. This in part from treating it as a complete work, when it is a work in progress.

For instance, Moyal-Sharrock’s account sits uncomfortably with scaffolding and with the riverbed metaphors, which remain provisional and mutable.

And it is somewhat at odds with the “counts as…” notion discussed above, which is quite explicitly propositional.

And so it goes.

11

I grant that it is an interesting theory.

Is that not a model of the sort Wittgenstein said belonged to natural science in the Blue Book?

In any case, do you not accept that the theory proposed overrides the specificity of 347 in its wording?

Is the “overt” intention somehow not the underlying intention of the comment?

12
  1. “I know that that’s a tree.” Why does it strike me as if I did not understand the sentence? though it is after all an extremely simple sentence of the most ordinary kind? It is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning. Simply because I don’t look for the focus where the meaning is. As soon as I think of an everyday use of the sentence instead of a philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary.

This? Not following your question, I’m sorry.

13

Whoops, I meant the series starting from 341:

  1. That is to say, 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.

  2. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.

  3. 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. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

  4. My life consists in my being content to accept many things.

14

I’ll not go to great length in defence of Moyal-Sharrock’s account. My view, somewhat intuitively, is that a separation between linguistic and non-linguistic beliefs would be difficult to firmly articulate—that doing so is in danger of re-introducing the dualism between world and word rejected by Davidson; but that’s outside the scope of this thread.

I’ll add that it seems clear to me that §343 is introduced only in order to be rejected. That the door turns on its hinges, is not an assumption—it’s what a hinge, and a door, is!

Hence: 346. When I am trying to mate someone in chess, I cannot have doubts about the pieces perhaps changing places of themselves and my memory simultaneously playing tricks on me so that I don’t notice.

So I doubt we can clearly separate belief-that and belief-in, in the way Moyal-Sharrock might be read as supposing.

15

Well, that gets back to my previous question directed at Moyal-Sharrock’s theory:

It seems like I am being asked to ignore statements with face value for another agenda. The series specifically says its concern is not a set of assumptions.

Why should the efforts to distinguish between different sorts of propositions not actually be about that?

16

I’m sorry, I don’t quite see what you are suggesting. isn’t an overt belief, by that very fact, a belief-that? A belief in something that can be put into a sentence?

So §341: yes, our doubts depend on our certainties; §342, yes, our scientific investigations (and perhaps all our other investigations…?) depend on some things not being doubted; yet not §343, because what is held indubitable is not placed there as an interim step in a process, but in order to get the game going at all; hence “My life consists in my being content to accept many things”… and so to the place of constitutive rules as in Chess.

17

I will ponder the “get the game going at all” statement.

But what I was referring to by “overt” is the text making comparisons between propositions. If the differences drawn are not what the observation is about, then there must be something else that it is about.

I question that is the case rather than assert an opposing interpretation.

18

You’ve lost me entirely.

19

Do you accept that the text compares different kinds of propositions?

20

And if you do, is that comparison not to be taken at face value?

21

Some propositions are undoubted, some open to doubt. Yes.

This is not a result of the structure of the proposition, but of their place in the language game.

So we are not here comparing different kinds of propositions, but different places they may have in the language game.