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A Comfortable Sureness: Knowledge, Animality and Conceptual Investigations in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

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Abstract

This essay analyses some remarks of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in which Wittgenstein compares human behaviour to that of animals and says he wants to consider man as an animal. The essay’s main purpose is to show that these remarks are essentially understood as part and parcel of what Wittgenstein calls “conceptual investigations” and that, consequently, they give little support to On Certainty’s naturalistic interpretations. A second purpose of the essay is to show that Wittgenstein does not intend to combat the use of “I know” in contexts such as those evoked by Moore; rather he wants to draw attention to the different ways in which we say or can say “I know.”

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Notes

  1. Henceforth cited by the abbreviation OC followed by the paragraph number.

  2. In this context, see Perissinotto (2002).

  3. A reading of this type is presented by Wolgast (1994) who nevertheless maintains that this “naturalistic” turn in Wittgenstein is in contrast to many of the things he had previously said about philosophising and to the mistrust he had always shown towards explanation (or foundation) in philosophy. A partly similar reading, though with more nuances and distinctions, can be found in Malcolm (1982). More complex, but not without ambivalences, is the reading offered by Moyal-Sharrock (2016). More in tune with the present reading are those of Rhees (1997), Knott (1998) and Mota (2017).

  4. This use of the singular expression “language-game” may appear strange, to say the least. I would say that it is used here as a collective noun to indicate all the innumerable and varied linguistic games played or practised by human beings.

  5. English-speaking translators here translate “Sicherheit” as “certainty”, which is, however, also their translation of “Gewißheit”; elsewhere (OC, §511 and §617) they instead translate “Sicherheit” as “sureness”. I think the distinction between “Sicherheit” and “Gewißheit” should not be lost, and so I prefer here too to translate “Sicherheit” as “sureness”. An alternative translation could be “confidence”.

  6. For example, in the case of “I know that that’s a tree” spoken in the presence of a tree in broad daylight and without anyone having raised doubts about it (cf. OC, §481 and §483).

  7. Cf., for example, OC, §486: “‘Do you know or do you only believe that your name is L. W.?’ Is that a meaningful (sinnvolle) question? / Do you know or do you only believe that what are you writing down now are German words? Do you only believe that ‘believe’ has this meaning? What meaning?”.

  8. Other examples: “A. ‘Is N. N. at home?’—I: ‘I believe he is.’—A: ‘Was he at home yesterday?’—I: ‘Yesterday he was—I know he was: I spoke to him.’ —A: ‘Do you know or only believe that this part of the house is built on later than the rest?’—I: ‘I know it is; I got it from so and so’” (OC, §483). In the next paragraph Wittgenstein comments thus on this series of examples: “In these cases, then, he says ‘I know’ and mentions how one knows (und gibt das den Grund des Wissens an), or at least one can do so” (OC, §484).

  9. I will not here offer a judgement on the plausibility and correctness of Wittgenstein’s reading of Moore. For an analytical and balanced assessment, see Coliva (2010).

  10. With regard to this point, I agree with Schönbaumsfeld (2016, 2021).

  11. It must be remembered that in this remark Wittgenstein identifies “conceptual investigations” and “philosophical investigations” distinguishing them from scientific researches: i.e., “factual investigations” (sachlichen Untersuchungen) (Wittgenstein 1980a, §949).

  12. Obviously many intricate problems remain open. For example, when can the checks I have made be considered sufficient? It is very likely that Wittgenstein would reply that there is no general or principled answer to this and similar questions.

  13. Where the same sign is used with two different modes of signification, we have two different symbols. Consider, for example, the statement “Green is green” in which the first word is the name of a person and the second an adjective. As Wittgenstein observes, “these words do not merely have different meanings: they are different symbols” because they have different modes of signification” (Wittgenstein 1974, 3.323). Indeed, one is a proper noun, the other an adjective. The case is different with “green” and “red”, for example: these two words have different meanings but the same mode of signification and therefore belong to the same symbol.

  14. “In this way the most fundamental confusions are easily produced (the whole of philosophy is full of them)” (Wittgenstein 1974, 3.324).

  15. “In order to avoid such errors we must make use of a sign-language that excludes them by not using the same sign for different symbols and by not using in a superficially similar way signs that have different modes of signification” (Wittgenstein 1974, 3.325).

  16. For example, we can imagine circumstances in which someone waking up after a surgical operation following a road accident could say: “I know this is my hand and not a prosthesis that closely resembles a real hand. Fortunately, as the doctor has assured me, after that terrible accident it has not been necessary to amputate my hand.”

  17. See the observations which conclude the third section.

  18. In this annotation from On Certainty he echoes the passage in Discourse on Method [1637] where Descartes expounds the first precept of his method: “The first [precept] was never accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such; that is say, carefully to avoid hasty judgment (précipitation) and prejudice (prévention); and to include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt” (Descartes 1998, p. 11).

  19. These remarks by Wittgenstein are somewhat reminiscent of the distinction established by Sosa (2001, p. 193) between “two sorts of [human] knowledge, the animal and the reflective […] animal knowledge that p does not require that the knower have an epistemic perspective on his belief that p, a perspective from which he endorses the source of that belief, i.e. from which he can see that source as reliably truth-conductive. Reflective knowledge that p does by contrast require such a perspective”. It must be noted, however, that this distinction falls entirely within what—following Coliva (2021) and Schönbaumsfeld (2021)—we have referred to as the “ordinary” or “epistemic” use of “to know”. By contrast, Wittgenstein’s remarks would appear to serve the (methodological) purpose of drawing attention to what—again, borrowing the terminology of Coliva (2021) and Schönbaumsfeld (2021)—we might call its “grammatical” or “logical” use.

  20. This is not to exclude that squirrels, like many other animals, can, so to speak, learn from experience. Rather, the emphasis here falls on the use of inductive inferences for justification purposes.

  21. On the meaning of these verbs, in particularly “fused” cf. Moyal-Sharrock (2010, p. 305).

  22. If I interpret that question as a not too precise way of asking myself if I know whether tomorrow will be a sunny day, then I can answer by reminding myself of the weather forecast: “The newspaper says it will rain tomorrow.” But this is obviously an entirely different case.

  23. Saying that a behaviour is instinctive means that it is innate in the sense that it is not the result of a specific training and is not based on reasons, reasoning, inferences, etc. However, this does not mean there are no scientific explanations that can give us the causes of that behaviour; for example, the olfactory stimuli produced by the mother’s milk have been indicated as the causes which explain why the new-born infant immediately turns towards the mother’s breast.

  24. In this context, see Standish (2017).

  25. For example, Wittgenstein adds in a note to Zettel “[b]eing sure that something is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive, kinds of behaviour towards other human beings” (Wittgenstein 1967a, b, §545).

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Perissinotto, L. A Comfortable Sureness: Knowledge, Animality and Conceptual Investigations in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Topoi 41, 1013–1021 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-022-09841-x

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