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

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Reading Wittgenstein’s On Certainty as a Whole: An Interpretive Picture

I’ve been reading and writing on Wittgenstein’s On Certainty since 1980, and what follows is my interpretive picture of the work as a whole. I want to note that Wittgenstein left no title for these notes, which were edited and published posthumously by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, so the title is entirely my own. I’m working as an independent scholar, someone who’s lived with this text for forty-five years rather than reporting the consensus of a department. Forum members who know my work will recognize familiar ideas. Those who don’t are welcome to engage the ideas on their merits, which is the only standard that matters in this thread.

On Certainty is a notoriously difficult text, unfinished, written in fragments across the last eighteen months of Wittgenstein’s life, and resistant to the kind of systematic summary that academic philosophy tends to reward. Part of its difficulty, I want to suggest, comes from a source that hasn’t received enough attention. Wittgenstein uses the word “certainty” in at least four distinct senses throughout the text, and he moves between them without always flagging the transition. Much of the confusion in the secondary literature, and much of the productive disagreement, traces back to readers talking past each other because they’re tracking different uses of the word.

The four senses I want to work with are these:

Subjective certainty is the psychological state, conviction, the feeling of being sure. This is what Wittgenstein is consistently pushing against in OC. Certainty in this sense isn’t what he’s after, and distinguishing it from the others is the first clarifying move the text requires.

Hinge certainty is the bedrock sense, the non-epistemic certainty of propositions that stand fast for us, not because we’ve examined and verified them, but because they form the enabling conditions of any examination or verification at all. This is the heart of OC, and the sense most directly tied to Wittgenstein’s own concept of hinge propositions.

Epistemic certainty is the defeater-resistant standing a belief can have within a practice of justification, the legitimate, practice-indexed use of “I know” that Wittgenstein contrasts with both Moore’s overclaiming and the skeptic’s underclaiming. This sense is operative throughout OC even though Wittgenstein doesn’t name it as such.

Absolute certainty is the certainty of logical and mathematical necessity. Wittgenstein’s treatment of this sense in OC is the most complex and in some ways the most unresolved. He’s clearly aware that mathematical certainty has a different character from empirical hinge certainty, but the relationship between them is something the text gestures toward without fully settling.

A few things I want to be clear about from the start. Wittgenstein doesn’t explicitly draw these four distinctions himself. The taxonomy is mine, offered as a reading tool rather than a doctrine hidden in the text. What I’m claiming is that these distinctions are required by the text, that the confusions Wittgenstein is working against, and the moves he’s making, only become fully visible once you recognize that certainty is doing different work in different places throughout OC. The taxonomy doesn’t impose a system on a text that resists system. It provides a map for navigating terrain that Wittgenstein himself knew was unmapped.

I also want to be clear about the scope of this thread. My aim isn’t to limit myself to strict exegesis of OC. I’ll be working in three registers, what the text directly supports, what it implies but doesn’t fully develop, and where the distinctions lead when taken further than Wittgenstein himself goes. I’ll try to signal which register I’m in at each stage, because those are genuinely different kinds of claims and deserve to be evaluated differently.

In what follows I’ll take up each sense in turn, working through the relevant passages in OC and then developing what each sense implies beyond the text. I’ll start with subjective certainty, the sense Wittgenstein is arguing against, because clearing that ground first makes everything else easier to see.

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Hi Sam, I want to thank you for this thread. You are very thorough and the posts are quite detailed.

What I see at this point is that Wittgenstein is exposing a number of subtle differences and nuances in the use of “know”, within the context of an important categorical division. The important division is between the subjective certitude of “I know” (Moore’s use), and the sense of objective knowledge, “we know”.

The two are shown to be related to each other through practise, and this is what causes the difficulties involving many subtle differences and nuances. The common knowledge “we know” is supported by standard practise and therefore crosses into, and may even form the base for the subjective certitude of “I know”. So for example, “I know that the earth revolves around the sun”, just like Moore knows that this is one hand, and the basis of this certitude is the common practise which demonstrates that this is objective knowledge, something “we know”.

The principal issue which Wittgenstein seems to point to, is that the use of “I know” to represent subjective certitude extends into all sorts of situations, not necessarily supported by the common practise of objective knowledge. Sometimes “I know” is supported mainly by personal experience, and memory. This produces a vast variance of degrees of objective support for the subjective certitude of “I know”. At the two extremes are “I know” supported solely by personal experience, and “I know” supported by objective knowledge, with all degrees of mixing in between.

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Thanks for the kind words.

I want to push back on a few points, though, because I think the framing of subjective I know versus objective we know doesn’t quite capture what Witt is after in the opening remarks. Witt isn’t setting up a contrast between individual and collective knowledge. Moore’s mistake isn’t that he’s speaking for himself when he should be appealing to what we all know. The problem is that he’s confusing his conviction that he can’t be wrong with the epistemic use of I know has when it’s doing real work within the language-game of epistemology. And that confusion wouldn’t be fixed by replacing I with we. Witt makes this point early on in OC 2 when he says that from its seeming so to everyone, it doesn’t follow that it is so. Collective conviction is still conviction.

I’d also push back on the idea of a spectrum of degrees between subjective experience and objective knowledge. Witt isn’t arranging knowledge claims on a continuum from less to more objectively supported. He’s making a point about the grammar of I know, about what the expression is doing in different contexts. The distinction between what I’ve been calling hinge certainty and epistemic certainty isn’t a matter of degree. They’re different in kind. A hinge doesn’t become an epistemic claim by accumulating more support, and an epistemic claim doesn’t become a hinge by being widely shared. They operate at different levels entirely.

You’re right that practice is central, and that’s an important observation. But I think its role in Witt’s account is more fundamental than providing objective backing for subjective conviction. Practice (general comment: think of a practice as an established use) is what gives I know its meaning in the first place. Without a practice to discipline the claim, I know doesn’t have weaker standing. It has no standing at all. That’s precisely what Witt is showing about Moore’s use of “I know here is one hand.” The words are grammatically well-formed but they’re idle because they’ve been lifted out of any practice that could give them epistemic life.

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It’s not that the practices underlying hinges are essentially nonlinguistic. Rather, words are themselves actions which belong to larger systems of actions forming our bedrock practices. Someone can conceivably be persuaded to see the world our way through our words.

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That’s supposed to read “…in the acting itself.” I’ll edit that.

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OK, I think I see where I’m having a problem. It is your use of “epistemic”, and related terms like epistemology. This is not Wittgenstein’s word, so I don’t understand it as a part of any system or structure in the text. It is your word, so it is a part of your interpretive structure. However, I don’t think I understand how you are using it.

I offered a distinction between the subjective knowledge of “I know” (knowledge derived solely from my personal experience), and the objective knowledge which I termed as “we know”. As far as I understand, the way I used “we know” is to signify “epistemic knowledge”, what “know” is doing in the language-game of epistemology.

But you reject my “we know”, and instead use “epistemic knowledge”. But to me, they both mean the same thing. Can you explain to me why you think that the epistemic use of “know” is anything other than the meaning of “we know”?

I think I didn’t make myself clear. I didn’t mean a spectrum of degrees from one extreme to the other. I meant that each claim of “I know…” contains elements of both, personal subjective knowledge unique to myself, as well as elements of objective, epistemic knowledge, what “we know”. What I mean by degrees is that some claims are weighted on the one side, while others are heavier on the other, but each instance of “I know…” has elements of both.

This is why it is so difficult to separate out distinctly different uses of “know”. Each time it is used, there is a mix of each, and we can’t say that it’s exclusively one or the other. And I agree that it is a difference in kind, as you say, but still, in each instance when someone says “I know…” there is a mixing of the two kinds inherent within the statement. We separate them in principle, right here in this discussion, but in actual practise it would be very difficult to make a clear division.

You call them “hinge certainty” and “epistemic certainty”, to me it’s “I know” and “we know”. Forget the difference of terminology, what I think is important is that each instance of “I know…” has aspects of both types embedded. This is why there is so much nuanced meaning in the use of “I know”. Never is it all one or all the other. Each instance has aspects of both and they can be judged as weighted more toward one type or the other.

Not to be an intentional problem causer, but I’d have to disagree with this. The weaker sense of “I know” must be the primary sense. This sense refers to what I believe, based on my experience. The stronger sense develops from practise, discipline, and this is basically justification. Personal experience, and what I believe, as a living being, is prior to justification which comes through communication. So that weaker, unjustified sense, which is more like “I believe”, is the primary sense, as first sense.

However, the discipline of epistemology, sets justification as a criterion, and thereby seeks to exclude that weaker sense, even though the weaker sense inheres within common language use. Moore’s use is that common use. But epistemology seeks to separate that practise from the epistemic practise, through that criterion of justification, leaving it as nothing more than “I believe”. The problem though, is as I explained above, the two always comingle, and since the weaker is prior it inheres deeper, and it cannot be completely jettisoned.

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I think I should point out, that your talk of hinges is misplaced here. You are reading ahead to things talked about later, and applying your own interpretation back onto things talked about here at the beginning. So far, he has portrayed certainty as ‘impossible to be wrong’. And the common use of “know” does not ever guarantee this. That is the issue visited by Plato in The Theaetetus.

You are implying that he has offered a framework of hinges to guarantee this certainty, but that is not the case. Since you are reading ahead, I will remind you that it is important to note that Wittgenstein later dismisses this definition of “objective certainty” (to exclude the possibility of error), as itself impossible, therefore a useless definition. He then settles on a completely different definition of “objective certainty”, and this is the type of certainty that hinges are proposed as supportive of, not the useless definition of “certainty” which mean error is impossible.

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This is the very important issue with the difference between “I know” in the subjective sense, and “I know” in the objective (what you call “epistemic”) sense. In the subjective sense, “I know” signifies an attitude of certitude. But we all know that the person saying “I know” in this sense, could be wrong.

So Wittgenstein proceeds under the assumption that the objective (epistemic) form of “I know” ought to be able to ensure the certitude implied by the subjective form, as certainty. However he quickly discovers now, as Plato did, that this is not possible. It is impossible to exclude the possibility of error, and unreasonable to expect such a thing.

Then he moves along to propose something else, as the underlying, essential feature of objective (epistemic) knowledge. This is more like, ‘what would be accepted by a rational human being’. This provides his new definition of “objective certainty”, after dismissing ‘to exclude the possibility of error’. But I will argue that it’s really misrepresented as a form of “certainty”.

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I want to push back on a few points because I think there are some misreadings of what Witt is doing that are worth clarifying.

You say that Witt “proceeds under the assumption that the objective form of ‘I know’ ought to be able to ensure the certitude implied by the subjective form.” But Witt isn’t arguing under that assumption. He’s dismantling it. The whole thrust of the opening remarks is that subjective certainty, the feeling of conviction, can’t do epistemic work and was never in a position to do so. Witt isn’t looking for an objective version of “I know” that delivers what the subjective version promises. He’s showing that the subjective version was never promising anything epistemically meaningful in the first place. The direction of the argument is the opposite of what you’re describing.

The comparison with Plato is also misleading here. Witt isn’t reluctantly discovering that we can’t exclude the possibility of error, as though that were a disappointing result. He’s showing that the demand to exclude all possibility of error is itself confused, one that misunderstands the grammar of know. This isn’t skepticism. It’s a grammatical investigation into how our epistemic concepts actually function.

I also disagree with the idea that Witt moves toward something like “what would be accepted by a rational human being” as a new definition of objective certainty. Witt isn’t proposing a new definition at all. He’s describing how I know already functions within our language-games, where there are recognized procedures for checking and where claims are answerable to shared standards. That’s not a replacement theory of certainty. It’s an observation about ordinary epistemic life that was there all along but that philosophers keep overlooking because they’re chasing another idea.

Finally, your suggestion that epistemic certainty is “misrepresented as a form of certainty” concerns me because it assumes that real certainty must mean the total exclusion of error. But that’s exactly the conflation that causes confusion when reading OC. Epistemic certainty, the kind of standing a belief can have within a language-game where it’s supported by proper grounds and resistant to relevant challenges, is a genuine form of certainty. It’s just not absolute certainty in the logical or mathematical sense. Those are different senses of the word and keeping them apart is important to understanding what Witt is doing. Collapsing them into one and then concluding that anything short of absolute certainty isn’t really certainty at all is precisely the mistake the text is working to dissolve.

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Yes, he is dismantling the certitude involved with “I know”, but that is at a slow pace, and it hasn’t progressed very far at this point in the text. At this point, he takes the subjective certitude, and tries to replace it with an objective form. So he moves from “I am certain that…” to “It is certain that…”.

He has dismantle subjective certitude, and now he looks to a further type, what it means to be objectively certain. However, he will proceed to show that “it is certain that…”, if it is assumed to mean that the possibility of error has been excluded, cannot be obtained. So this will be where the dismantling of “certainty” really starts.

He has shown that “I am certain that…” cannot exclude the possibility of error. So he inquires concerning “it is certain that…”, and proceeds to show that this does not exclude the possibility of error either. After this, he will proceed with another proposal for “objectively certain”, which does not exclude that possibility. So it becomes not explicitly a dismantling of certainty, but a compromising.

I disagree with this. He clearly describes how common use of “I know…” implies that the user believes oneself to be certain. That is what “I know this is a hand” adds to “this is a hand”. The speaker is expressing a form of certainty. However, we see that quite often when people use “I know” in this way, the speaker is in error. That kind of certainty cannot exclude the possibility of error. So, Witt looks for an objective form of “I know”, what you called epistemic knowing, and I called “we know”, questioning whether this objective form of knowledge could do what the subjective failed at, and this is to exclude the possibility of error. It seems like, “It is certain that…” ought to imply that the possibility of error has been excluded.

You can frame what he is showing, (that it is impossible to exclude the possibility of error), however you want. It might be framed as “a disappointing result”, or it might be a misunderstanding of “the grammar of know”. The different frames are not relevant, and there are other ways to frame it. I would say that it’s more about the grammar of “certainty” as implied by the title.

If you want, I can produce the quote where he redefines “objectively certain”. This is a little while after he dismisses “to exclude the possibility of error” as unreal because it’s impossible. However, this would be to jump ahead in the book, and that might not be appropriate at this time.

To me, it appears like you are getting distracted by your epistemic interests. The book is about “certainty”, it is not about “know”. He leads into the inquiry into “certainty”, through examples of “I know”, which seem to demonstrate some form of certitude. But “I know” is not the principal subject here, “certainty” is. So it’s actually you who is chasing another idea. You are looking for some sort of epistemology, thereby focusing on the word “know”. But Wittgenstein is looking for certainty, with very little concern for epistemology.

This is looking way too far ahead in the book now. However, I will point out that I think it is your interpretation, not mine, which leads to confusion. Look, you want to separate “epistemic certainty” from “certainty” in the “mathematical sense”. How could this proposal be anything other than the seeds of confusion? That is not Witt’s proposal, it is yours, and it is a recipe for confusion.

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I’m not going to continue arguing with you. We just disagree and we won’t resolve these differences by continuing to argue.

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I think we’re making good progress though. I’m starting to get a feel for how you are using “epistemic”, and how your application of this category (in my opinion) misleads you in your interpretive picture of On Certainty.

However, I have not yet discovered why you are employing this interpretive principle. That would help me to understand why you create your picture in the way that you do. Understanding why you create the picture the way that you do would produce the possibility of redeeming yourself in my eyes (changing my opinion).

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I agree with Wittgenstein (and you) that Moore didn’t get it right in these arguments but he did identify where we should look for an answer. Those articles have lasted well, because even if they are wrong, they are wrong in interesting ways.

That’s not wrong. Except one would have thought that if that was what Moore thought, he would have realized his argument was a non-starter. I think he was reaching out for the kinds of argument that W uses, but couldn’t quite get there.

People do not always express their beliefs in words. Sometimes they express them in actions. I don’t see a problem with non-linguistic hinges. But sometimes, as in “the earth has existed for billions of years” it is hard to see how that could be done.

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I’m not saying all hinges are non-linguistic. So, if some hinges are linguistic that would account for statements like “the Earth has existed for billions of years.”

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I agree with that, but feel the need to explain why. It’s simply that marking one’s own homework is never convincing. But the consequence is that “I know that p” has no force that “p” doesn’t have. In effect it is a rhetorical elaboration, meant to give more assurance, but without actually providing any grounds.

But then I have to acknowledge that the constant use of “I know…” in these discussions (and, occasionally in others I’ve seen) can be used in such a way that it does have force. But let’s explain that it is here being used in the same say as “S knows” - roughly, it adopts a third person stance to one’s own knowledge. In fact, we do that all the time, but without any use of “know”.

23 If I don’t know whether someone has two hands (say, whether they have 'been amputated or not) I shall believe his assurance that he has two hands, if he is trustworthy.

This brings up something that I think is usually overlooked. We don’t always cite evidence and grounds to justify a claim to knowledge. Sometimes we cite such grounds as “trustworthy”, which amount to citing credentials rather then actual evidence. That’s because knowledge is not just a language game, but relies of competences and skills. These underpin the language game. Hence I think that Moore would have been justified in citing “I can see” or “It is my hand”, rather than attempting to provide evidence of the normal sorts.

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You’ve made some good points, particularly the point that “I know that p” sometimes has no force that “p” doesn’t have on its own. That’s very close to something Witt would develop later in the text. And the comment about I know sometimes functioning like a third-person report on one’s own epistemic position is interesting.

Where I’d push back is on the suggestion that Moore would have been justified in citing “I can see” or “It is my hand” rather than providing ordinary evidence. I don’t think this solves Moore’s problem but just relocates it. The issue isn’t that Moore chose the wrong grounds. The issue is that in the philosophical context where he’s trying to prove the existence of the external world, no grounds can do that work, because the framework within which grounds have their standing is precisely what’s being called into question. Saying “I can see” or “It is my hand” presupposes the very framework the idealist is challenging. Moore can’t escape the problem by finding better evidence because the problem was never about evidence in the first place. It’s about the status of the framework that makes justification (evidence/good reasons) possible.

I’d resist the idea that competences stand outside or underneath the language-game as an independent source of justification. For Witt, the competence to recognize a hand, to see, to check, these are all embedded in the form of life within which I know has its use. They’re part of what constitutes the language-game, not a separate foundation for it. This is why Moore’s problem can’t be solved by appealing to his perceptions. Perceptions already operates within the framework, and it’s the framework itself that the idealist is questioning.

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But you just did formulate it as a linguist hinge, in saying “the world holds together from moment to moment”.

The objection I have to non- or pre- linguistic hinges is that we talk about them.

That is, along the lines of Davidson, and in keeping with “the world is all that is the case”, there is no uninterpreted , and so pre- linguistic, world. Any hinge can be expressed as a statement.

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This I believe is a common confusion, and we’ve argued about this in the past. The confusion here is a clear case of what I posted earlier in the thread on non-linguistic hinges, namely conflating the certainty itself with our description of it.

When I say, “the world holds together from moment to moment,” I’m using language to point to something that operates prior to language. The fact that I need words to discuss it in a philosophy thread doesn’t make the certainty itself linguistic. For e.g., a dog acts with the certainty that the world is continuous, and so do newborn infants. Neither of them has formulated a proposition. The certainty is there in their engagement with the world before any language enters the picture. My describing it in words doesn’t make it a linguistic phenomenon, no more than a biologist’s description of a heartbeat makes the heartbeat a linguistic phenomenon.

The appeal to Davidson and “there is no uninterpreted world” is doing something different from what you think. Davidson’s point about interpretation concerns how we make sense of beliefs and meaning within a framework of rationality. It doesn’t show that a pre-linguistic creature’s unreflective engagement with the world is somehow propositional. The claim that “any hinge can be expressed as a statement” is true but irrelevant. Of course I can put any certainty into words after the fact. The question isn’t whether we can talk about non-linguistic hinges. Obviously, we can, and we have to if we’re going to do philosophy. The question is whether the certainty itself depends on language for its existence, and it plainly doesn’t. The certainty was operative in living creatures long before language existed. Requiring that all certainties be linguistic because we use language to discuss them is like requiring that all of the physical world be linguistic because physics is written in sentences.

The statement “the world is all that is the case” is from the Tractatus, and it’s worth noting that Witt himself moved substantially beyond that position in his later work, including OC. Using early Witt to argue against a distinction of the later Witt, I believe, is not a good move.

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I’m not contesting the first sentence. it seems to me that we tend to get over-focused on language and evidence as gathered and weighed as a activity of speaking. But underlying the propositions and inferences is a cluster of competences, starting with the competence to gather evidence and weigh it. Perhaps what I should have suggested is something more like your second sentence in that quotation - that the skills and competences are part of what sets up the possibility of the hinge existence.
We all know that language-games are based on, or part of, practices and that practices are constituents of a way/form of life. But W gives very little detail and I’ve always been curious about what more might be said about them.

I’m inclined to think of the some, but not necessarily all, epistemic competences are not linguistic and so are amongst the practices on which the language game is built.

That’s right. When we say that the dog is expecting its dinner, we are describing a behaviour pattern. But that behaviour pattern justifies us in attributing some rationality to the animal. I don’t think that we can neatly draw a line round language and say that creatures who do not use language are not rational. It’s not that simple.

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I always found the concept of ‘hinge certainties’ quite interesting from a psychological point of view. They are even used nowadays to understand some mental disorders like OCD (see e.g. this paper: Sanneke de Haan, Erik Rietveld & Damiaan Denys, On the nature of obsessions and compulsions - PhilArchive which argues that OCD patients lose the ‘grasp’ of certainties held by those who have not the disorder).