Why "On Certainty" should be called "On Doubt"

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Some prominent Wittgenstein scholars, like Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Avrum Stroll, and Ray Monk, view On Certainty as a distinct new phase in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Moyal-Sharrock even has a collection of essays called The Third Wittgenstein and views the book as a revolutionary shift in his thought. However, I’ve long believed that On Certainty is just a natural extension of the philosophy Wittgenstein advances in his Philosophical Investigations (PI).

Wittgenstein spent the last 18 months of his life writing the notebooks which would become the book On Certainty, but he didn’t give it that title. His literary executors, G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, named the book when they edited and published his notes in 1969. I think they “done messed up, A. A. Ron”. Soon after reading the book more than 20 years ago, my initial reaction was that a better title would have been On Knowledge. However, more recently I have come to the conclusion that it should have been called On Doubt.

The title On Certainty makes Wittgenstein sound like a Foundationalist, whereas this was one of his main targets in PI. Wittgenstein isn’t just gathering his thoughts about “being sure” in these notebooks; he is doing the same style of therapeutic philosophy that he did in PI. If the Investigations was his initial attack on Cartesianism then OC is where he finishes the job. The Private Language Argument showed that we can’t even name sensations without a shared, public world. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein continues that fight specifically against Cartesian Doubt.

Why I think On Doubt is a better title:

  1. It’s a therapy, not a thesis. Wittgenstein is not giving us a list of things to be certain about; he’s providing an intervention for the skeptic’s pathological doubt. Titling the work after the ‘healthy’ state of certainty risks overlooking the ‘disease’ of groundless questioning that he is attempting to dismantle.

  2. Doubt requires a background of trust. Like he argued in PI that you can’t have an isolated/private language because language requires a community, here he is arguing that you can’t have an isolated doubt that stands separate from everything else. Doubt isn’t a standalone act; it is parasitic on an inherited state of trust.
    To doubt a specific hardware part, you have to trust the language of physics. To doubt if a hand is yours, you have to trust the eyes you’re using to look at it. This “background of trust” is the ground you stand on to dig the hole of doubt. If you try to doubt the ground itself, the “spade of doubt” has nothing to dig into. As he says at §115: “The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”

  3. The Hinge is about the Door.
    The famous “hinge” metaphor (§341-343) is the best evidence for the title On Doubt. Wittgenstein argues that certain propositions stay fixed like the hinges of a door.
    The door is the specific thing we are questioning, investigating, or doubting at any given moment. But for that doubt to be a move in the game, it requires a fixed point of leverage. If you try to doubt the hinges and the door simultaneously, the door doesn’t “swing” better, it falls off the frame. You haven’t reached a deeper level of skepticism; you’ve made it impossible for the act of doubting to function.

Calling it On Certainty frames the book around a feeling. Calling it On Doubt frames it around Wittgenstein’s (wider sense of) grammar, by showing that doubting certain things isn’t intellectual, it’s a mechanical failure of language and our form of life. As he put it in PI: once justifications are exhausted, I’ve reached bedrock and my spade is turned. On Doubt is the study of that turning point.

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I think his title is good. The Cartesian doubt trumps all other meditations – so I think I would have been disappointed if Witt’s book was named On Doubt. To him, I think, certainty required more facetime because skepticism in the 18th century was the force to be reckoned. Certainty at the time was thought to be taken for granted without caution. (Of course, this is an error in critique, as we know, because it was also the time of the enlightenment).

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It’s not so much the title itself I’m interested in, but the interpretation of the text, which I think is brought into focus by the title On Doubt.

Wittgenstein isn’t just addressing “ordinary” doubts (like whether I left the stove on); he is providing an antidote to radical Cartesian doubt, which he argues is excluded by grammar.

Naming it On Certainty risks mistaking Wittgenstein for a Dogmatist (like G.E. Moore). But Wittgenstein isn’t taking sides in the debate. Instead, he attacks the root cause of the argument for both sides by showing that they share the same flawed presupposition: believing that “certainty” and “doubt” are intellectual choices made in a vacuum.

The skeptic believes they can doubt anything and everything without consequence; the dogmatist simply responds that they are wrong. Wittgenstein doesn’t only disagree with the skeptic; he offers a grammatical reason why the skeptic’s project is a non-starter. He shows that radical Cartesian doubt actually spins idle. It’s a doubt that tries to detach itself from the language and form of life required to express it.

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And what did I just say? Error in critique because now we are looking at the risk of becoming a dogmatist. The point I was trying to make it is, his flagship is the nonsensical doubting which leaves nothing to get a grip on. So, why not put the star on the title of his book?

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I’m not actually attacking your point about the “nonsensical doubting” being the flagship. I’m saying that the title On Certainty focuses on the wrong thing.

The “star” of the book imo isn’t the certainty itself; it’s the misapplication of doubt. Wittgenstein’s interest is with certainty as the limit where any normal speaker’s “spade is turned.”

Calling it On Certainty treats the “limit” as a destination. Calling it On Doubt treats the book as what it is: a diagnostic of the “idle wheel” of Cartesian skepticism. It’s not a manual on how to be sure; it’s a study of why the skeptic’s spade cannot dig further and remain grammatically sound.

A taxonomy of hinges?
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I like this thread, nice job.

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Interesting. I always assumed the title was ironic.

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Since it is a collection of notes put forward by the Editors after Wittgenstein’s death, I doubt the title was given ironically.

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:+1: I always misunderstood the intent of this book.

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I am inclined to agree with Luke that the collection does not represent a “third” period in the writing. But there are differences in some of the arguments that I need to absorb before talking about them.

Since the question of Wittgenstein’s scholars came up in the Other Place, it has struck me how much each of them select what makes sense to them in the same way I do to make an argument from the text. We do not have the hard line between notes and what is published to restrict speculation of intent. I am not on solid ground while others are stuck in mud.

But I can point to a continuity with previous Wittgenstein texts regarding the recognition of our life as the axis on which other propositions turn. Here is a collection of notes that mention “life”:

My life shows that I know, or am sure, that a chair is standing there, that a door is there, and so forth. I tell my friend, for example, “Take that chair over there”, “Shut the door”, and so on. -OC7

Does my life manifest that there is a hand there (namely my hand)? -OC9

The propositions that represent what Moore ‘knows’ are all of such a kind that one can barely imagine why anyone should believe the opposite. For example, the proposition that Moore has spent the whole of his life pretty close to the Earth. Once again, I can speak of myself here rather than of Moore. What could bring me to believe the opposite? Either a recollection or that it was told me. – Everything that I have seen or heard induces me to believe that no human being has ever been far from the Earth. Nothing in my world‐picture speaks for the opposite. -OC 93

Why isn’t it possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the Moon? And how could I try to do so?
Above all, the assumption that perhaps I have after all been there strikes me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, would be explained by it. It wouldn’t tie in with anything in my life. -OC 117

What is the basis of the belief that all human beings have parents? Experience. And how can I base this firm belief on my experience? Well, I base it not only on my having known the parents of some human beings, but also on everything I have learnt about the sexual life of human beings, their anatomy and physiology; and also on what I have heard about and seen of animals. But is that really a proof? -OC 240

One of these is that if someone’s arm has been hacked off, it won’t grow again. Another is that someone who’s been decapitated is dead and will never come to life again. -OC 274

My life consists in my being content with various things. -OC 344

I should like to regard this assurance not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life. (That’s very badly expressed and probably badly thought out as well.) -OC 358

What I’m aiming at is also to be found in the difference between the casual statement “I know that that’s a …” as it’s used in ordinary life, and the same utterance when it’s made by a philosopher. -OC 406

It would be no guess, and I could tell it to someone else with complete assurance, as something that isn’t to be doubted. But does that mean that it’s absolutely true? Can’t something that I quite definitely recognize as a tree, that I have seen here for the whole of my life, turn out to be something else? Can’t it baffle me?

And in spite of this, it was correct, in the circumstances that give this sentence sense, to say, “I know (I’m not just guessing) that that’s a tree”. To say “In truth, I only believe it” would be incorrect. It would be completely misleading to say: “I believe I’m called L. W.” And, true enough, I can’t be mistaken about this. But that doesn’t mean that I’m infallible about it. -OC 425

You must bear in mind that a language‐game is, so to speak, something unpredictable. I mean: it has no grounds. Isn’t reasonable (or unreasonable).
It’s just there – like our life. -OC 559

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It doesn’t to me. He was calling out to say that there are things that are certain before doubting makes sense. So, unlike other philosophers who start dismantling what have already been established as foundational – perception, for example, he was saying that certainty is real. There are things we can be certain of.
In any case, this is your thread – I have no intellectual investment in arguing about the titles of writings.

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I agree that he is defending the reality of a bedrock where the spade turns. My concern with the title is that the type of certainty Wittgenstein is talking about should not be conflated with the dogmatic certainty of someone like G.E. Moore (who tried to ‘prove’ he had hands).

I see Wittgenstein as providing therapy on the grammar of doubt. Moore tried to prove the skeptic wrong, but Wittgenstein showed that ‘I doubt if I have hands’ isn’t a meaningful doubt at all. He’s saying that radical doubt is impossible. Moore thought he was certain of his hands as a piece of knowledge, whereas Wittgenstein says that one cannot know that the statement ‘I have hands’ is true. This is because it’s something that cannot be meaningfully doubted (in most, everyday contexts).

The title “On Certainty” seems to hide that the point of the book is about the limits of what can meaningfully be doubted. Maybe that’s why some prominent scholars view the book as a distinct third chapter of his philosophy instead of a natural extension of PI?

I don’t view OC as a third chapter of his philosophy, but as a natural extension of the Investigations. He had already established the Form of Life concept and had already included non-linguistic things like facial expressions and primitive reactions in his definition of grammar. He wasn’t discovering a new type of foundation in OC; he was showing that the Cartesian skeptic ignores the animal grounding that makes language possible. My concern is that the title On Certainty misleads by suggesting a positive, intellectual discovery of certainty, rather than a study of the logical impossibility of doubt.

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Ha, ha, that makes me laugh, Luke. I interpret the book in the very opposite way. He demonstrates the logical impossibility of certainty, and this implies that doubt can never be annihilated.

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This is not what I understand reading the OC. To him, certainty is a given first, doubting then needs to be examined. If you really doubt if you have hands or your hands exist, then you should wonder where did you get the idea to doubt the existence of your hands?

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Since you seem to have had little difficulty with it, perhaps my opening post is an argument from autobiography. The title had long obscured for me that Wittgenstein’s aim was to provide a therapy against radical doubt. I believe naming the book On Doubt would better reflect what Wittgenstein is actually doing: describing the conditions that make doubt possible and the grammatical limits that render skepticism incoherent.

Doubt and certainty may be two sides of the same coin, but the side we choose to name matters for the efficacy of the therapy. On Certainty directs the reader toward a “given” bedrock; On Doubt focuses the reader on the process of dissolving the skeptic’s illusion.