No, you are not, but it is what is implied by your insistence that there are non-propositional certainties, your “non-linguistic hinges”.
You say that “Non linguistic” means “not normally functioning as a proposition inside the space where we give grounds, check, doubt, correct, and argue.” This can’t work. If your certainty of your hand cannot be set out as a proposition, it cannot function as an explanation. You may demonstrate that you have a hand by using it to pick up a pen, and that is exactly to show the truth of “here is a hand”. That there is no space between the proposition and the hand is pivotal to Wittgenstein’s approach.
I don’t understand how you are using the word “counterfactual.”
The number 63 says:
If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, then certain language‐games lose some of their importance, others become important. And that’s how – gradually – the use of the vocabulary of language changes.
Are you saying that the imagining is being presented over against what the facts are without such imagining?
Now I don’t understand what you are asking. You’re proposing an imagining without such imagining? Isn’t that blatant contradiction. Why would you think I was saying that?
Look at the first line of 63:
“If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain language-games lose some of their importance, while others become important.”
Do you see that there is an implied “facts as they are”? And, their is a proposed “imagining” of the facts otherwise than “as they are”. Isn’t this exactly what a “counterfactual” is, to imagine “the facts otherwise than as they are”?
What is it about certain propositions and not others that exempts them from doubt? Is it subjective certainty? What one person is certain of another may not be. It is not subjective certainty but what is reasonable. What determines what is reasonable or unreasonable?
Thus we should not call anybody reasonable who believed something in despite of scientific evidence.
He gives an example:
239. Catholics believe as well that in certain circumstances a wafer completely changes its nature, and at the same time that all evidence proves the contrary. And so if Moore said “I know that this is wine and not blood”, Catholics would contradict him.
This continues a line of thought from 92:
However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? 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.
The king’s subjective certainty and inherited background would have to be uprooted and replaced with one based on scientific evidence.
105. All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.
298. 'We are quite sure of it does not mean just that every single person is certain of it, but that we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education.
When Wittgenstein says:
342. … it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
He is not talking about just anything or everything we do not doubt, but rather about “certain things” within our system of knowledge. They are the hinges on which our questions and doubts turn. They are things that are not doubted because they are established as known. They allow us to move past subjective certainties that cannot be reconciled with different subjective certainties of others.
But that is not what is being said in the context at all. You’ve jumped way out of context with your quotes. I suggest that you are offering a distorted interpretation, distorted for the purpose of supporting an understanding of “language-games” which is other than that being offered by Wittgenstein.
Look, at 63 he says that we can imagine that if facts we different, our language -games would be different, That’s clearly a counterfactual example. if the facts were different than they actually are, the consequence would be different language-games.
That’s the starting premise. Then he makes a second premise at 64, the meaning of a word is it’s function, like the function of an official.
Then he proceeds at 65 to turn 63 backward, to start with changing language-games, and he says that the cause of different language-games is not different facts (even though we imagine in the counterfactual example that different facts is what would cause different language-games). The real cause of different language-games is the second premise (64) different meanings, different, and changing functions for the same word.
Wittgenstein addresses that interpretation in several places in On Certainty but perhaps the most precise rebuttal comes from Philosophical Investigation Part 2:
Xll
If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar?—Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature.
(Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest does not fall back upon these possible causes of the formation of concepts; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes.
I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize—then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to
him.
Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian, for instance.) Is it a mere question of pleasing and ugly?
(emphasis mine).
Paine, you are going in the opposite direction, further and further out of context. I asked you to look at what is written, in the context, as presented, because your last post took material from far outside of the context. Now you’ve gone even further out of context, to a completely different book, “Philosophical Investigations”.
The problem here seems clear. You are unwilling to address what Wittgenstein has said in this particular context, because you cannot understand it to be consistent with how you interpret things which he has said in other contexts. I suggest that you stop trying to force things to fit into an overall, consistent, ‘Wittgensteinian System’. He didn’t write that way, his material is chock full of ambiguity and inconsistencies. Please take it as it is, and stop trying to force it into an interpretive picture which is “a whole”.
I simply pointed to reasons why your reading is mistaken. I put the statement side by side with others. Your interpretation does not fit with other statements. I don’t have a picture that integrates all that has been said.
The website is telling me we should get a room. I will let you have the last word.
You did not put the statements side by side with others. You refused to look at the statements, only looking at my interpretation of those statements, and putting that interpretation side by side with other statements. On the basis of this comparison you concluded that my interpretation must be wrong.
If it was Wittgenstein’s statements which you put side by side with others, you would conclude that his statements are inconsistent, not that my interpretation is inconsistent. Instead, you put my interpretation side by side with other statements from far away context, and concluded that my interpretation must be wrong, without even comparing my interpretation to Wittgenstein’s statements which they are an interpretation of. How can you judge an interpretation without comparing it to the thing which it is an interpretation of?
What I am asking is that you take a look at exactly what is said between 61 and 65, and put that side by side with my interpretation. Judge the interpretation in relation to what it is an interpretation of, instead of in relation to what is written in so far off other place. Your reference to far off places, instead of looking directly at the context, is severely misleading you.
I’ve mentioned before that you’re conflating the certainty itself with our ability to describe it. When I pick up a pen, the certainty that my hand is there isn’t the proposition “here is a hand.” The proposition is how we describe what’s happening after the fact, for e.g., when we do philosophy. The certainty is in the picking up. That’s exactly what OC 204 says, what lies at the bottom of the language-game is our acting, not propositions we believe are true.
Your claim that if a certainty can’t be set out as a proposition it can’t function as an explanation misses the point, because hinges don’t function as explanations. They’re not in the business of explaining anything. They’re the conditions under which explaining becomes possible. Asking a hinge to function as an explanation is like asking the ground to function as a step. The ground is what you step on. It’s not itself a step.
And your claim that “there is no space between the proposition and the hand” actually supports my position rather than yours. If there’s no space between the proposition and the hand, then the hand is doing the work, not the proposition. “Here is a hand” is a description we give of something already operative in our engagement with the world. A dog fetching a ball acts with the certainty that the ball persists, that the ground holds, that the world hangs together. No propositions are involved. The certainty is fully operative without ever taking propositional form. Describing it in propositional form is what we do when we step back and philosophize, but the description isn’t the certainty. The certainty was there before the description and would be there without it.
Your worry seems to be that non-propositional certainties are metaphysically loaded, that I’m smuggling in a world of pre-interpreted facts. But I’m doing the opposite. I’m pointing to something more basic than interpretation. A child reaching for a toy isn’t interpreting the world. It’s engaging with it. The certainty that the toy persists isn’t an interpretation or a proposition or a theory. It’s a condition of the child’s engagement. Calling it non-linguistic isn’t saying it’s ineffable or mystical. It’s saying it operates at a level that doesn’t require language to function, even though we need language to talk about it. That’s no more mysterious than saying the sunset existed before anyone described it. Describing a sunset in language doesn’t make the sunset linguistic.
Your argument rests on a claim that I think is mistaken, i.e., that facts cannot change. When Witt says at OC 63 “if the facts of nature were different” he’s not talking about eternal metaphysical truths sitting outside our practices. He’s talking about the natural regularities within which our practices have their life, that objects have weight, that fire burns, that seasons are ongoing. But facts in the relevant sense can and do change. It was once a fact that no human had been to the moon. It’s no longer a fact. More importantly, what counts as a fact is itself determined within a framework. The framework determines what counts as a fact, and the facts shape the framework. They’re mutually dependent, which is exactly what the riverbed metaphor captures. The water shapes the bed and the bed channels the water.
So, the gap you’re drawing between OC 63 and 65 isn’t really there. OC 63 says if the facts of nature were different, our language-games would be different. OC 65 shows that our language games do change over time. These are compatible because the facts of our situation do change, and because the relationship between facts and frameworks isn’t one-directional. When the riverbed shifts, what counts as solid ground shifts with it, and new facts emerge within the new framework.
Your final point, that if frameworks aren’t based in facts then we have no claim to certainty, rests on the assumption that certainty must be grounded in something outside our practices. But that’s the foundationalist picture Witt is dismantling throughout OC. Certainty doesn’t come from facts guaranteeing our framework from the outside. It comes from the framework itself standing fast for us. OC 204, what lies at the bottom is our acting. OC 94, our world-picture is the inherited background against which we distinguish between true and false. The certainty isn’t derived from facts. The facts get their standing from the certainty. Asking where the facts are in all this is like asking what holds up the bedrock. Nothing holds it up. That’s what makes it bedrock.
Consider §94: ”But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
And OC §341: “That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt.”
In OC, our certainties are both propositional and truth-apt.
The certainty that there is a pen in your hand concerns exactly the truth of “There is a pen in your hand”. What else could the certainty that there is a pen in your hand be of, if not the truth of “There is a pen in your hand”? The alternative would be to follow Moyal-Sharrock into insisting that all belief, especially belief-that, reduces to belief-in. You of all people will be aware of how much this strains against what we might call the standard reading of OC.
If our beliefs are to act as conditions, as you say they do, then they must be true. If they are true , they are propositional. This is not to make them empirical; that the bishop stays on its own colour throughout a game is not an empirical fact, yet it is a fact.
That the dog fetched the ball is propositional; there is no space between the fact and the true proposition that sets it out. You are trying to force a space between what we say about the world and what we do in the world. That’s a very non-Wittgensteinian move.
OC is an incomplete work, and it would be a mistake to suppose that it reaches a firm conclusion. What we can point to now, after OC, is work on constitutive definitions, on the way in which language games are constructed by accepting constitutive rules. The sharpest way to understand hinges is to consider them to be such rules, and hence to consider them to be propositional and truth-functional yet true.
OK, I accepted this, that facts change, that’s what Paine suggested to me. But it makes no significant difference. The issue is the relationship between the language-games and certainty. If facts change, then facts cannot provide the grounding for certainty. Ok, we seem to agree on that.
So if changing facts are the cause of changing language-games rather than changing meaning (which is what I think 64 clearly indicates, that changing meaning is the cause of changing language-games), we still do not have any grounds for certainty within the language-games. That’s why I told Paine that this interpretation makes no significant difference.
In yours and Paine’s interpretation, language-games are actually changing due to changing facts, therefore “facts” can’t provide what is required for certainty. In my interpretation, facts remain the same as facts (at the time Wittgenstein wrote this no man had been on the moon), and Wittgenstein proposes a counterfactual (imagine that the facts are other than they are).
However, in my interpretation, language-games are forever changing due to changing meaning (changing “function” by the terms of 64), and this also means that there is no certainty within the language-games. Even if the facts themselves remain the same, the meaning of the words used to express the facts can change, therefore certainty is not supported.
But 65 clearly describes a changing framework. If “standing fast” is what is required for certainty, according to Wittgenstein, then 65: “When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change”, clearly indicates that Wittgenstein thinks certainty is impossible.
Do you see this? If certainty comes from “standing fast”, whether it is the facts or the framework, neither of these actually do stand fast, according to Wittgenstein. Therefore certainty is not supported according to Wittgenstein, at this point in the book.
Your argument has sharpened so I want to address what’s new rather than repeat old ground. At least as much as possible.
You cite OC 94 and 341 as showing that certainties are propositional and truth-apt. But look at what OC 94 actually says. It says our world-picture is “the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.” The background against which we distinguish true and false isn’t itself something we distinguish as true or false. It’s the condition of that distinction having an application. That’s not a propositional role. It’s a framework role. And OC 341 says some propositions are exempt from doubt. Exempt from doubt means they don’t enter the space where we assess truth and falsity. Witt uses the word propositions there, but he also says repeatedly that these propositions have a peculiar role, that they look empirical but don’t function empirically. OC 136 says, “When Moore says he knows such and such, he is really enumerating a lot of empirical propositions which we affirm without special testing; propositions, that is, which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions.” The peculiar logical role is precisely that they aren’t functioning as ordinary truth-apt claims.
Your move from “if conditions must be true, they must be propositional” smuggles in an assumption I reject. Conditions of possibility aren’t the kind of thing that are true or false. The ground holding beneath your feet isn’t true or false. It’s a condition of there being a stable world in which truth and falsity have application. Calling it true already treats it as a proposition within the space of epistemic assessment, and that’s exactly the space Witt says hinges don’t occupy.
Your chess analogy is interesting, but it supports my point rather than yours. The rule that the bishop stays on its own color isn’t a move in the game. It’s what makes moves possible. And a player who has internalized the rules doesn’t consult propositions about bishop movement before acting. The rule is operative in the playing without taking propositional form in the player’s mind. That’s exactly the relationship I’m describing between non-linguistic hinges and our engagement with the world. Your suggestion that hinges are constitutive rules is actually closer to my position than you seem to realize. Constitutive rules define a practice. They aren’t moves within it. But they don’t need to be explicitly propositional to be operative. They can be displayed entirely in action.
On Moyal-Sharrock, I’m not reducing belief-that to belief-in. I’m saying there’s a level of certainty that operates prior to the distinction between belief-that and belief-in. The child reaching for the toy isn’t believing-that or believing-in. It’s engaging. The certainty is in the engagement. We can describe that engagement propositionally after the fact, and when we do, we get propositions. But the propositions are our descriptions. They’re not what’s doing the work at the level Witt is pointing to. That’s not a strain against the standard reading of OC. It’s what OC 204 explicitly says.
It is not that we cannot distinguish between things in that background that are either true or false, but simply that we do not, unless we have good reason to. That background is certain for us.
147. The picture of the earth as a ball is a good picture, it proves itself everywhere, it is also a simple picture - in short, we work with it without doubting it.
At one time it was believed by many that the earth is flat. People were certain of it. It was part of the background against which true and false were distinguished.
Fooloso4, the flat earth example is a good one, but it illustrates my point rather than yours. “The earth is flat” was a linguistic hinge. It had propositional form, it functioned within a system of beliefs, and it eventually shifted. That’s exactly what the riverbed metaphor describes. Some propositions harden and function as channels, and over time some hard ones become fluid. No disagreement there.
But you’re treating all hinges as though they were like the flat earth, linguistic propositions embedded in a system that we happen not to question but could. That’s where we disagree. Your claim is that we can distinguish true and false within the background but simply don’t unless we have good reason to. That works for linguistic hinges like “the earth is flat.” We didn’t evaluate it, then we had reason to, and it shifted. But try applying that to the deepest hinges (bedrock). Can we evaluate whether objects persist but simply choose not to? What would it look like to have “good reason” to check whether objects persist? The question doesn’t make sense, because the very activity of evaluating presupposes that objects persist long enough to be evaluated. You can’t check whether objects persist without relying on objects persisting while you check. It’s not that we don’t evaluate these things. It’s that we can’t, not as a practical limitation but as a grammatical one. Your description treats the entire background as made up of things that could in principle be evaluated. That’s true of some hinges. It’s not true of the bedrock ones.
When Witt says at OC 94 that our world-picture is the inherited background against which we distinguish true and false, he’s not saying the background is made up of propositions we’ve chosen not to evaluate. He’s saying it’s the condition under which evaluation is possible at all. There’s a difference between a proposition we don’t question and something that makes questioning possible. The persistence of objects, the existence of other people, the continuity of experience, these aren’t propositions sitting in the background waiting for science to get around to them. They’re what makes the background a background.
OC 147 is about the picture of the earth as a ball. That’s a scientific picture, a linguistic hinge. It proves itself, we work with it, we don’t doubt it. But the certainty that there is an earth at all, that physical objects persist, that experience is continuous, those aren’t pictures that prove themselves. They’re conditions of anything proving itself. Confusing the two is confusing the riverbed with the ground beneath it.
Since you have opened up the topic to all, I will reformulate my objections given elsewhere.
First of all, the use of the term in your paraphrase of the book takes the use of a metaphor used in specific contexts and makes it a component of how language games work. This encounters the difficulties observed up thread by @Ludwig regarding the mixing of metaphors. The bigger problem for me is that the model being assembled is a methodology that Wittgenstein avoided in his other writings.
My second objection concerns the general idea of how certainty appears in language games. In my comment above, I quoted from Philosophical Investigations where Wittgenstein says:
“The kind of certainty is the kind of language-game.”
That language seems to militate against a taxonomy of certainties, whether yours or others.
You say I’m taking metaphors used in specific contexts and making them components of a systematic account, which is something Witt avoided. But there’s a difference between building a system and making explicit the structure that’s already there in the text. I’m not imposing a framework from outside. I’m describing what Witt is doing when he reaches for different images at different points. He uses the hinge metaphor to emphasize what must stay put for inquiry to turn. He uses the riverbed metaphor to show that some certainties can shift over time. He uses scaffolding to point to what gets removed once the structure stands. These aren’t interchangeable. He chose different images because he was pointing to different features of the same phenomenon. Noting that these images track different aspects of certainty isn’t systematizing in the way Witt resisted. It’s taking seriously the fact that he chose different images for different purposes. Witt resisted the construction of philosophical theories that explain. He didn’t resist the activity of describing clearly what is already in view. That’s what he says philosophy should do at PI 124. “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.”
On the PI quote, “The kind of certainty is the kind of language game.” I think this supports what I’m doing rather than undermining it. Witt is saying that certainty takes its character from the language game in which it appears. Different language games, different kinds of certainty. That implies there are different kinds of certainty, which is exactly what I’m doing. If there are different uses of certainty in language games, then certainties differ. Describing those differences isn’t violating the principle. It’s following it.
The PI remark is also important. Witt is saying you can’t measure certainty about someone’s pain against mathematical certainty as though they were on a single scale. “Mathematical certainty is not a psychological concept.” He’s resisting the idea of a single undifferentiated notion of certainty, which is exactly what my taxonomy resists. Collapsing all certainty into one kind is the move Witt is warning against, not the move of distinguishing different uses of certainty.
And the quote actually opens a door to non-linguistic hinges. If certainty takes its character from the kind of practice in which it appears, then pre-linguistic practices generate pre-linguistic certainties. The child’s engagement with the world is a kind of practice, and the certainty there takes its character from that engagement, not from any propositional formulation we might later give it.
The condition that makes the picture and evaluation possible is not part of that picture. Evaluation is made on the basis of that picture.
Our disagreement is not due to lack of clarification. It is a matter of what is to count as a hinge. A dog acting without doubt is not a hinge it is simply the absence of doubt. The quote from Goethe is not “in the beginning was the hinge”.