Frameworks, Hinges, and What Lies Beyond

Metaphysics & Epistemology
21

The opening post cites OC 76, OC 92 (quoted in full), OC 96–97, OC 136, OC 204, OC 205, and OC 341–343. The replies throughout the thread cite OC 7, OC 42, OC 86, OC 116, and OC 174. The connections to the text are there if you read the posts.

But I also want to push back on the assumption behind the question. This thread isn’t a line-by-line commentary. That’s what the OC reading thread is for. This thread takes what Witt opened up and develops it, tests it, applies it to questions he didn’t address. That means some of the discussion will be working with the ideas rather than quoting the passages. Philosophy doesn’t stop at exegesis. Witt himself would have had little patience with the suggestion that the only legitimate philosophical move is to cite Witt. The point was never to produce a body of correct interpretations. The point was to see something about how certainty, knowledge, and frameworks actually work. Sometimes that means going back to the text. Sometimes it means going further than the text warrants.

Some people want to drone on about the text, but philosophy is more than exegesis (not that you’re necessarily saying this Paine). Why? Because there is no final answer.

22

I appreciate your description of what the “uncertain creature” might look like, but I’m not convinced. Take a different example. Let’s say I’m uncertain whether my self should be located, or conceived of, as residing within my physical body. Would that mean that I am frozen in place, unable to be a self, until the question is resolved? I don’t think so. I would simply carry on, while being uncertain. There are many way-stations between certainty and radical doubt. To be uncertain does not mean to give up the belief that something is extremely likely to be true, and worth acting accordingly.

So – let’s say it appears to me that objects endure. And that is indeed the basis for all my actions. Must it then be the case that, ergo, I am certain of this? In your sense of certainty, yes, it must. To claim to be uncertain while constantly trusting all the persisting objects would be a sort of performative contradiction. But there’s another, more traditionally philosophical, sense of what it means to question certainty. I don’t see anything inconsistent or contradictory in saying, “Yes, it seems highly likely to me that objects persist; not only do I have the evidence of my actions, but I have additional rational explanations for holding such a position, so I will carry on in the usual manner; but . . . could I be wrong? Is it incoherent to postulate a radical skepticism about the empirical world?”

Yes, there’s something right about this. What we’re trying to understand, I think, is how to give an account of certainty that places it outside language – that reveals it to be either a series of actions, or that hard-to-pin-down subjective something that isn’t a feeling and yet undergirds our very subjectivity. The banal difficulty here is just that “certainty”, in English, generally isn’t used that way. We’d be more likely to say, “My actions reveal that I am certain, but they do not equate with certainty itself. Certainty is a combination of psychological confidence and propositional justification.” It’s that usage that you’re challenging.

I think some of your own descriptions are helpful here. You say, for instance, “To be a sentient creature acting in a world is to act with hinge certainty.” Precisely: The acting is done with certainty, it is not the certainty itself. Or this: “The certainty is a condition of being a functioning creature.” That is, the functioning itself is not the certainty; rather, certainty is something like a “condition” that is revealed in the functioning.

Obviously, all these ruminations connect with that interesting question of whether certainty is “more than merely acting a certain way.” I’m glad you find it interesting too. I’ll try to sharpen my thoughts about it and bloviate when ready. :slightly_smiling_face:

23

Diagnosing a Framework

The opening post described the structure. The regress post showed what it solves. This post offers tools for applying the framework insight to actual belief systems, i.e., scientific, religious, philosophical, political, etc.

Every framework has hinges. Every framework treats certain things as exempt from doubt while everything else gets tested, questioned, and revised. But not every framework handles its hinges well. Some confuse their hinges with their ordinary claims. Some insulate their hinges from the very practices that would otherwise call them into question. Some can’t account for their own limits.

The following questions can be put to any framework. They aren’t a test for truth. They’re a diagnostic for structural health.

What are the framework’s hinges? What does it treat as exempt from doubt?

Every framework has them. The question is whether the framework knows it has them. Modern science, for instance, operates with hinges: the uniformity of natural law, the reliability of observation under controlled conditions, the assumption that nature doesn’t behave differently when we aren’t looking. These aren’t findings of science. They’re conditions under which scientific findings become possible. You can’t design an experiment to test whether nature behaves uniformly, because the experiment already relies on that uniformity. A framework that can identify its own hinges is in better shape than one that mistakes them for conclusions it has established.

Are its hinges consistent with the deepest non-linguistic hinges?

Recall the three levels. The deepest hinges are prelinguistic: objects persist, other beings exist, experience continues. These aren’t optional. Any framework that contradicts them doesn’t become an interesting alternative. It becomes incoherent. A framework that denied the persistence of objects couldn’t conduct investigations, couldn’t accumulate evidence, couldn’t function. The deepest hinges constrain what a viable framework can look like. They don’t determine which framework is correct, but they rule out frameworks that violate the conditions of functioning at all. A framework whose linguistic hinges are consistent with the prelinguistic ground is structurally sounder than one that’s not.

Does the framework distinguish between its hinges and its ordinary claims?

This is where many frameworks get into trouble. Ordinary claims are tested, revised, sometimes abandoned in light of evidence. Hinges stand fast while the testing happens. When a framework treats an ordinary claim as a hinge, it immunises that claim against revision. When it treats a hinge as an ordinary claim, it tries to justify something that doesn’t need justification. Both moves create distortion. Science generally handles this well, viz., the uniformity of natural law functions as a hinge, and specific laws (Newton’s, Einstein’s) function as claims that can be revised. Religious frameworks struggle here with a specific doctrinal claim (the earth is six thousand years old) gets treated as a hinge when it’s actually an empirical claim that belongs in the space of evidence and revision.

Does it insulate its linguistic hinges from the practices that would otherwise call them into question?

A framework can protect its hinges in two ways. First, the hinge stands fast because it’s genuinely doing hinge work, because the framework couldn’t function without it. Second, the hinge is protected by preventing the practices (observation, questioning, testing) that would put pressure on it. The distinction isn’t always easy to draw, but it matters. A political framework that treats its founding principles as hinges is doing something defensible. A political framework that prevents the free exchange of information to protect its founding principles from challenge is insulating in the illegitimate sense. The question isn’t whether the hinges are protected. All hinges are protected. The question is whether they’re protected by their structural role or by the suppression of practices that might reveal them to be ordinary claims dressed up as hinges.

Can the framework account for its own limits?

This is the deepest question, and the one most frameworks fail. The regress post showed that no rule-governed system can fully ground itself from within. A healthy framework can acknowledge this. It says here is where my resources run out, here is where argument gives way to something else. An unhealthy framework claims to be complete, claims to answer every question from within, claims that its boundaries are the boundaries of what can meaningfully be asked. OC 92 is the test case. Moore cannot prove his view to the king. A framework that can acknowledge this, that can recognize the structural limit on what argument can accomplish when frameworks differ, is being honest about its own nature. A framework that insists it can prove itself to anyone who reasons correctly is confusing its internal standards with universal ones.

These five questions don’t tell you which framework is true. They tell you which frameworks are structurally sound, which ones understand their own nature, and which ones are hiding ordinary claims behind the authority of hinges. The honest position, and I think the Witt position, is that where frameworks differ at the level of their linguistic hinges, argument runs out. OC 92 says conversion, not proof. But the deepest hinges, the prelinguistic ones, constrain what a viable framework can look like. And the diagnostic questions can reveal when a framework is violating those constraints or insulating itself from the practices that would expose the violation.

24

I’m not sure I fully understand all of this, so hopefully this reply is useful in some way. I would certainly agree that someone’s framework cannot be shifted with reasoning or logic alone. We see this every day in the political arena.

However, personal experience or what’s under the personal experience, seems to be the driver: emotions. And when I think about a baby that has no conceptual thinking, but still acts, I can’t help but wonder if that action is the result of emotion.

It leaves me thinking that maybe emotion is the pre-conceptual layer that humans use before conceptual thought can form. Does that make sense in terms of what you are describing?

25

I’m not sure how much of our disagreement is just about using different words for the same thing and how much is a different understanding of how human cognition works. I will say this–what I, and I think you, are describing is intuition as it is normally defined. Merriam-Webster says intuition is “…the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference…immediate apprehension or cognition.” Other sources provide similar definitions. Beyond that, I think my understanding of the mechanisms of intuition I discussed previously are consistent with the findings of psychology/cognitive science.

I won’t take this any farther. I don’t want to distract from your thread.

26

Quellcrist, thanks for responding. The suggestion is worth thinking through, but I’d push back on it.

Emotion is a real part of human experience and it does sometimes drive action. But it’s too specific to be what I’m describing. Watch the infant reaching for the toy. The infant isn’t reaching because it feels something about the toy. It’s reaching. The reaching isn’t the result of an emotion any more than it’s the result of a proposition. It’s the acting itself, prior to both. The act of reaching shows the basic certainty that we all have.

The dog going to its bowl makes this clearer. The dog isn’t emotional about the bowl (at least not necessarily). The dog goes. The going is the certainty. If we say emotion is what drives the going, we’ve inserted a cause behind the acting, as though the acting needs something else to explain it. But Witt’s point at OC 204 is that acting lies at the bottom. Not emotion that causes acting. Not propositions that guide acting. Acting. The bottom is the acting itself.

There’s a deeper problem with the emotion suggestion. If we say emotion is the pre-conceptual layer, we’ve replaced one mental state (belief, proposition) with another (feeling, emotion). We’re still looking for something inner that produces the outer behaviour. But hinge certainty isn’t inner at all in that sense. It’s not a state that causes the reaching. It’s the character of the reaching. The conviction is in the structure of the action, not behind it.

That said, you’re pointing at something real when you mention the political arena. People don’t change their frameworks through reasoning alone, and emotion is clearly part of what holds frameworks in place and what shifts them. That’s true at the level of linguistic hinges, where frameworks differ and where conversion (not proof) is what Witt describes. But the prelinguistic hinge certainty I’m describing in the opening post is more basic than emotion. It’s the ground on which both reasoning and emotion stand. A creature that didn’t act with hinge certainty couldn’t feel emotions about its world any more than it could form propositions about it.

27

T_Clark, I appreciate your responses, and I don’t think this is just a disagreement about words. The Merriam-Webster definition actually helps show the difference.

Look at the definition closely, “the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.” Every key term in that definition places intuition inside the epistemic framework. It’s a faculty (a capacity of the mind). It attains something (it reaches a result). What it attains is knowledge or cognition (an epistemic achievement). It just does so without rational thought and inference (it bypasses the usual route but arrives at the same destination).

That’s precisely what I’m saying hinge certainty is not. It’s not a faculty. It’s not attaining anything. It’s not delivering knowledge through an alternative route. It’s the ground on which all routes to knowledge, including intuition, stand.

OC 205 says the ground is not true, nor yet false. Knowledge is true; that’s one of its conditions. If the ground isn’t true or false, then it isn’t knowledge, and if it isn’t knowledge, then no faculty for acquiring knowledge, however direct, is what’s operating here. The infant reaching for the toy hasn’t attained knowledge of the toy’s persistence through a special faculty. The infant is reaching, and the certainty is in the reaching. There’s no attainment. There’s acting.

So the disagreement isn’t about whether intuition is real. It is. People do arrive at knowledge without conscious rational thought and inference, and psychology has good things to say about how that works. The disagreement is about whether that’s what’s happening at the level Witt is describing. I think it isn’t. Intuition operates within the framework. Hinge certainty is what the framework, including intuitive knowledge, rests on.

28

The Order of Things

One reason the framework problem is hard to see is that we encounter it backwards. We start with epistemology, with questions about knowledge and justification, and then try to work down to what lies beneath. But the actual order runs the other way. What I want to do in this post is lay out the sequence as it actually unfolds, from the ground up, so the structure becomes visible.

A world with objects in it.

Before anything else, there are objects in space. They persist. They have locations. They don’t vanish when unattended and reappear when needed. This isn’t a claim anyone makes. It’s the condition under which any claim about anything becomes possible. A world without persistent objects isn’t a world with a different physics. It’s a world in which nothing, including investigation, memory, and thought, could get started. The deepest hinge certainty is here, i.e., the conviction, shown in every act of reaching, stepping, and navigating, that there is a world of enduring things. The infant shows this conviction before it has a single word. The dog shows it without ever acquiring one.

Creatures in that world.

Within this world of persisting objects, there are creatures. They have bodies that respond to their intentions. They move through space. They encounter objects and other creatures. Their engagement with the world is practical before it is cognitive. They reach, grasp, avoid, pursue. Every one of these actions shows hinge certainty, viz., conviction that the ground holds, that the body responds, that space and time have the structure they seem to have. This is still entirely prelinguistic. No propositions. No concepts. No language. Just creatures acting with conviction in a world of enduring things.

Other minds.

Among the objects these creatures encounter are other creatures. And the engagement with other creatures is different from the engagement with rocks and trees. Other creatures respond. They react. They initiate. The conviction that other beings exist, that there are minds besides one’s own, is shown in every interaction; the infant turning toward a face, the dog responding to its owner, the child seeking comfort from a parent. This isn’t an inference (“that thing behaves like me, so it probably has a mind”). It’s shown in the acting. The infant doesn’t reason its way to the existence of other minds. The infant engages with other beings, and the engaging shows the conviction.

Language.

Now something new enters. Among these creatures acting with conviction in a world of enduring things, some of them develop language. Language doesn’t replace the prelinguistic engagement. It grows on top of it. The creature was already reaching, navigating, interacting with other minds. Language gives it new capacities, it can describe, question, assert, deny, instruct, warn, promise. But every one of these activities rests on the prelinguistic hinge certainties that were already in place. You can’t describe objects unless objects persist. You can’t instruct another person unless other minds exist. You can’t assert anything unless there’s a world for the assertion to be about. Language is powerful, but it’s not the ground floor. It’s built on a foundation of prelinguistic conviction that was there before the first word was spoken.

And notice what happens when language arrives. The prelinguistic certainties don’t become linguistic. They continue to operate nonlinguistically even in a creature that now has language. You still sit without testing the chair. You still reach without checking the cup. You still step without verifying the ground. The hinge certainties that were prelinguistic in the infant and the dog are now nonlinguistic in you, i.e., the same conviction, shown in the same kind of acting, in a creature that also happens to have words.

Linguistic hinges.

With language comes a new level of hinge certainty. Certain formulations take on a peculiar logical role (OC 136). “The earth has existed for a very long time.” “Physical objects continue to exist when unperceived.” “My name is Sam.” These can be stated, and they look like propositions. But they don’t function the way ordinary empirical claims function. They stand fast while other things get tested. They’re held in place by what lies around them in the system (OC 144). And unlike the prelinguistic hinges, they can shift over time. What was riverbed becomes channel and what was channel becomes riverbed (OC 96–97). Linguistic hinges are real and important, but they’re the third floor, not the ground floor.

Frameworks.

Linguistic hinges don’t float independently. They cluster into systems, world-pictures, what I’ve been calling frameworks. A framework is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false (OC 94). It includes standards of evidence, practices of justification, criteria for what counts as a good explanation. Different frameworks can share the prelinguistic ground (they must, or they couldn’t function at all) while diverging at the level of linguistic hinges. Moore and the king share the same prelinguistic certainties. They diverge in their world-pictures.

Epistemology.

And now, finally, we arrive where philosophy usually starts. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, justification, evidence, and doubt. But look at how much had to be in place before epistemology could get going. Objects persisting in space. Creatures acting with conviction. Other minds to communicate with. Language to formulate claims. Linguistic hinges to structure enquiry. Frameworks to provide standards of evidence. Epistemology operates inside all of this. It’s the activity that happens on the upper floors of a building whose foundations were laid long before the first epistemological question was asked.

This is why the infinite regress was never solvable from within epistemology. Epistemology asks, what justifies this belief? And then, what justifies that justification? The regress runs because epistemology is looking for the bottom within its own domain, within the space of propositions and justification. But the bottom isn’t in that domain. It’s five floors down, in the prelinguistic conviction of a creature reaching for an object in a world of enduring things. The regress stops not because you find a self-justifying proposition, but because you reach a level where propositions haven’t arrived yet and justification doesn’t apply.

And this is why every response in this thread has recategorised the phenomenon as something inside the framework. You’re all standing on the upper floors. The view from up there is made of language, concepts, categories, mental states, faculties. When I point downward and say “the building rests on something that isn’t any of those things,” the natural move is to look around the floor you’re standing on and say “do you mean this? or this? or this?” No, I mean what’s beneath all of it. OC 204 says acting lies at the bottom of the language-game. The game is up here. The bottom is down there. And the bottom was there first.

29

After reading what you’ve written here, I agree, we do have disagreements in substance.

And that is where we disagree. I think what you and LW call “hinges” do constitute knowledge and are located “within the epistemic framework.” The example we both seem to be using is object permanence. That is something very young babies have to learn.

As I noted previously, my understanding is that they come from two sources 1) experience in the world and 2) inborn, instinctive knowledge. Is that second source what you and LW are talking about. It doesn’t seem that way.

If you’re interested, here’s a link to an article I found eye-opening by Konrad Lorenz–“Kant’s Doctrine of the A Priori in the Light of Contemporary Biology.”

30

No, I made a distinction between pre-linguistic background and lived non-linguistic engagement. I said Wittgenstein would reject the first but not the second. Hinges show themselves through lived non-linguistic as well as linguistic practices. Wittgenstein doesn’t deny that there is a history to our behavior, including a natural history. But as soon as we start thinking about this history in terms of something like a pre-linguistic background, we turn the idea of action into a theoretical posit. In claiming the dog’s ‘action’ with respect to objects is certain, action for you in this context seems to mean ‘response to something fixed prior to the action’.

This treats the action as a passive response to or representation of something which is really doing all the heavy lifting for you, a pre-existing fact of nature. The action is only certain because it can rely on the independent foundation of nature, which would be the case whether an action was performed on it or not. Actions seem almost to be secondary for you at the level of foundations. They are needed in order to reflect, express or represent the effect of already-in-place facts of nature. And since facts of nature imply empirical causes, we can’t rule out some bizarre event which could in theory change the empirical facts concerning physical objects such as to put into question the correctness of the anticipations of the dog or baby. We would the. say the dog or baby was wrong because the facts changed.

By contrast, for Wittgenstein actions, and the systemic web of practices they participate in, don’t express, represent or reflect anything about the world external to them. They enact or produce senses of meaning, as forms of life. They are world-forming , not world-representing, expressing or reflecting. The dog’s certainty concerning objects is not based on its actions anchoring themselves onto the way the world already is.

It is based on the expectations emanating from a pattern of interacting with its world which it creates , that is, co-creates as its way of inhabiting its material and social environment. This pattern of actions isn’t certain because it is anchored in true facts of nature, but because it produces its own compass or map of intelligibility. It is the anchor , not some empirical facts behind it. That anchor can change, but not because the facts of nature changed independent of our actions with respect to our world.

Wittgenstein says when we try to justify everything, we imagine we need a foundation, like the facts of nature which anchor your conception of ‘action’. But justification simply comes to an end in practice, which needs no anchor. Because foundations simply lead to an infinite regress, and ultimately to skepticism.

As far as I can see, you haven’t extracted yourself from G.E. Moore’s perspective, you’ve just tweaked it in such a way that formal linguistic propositions like ‘this is a hand’ and ‘objects persist’ are relativized to the content of language games, and a separate status for ‘objects persist’ that you call the pre-linguistic foundation is proposed. This amounts to saying that Moore’s mistake was to try and ground his enterprise at too high a level, the linguistic proposition, and you’ve dig all the way to rock bottom, the pre-linguistic. But all the heavy lifting of this pre-linguistic level of ‘actions’ is not done by our actions themselves but by empirical facts anchoring them, and the grammar of empirical facts is propositional in the sense that it is an epistemological posit.

Even though, with Moore you say “this is not subject to justification”, you also say “it rests on empirical facts”. But “rests on empirical facts” is already a justificatory relation, even if you don’t call it that. All empirical facts could in theory be otherwise, and replace certainty with doubt. Because it implies the stability of action is explained by underlying facts about the world, you haven’t eliminated epistemic grounding, you’ve just displaced it.

31

Great stuff, Sam, thanks. I think the way you’re proceeding is perfect for the topic, and highly thought-provoking.

Again, I’m curious why you seem to view this as a kind of on-off switch: Either we have the certainty you claim we do, or else we are “incoherent,” “can’t function,” etc. My previous reply suggested some other, midway, stances we in fact take. Why must I deny the persistence of objects? Can’t I remain uncertain about it while carrying on?

Yes. I’ve observed that many philosophers start to get a little upset at this point. They seem to believe that this position is recommending interminable confusion or mere consensus, or else that is must involve a contradiction based in relativism. But we know that’s not how philosophy actually proceeds. We may not have proof of our framework, or be able to prove it to someone else, but we are nonetheless being reasonable, intellectually cautious, and open to any sensible challenges. “What argument can accomplish when frameworks differ” still includes a great deal, I believe.

From Witt:
"I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way.”

One wishes Witt could have said a bit more here. We can agree that “conversion” is only a stab at finding the correct word, but still we want to know what is “special” about this kind of conversion, and what it means to “bring someone to look” at something. These issues are absolutely central to the Wittgensteinian picture.

I’ve been thinking through Levinas recently, so this question naturally occurs to me: Doesn’t this description of a framework make “true and false” the basis of philosophy? What about ethics? Does the inherited background of a framework also provide for the distinction between good and evil, cruelty and kindness, responsibility to others vs. to myself? Or must we say that ethical questions only arise at the level of propositions that are deemed true or false? Levinas, you probably know, would say that ethics is First Philosophy, and is also pre-linguistic, based in sensual life and how we encounter the other. Can we fit this into the framework picture you’re drawing?

I agree with the substance of Josh’s objections here. It harks back to my questions about where certainty is supposed to “live,” the “place” at which we discover it. I think you’re right to look for an account that is not propositional, that acknowledges that special subjective something upon which we rely, but you probably need to do better than “empirical facts” (or equating certainty with the actions themselves). Tough issue, though; I’m not sure of my ground here.

32

After exploring this more, I think I have a better grasp on the topic. I’ll just lay out the position I came to and how I think it aligns with what you’re asking.

Wittgenstein says Acting is the bottom. There’s nothing beneath it. I think we need to go one more step though. Acting is what occurs when a body is designed for motion and it is within an environment that affords that motion. The body acts because it can.

In regard to hinges, the things we don’t and can’t ask in language, they are of the body. The body controls all kinds of actions that we do not consciously take part in:

  1. Sensorimotor Continuity - The world persists when you blink
  2. Predictive Processing - The brain predicts gravity
  3. Embodied Priors - You occupy one body
  4. Automatic Regulation - Heartbeat

So, I do agree with you that the bottom is experiential, if the bottom is the body. Because action comes from the body and the body does not require concepts or conscious thought to perform actions like the ones listed above.

I also think that the body is designed for connection. For example, we mirror other’s actions and form unconscious judgments of people in under a second. We don’t need a shared framework to impact each other, just proximity of the body.

33

Jay, let me take all of this together.

On the on-off switch. I think the midway stance you’re imagining doesn’t work the way you think it does. You suggest that you could remain uncertain about object persistence while carrying on. But look at the carrying on. Your body reaches for the cup. Your feet meet the ground. Your hand turns the page. The carrying on IS the conviction. The philosopher who writes a paper questioning object persistence is sitting in a chair without testing it, reaching for a pen without checking it, operating with complete conviction at the prelinguistic level while formulating doubts at the linguistic level. The formulated doubt is idle in precisely the way Moore’s “I know here is a hand” is idle. Moore tries to make explicit something that doesn’t need making explicit. The idealist tries to doubt something that their own acting shows they have complete conviction about, and the doubt doesn’t reach the level where the conviction lives. Both moves have the form of a genuine philosophical position. Neither reaches down to the prelinguistic level where the conviction actually operates. So it’s not that denying object persistence makes you incoherent as a philosopher. It’s that no creature can actually act on such a denial. The acting shows the conviction regardless of what the philosopher has concluded.

On what’s “special” about the conversion in OC 92. My reading is that the conversion isn’t the adoption of new propositions on the basis of evidence. It’s a shift in the whole structure through which evidence becomes meaningful. The king doesn’t come to hold new beliefs that Moore’s framework supports. The king comes to inhabit Moore’s framework, which means seeing the world in a way that makes Moore’s beliefs natural rather than strange. You can’t argue someone into a framework. You can present it, live it in front of them, expose its fruits, and hope they come to see things through it. The shared epistemic tools can prepare the ground. They can show the king where his own framework strains. But the final step is something like recognition, and that’s not irrational, but it isn’t proof either.

On ethics. This is the most interesting question you raise. My instinct is that you’re right, that the framework picture can’t be only epistemic, and that the prelinguistic encounter with the other carries ethical weight before any ethical proposition is formed. But I haven’t worked it out with the same care I’ve given the epistemic side, and developing it here would pull this thread in a direction it isn’t set up for. It deserves a separate thread.

On Josh’s objection, which you seem to agree with. Josh says the heavy lifting is done not by actions but by empirical facts anchoring them. I haven’t said the prelinguistic level rests on empirical facts. I’ve said it’s where empirical facts eventually become possible. The relation runs the other way. Objects persisting isn’t an empirical fact that anchors my reaching. The reaching shows my conviction that objects persist, and that conviction is the condition under which empirical facts come into view at all. The facts get stated later. They’re third-floor formulations. The acting is the ground floor. So, when Josh says “rests on empirical facts” is already a justificatory relation, he’s right about the phrase but wrong about what I’m claiming. Nothing in my picture has the prelinguistic level resting on anything. It’s the ground.

You say I need to do better than equating certainty with the actions themselves, and you’re right. The conviction isn’t only the action. It belongs to the subject. OC 174 says “I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.” The certainty is mine. It’s real, belongs to me, and is shown in the acting. Both parts are needed. If I say the certainty just is the action, I’ve stripped out the subject and made hinge certainty sound like mere behavior. If I say the certainty is a state inside the subject that causes the action, I’ve put it back inside the framework as a mental state doing causal work. The believing and the doing are one thing at this level. OC 7 says his life shows that he knows there is a chair over there. Not an inner state that his actions report on. Not behavior with no subject behind it. A life in which conviction and acting aren’t two things to be correlated but one thing shown in the engaging of a subject with a world.

The bottom line is simple. There is a world at the bottom of our epistemic language. A world with objects in it, creatures acting in it, subjects whose convictions are shown in everything they do. Language came later. Epistemology came later still. The world was there first, and the acting was there first, and every category we reach for when we try to name what’s at the bottom (intuition, emotion, grammar, psychological certainty) is a product of the very thing it’s trying to describe. The map is not the territory. And the territory was there before anyone drew a map.

34

Quellcrist, I appreciate you working through this. You’ve moved closer to what I’m describing, and you’re right that the bottom is experiential and prior to concepts or conscious thought. But I think you’ve done something subtle that pulls the phenomenon back inside the framework.

You’ve taken the conviction shown in acting and given it a scientific explanation, viz., sensorimotor continuity, predictive processing, embodied priors, automatic regulation. These are real descriptions and neuroscience has useful things to say here. But the explanation is inside the framework. These are third-floor concepts used to describe something operating at the ground floor. Jay filed the phenomenon under “psychological certainty.” T_Clark filed it under “intuition.” You’ve filed it under “the body” and its mechanisms. Each is a legitimate way of studying the phenomenon from above. None gets beneath it.

There’s also a deeper problem. You say the bottom is the body. But the body is an object in the world. And the subject’s conviction that their body responds, that it occupies space, that it persists, is itself hinge certainty. The body doesn’t explain hinge certainty. Hinge certainty is already operative in every engagement with the body. You don’t check whether your body will respond before reaching. The conviction that it will is shown in the reaching. So grounding the phenomenon in the body puts something that needs the framework in order to be described in the position of explaining what makes the framework possible.

Where you’re right is that the conviction is shown in bodily acting. It’s not abstract or disembodied. The reaching is real, physical, embodied. But “shown in bodily acting” is different from “caused by bodily mechanisms.” The first says where the conviction becomes visible. The second is a scientific claim inside the framework, not a description of what the framework rests on.

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Funny how you were trying to call someone out for using LLMs… and yet here you are using ChatGPT standard format… it’s now apparent how you hallucinate so much.

36

The ‘map vs territory metaphor’ is highly problematic for Wittgenstein (and also for phenomenologists and enactivists). The reason is that it assumes a representational or referential model of the connection between subject, body and world. A “territory” is still something that could, in principle, be correctly or incorrectly represented. So even when you say you’re criticizing explanation-from-above, you remain inside an epistemological picture in which action must either represent, or be explained by something beneath representation. The result is the same as with Moore’s propositional certainty: language goes on holiday trying to ground upper representational levels on an ultimate base level to which all these upper levels refer.

A system of actions that makes hinges possible is not the map of some pre-existing ground beneath it. It is a ground-laying. The world which is relevant to humans did not come first. The senses of meaningfulness of ‘world’ and ‘we’ are articulated together via our actions with respect to it and its responses to us.

An illustration of the problem with your epistemological depiction of the ‘ground’ of hinges in nature is that it doesn’t allow us to ask ‘what is this certainty doing now’? Because the answer to this question for you is that the ground spins idly by just repeating itself with authority, like the man who thought he could prove his point by buying more and more copies of the newspaper in which it was printed.

Once you treat hinge certainty as a ground, something that underlies and authorizes our practices, you risk turning it into something that no longer has a clear use. And for Wittgenstein, that’s exactly where philosophical illusion begins: when something looks like it must be there, but we can no longer say what role it plays in our life with language.

In On Certainty, “certainty” is not supposed to be a state that operates underneath action, a standing conviction that powers behavior or a ground that silently guarantees intelligibility. Instead, its whole point is exhausted in its role within practices, in how doubt, justification, and inquiry come to an end. So if we ask, in the middle of ordinary activity ‘what is the hinge certainty doing right now?’ the Wittgensteinian answer is not: “it is grounding this action from below.”

It is closer to ‘nothing is being done by it at all, it is shown in the fact that certain questions are not being raised, certain checks are not being performed, certain doubts do not arise.

The man buying more and more copies thinks he is adding force to his claim, but from the outside we see that nothing new is happening, the same assertion is just being reiterated without changing its role.
Your picture risks something similar. Hinge certainty becomes a kind of ever-present authority. It is said to “underlie” all action, but when we ask what difference it makes in situ, it doesn’t do anything beyond what the action already shows.

At that point, Wittgenstein would suspect that “certainty” has been turned into a philosophical posit, something that must be there because of how we are thinking, not because of any identifiable use. This connects directly to his recurring move:

If you cannot say what role something plays in the language-game, what difference it makes to doubt, to error, to correction, then you may be holding on to a picture rather than describing a practice.

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So this gets to the heart of the question about the “location” of certainty, and of how to describe it. @Joshs 's comments below also address this (“the ground spins idly by just repeating itself with authority”), though he and I come to somewhat different conclusions, which I’ll try to talk about shortly, or else in response to his post.

Your claim is that certainty is the sort of experience that one cannot be in doubt about, and that is the very reason you want to call it “certainty.” This is shown in my actions, not my thoughts or beliefs. If I say that I’m uncertain about object persistence while taking advantage of what appears to be object persistence, you say that I can’t really mean that. My alleged doubt is “idle.”

Well, if certainty is as you describe it – an experience that produces our customary convictions about how we move around in the world – then I think that’s true. But if I maintain that certainty, for me, means something different, we have a problem. And indeed, I want to say that your (and Witt’s) use of “certainty” is non-standard, is in fact a suggested amelioration of how we normally use the word. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact, I think it badly needs amelioration – but we need a good case for why the new, recommended usage is an improvement.

This issue is aggravated by what we both agree is a difficult problem of description. Wittgensteinian certainty has some characteristics we can identify: It is subjective; it is individual, particular; it is not a feeling of psychological conviction; it is not captured by propositional language; it is (probably) not identical with a series of actions; it undergirds our experience of being in the world, but does not construct that experience.

These characteristics are suggestive, but very far from satisfactory, especially if you want to say that, up till now, philosophers have been mistaken in placing certainty within the mind, as a matter of assent to beliefs.

So when I say I can be uncertain about object persistence, what do I mean? The main difference lies in my use of the phrase “appears to be.” Here’s something I’m certain of: Objects appear to persist. What I can meaningfully be uncertain of is whether this appearance is correct.

So why isn’t this an idle doubt, something no sane person would entertain? This takes us back to Descartes, and a huge gap between the traditional problematic and how Witt and others have responded to it. We don’t need to go there. For my purposes, the point is that you and I can differ about how to understand and describe the experience of certainty without either of us believing anything ludicrous, and a phrase like “The carrying on IS the conviction” must persuade on its own merits, by showing itself as a better decription. As I’ve said, my preferred phrase would be “The carrying on SHOWS the conviction”, and this apparently minor change is right at the center of the issue.

Again, this is not a matter of denial. The person who doubts is not denying, they are doubting. To deny object persistence – to conclude that I really can’t rely on the chair being there – would be every bit as bizarre as you say, but it is more accurately called “the denial that objects will continue to seem to persist.” Our denier can be agnostic about what the objects really do while going mad from a fear they may not seem to persist.

Can I act on this kind of doubt? Yes. I can keep my mind open on the question about whether what appears to be the case is in fact how things are. Can I remain in doubt? That’s a harder question. But even if I can’t, there’s a big difference between being certain of how things seem, and being certain of how they really are. Bridging that difference is a traditional philosophical project, one not congenial to many who took the linguistic turn along with Witt. I think it’s a difference nonetheless.

Man, I’ve gotta stop now but I definitely want to return to the rest of your post. Glad the ethics question made sense to you. I appreciate your good conversation.

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First: I follow the rules, I use LLMs only for correcting my tons of frenchisms

Second: LLMs can detect novelty but are unable to invent anything deep, especially in Philosophy. And almost everything I say here blast everything that has been said in Philosophy :smiley:

Third and ultimate proof: I use Gemini.

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I’m relatively certain it does the majority of your “thinking,” based off of your feelings. Ibalready came across a post where I can tell you simply copy pasted the post in your AI to make sense of it, and it created the response, which is why it was referring to you in the third person.

40

I’m relatively certain it does the majority of your “thinking,” based off of your feelings. I already came across a post (this one) where I can tell you simply copy pasted the post in your AI to make sense of it, and it created the response, which is why it was referring to you in the third person.

Actually I notice you repeat a lot of things Nietzsche said too. The problem with you is your will to truth has little integrity.