This radical reading of Wittgenstein's third and last masterpiece, On Certainty, has major implications for philosophy. It elucidates Wittgenstein's ultimate thoughts on the nature of our basic beliefs and his demystification of scepticism. Our basic certainties are shown to be nonepistemic, nonpropositional attitudes that, as such, have no verbal occurrence but manifest themselves exclusively in our actions. This fundamental certainty is a belief-in, a primitive confidence or ur-trust whose practical nature bridges the hitherto unresolved categorial gap between belief and action.

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 97 - 119 In this paper, I briefly summarize the nature of Wittgenstein’s ‘hinge certainties,’ showing how they radically differ from traditional basic beliefs in their being nonepistemic, grammatical, nonpropositional, and enacted. I claim that it is these very features that enable hinge certainties to put a logical stop to justification, and thereby solve the regress problem of basic beliefs. This is a ground-breaking achievement—worthy of calling _On Certainty_ Wittgenstein’s ‘third masterpiece.’ As I (...) go along, I question some differing interpretations and respond to some objections from fellow-readers of _On Certainty_: Duncan Pritchard, Michael Williams, and Crispin Wright. (shrink)

In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content, Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are themselves simply a (...) further extension of action and do not therefore warrant being called ‘different in kind’ or ‘kinky’. With the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John V. Canfield, I show that Enactivism meets the challenge of explaining higher-level cognition; and, contra continuity sceptics, offer ‘a philosophically cogent and empirically respectable account’ of how human minds can emerge from nonhuman minds. (shrink)

This book also provides new and illuminating accounts of difficult concepts, such as patterns of life, experiencing meaning, meaning blindness, lying and ...

This anthology is the first devoted exclusively to On Certainty. The essays are grouped under four headings: the Framework, Transcendental, Epistemic and Therapeutic readings, and an introduction helps explain why these readings need not be seen as antagonistic. Contributions from W.H. Brenner, Alice Crary, Michael Kober, Edward Minar, Howard Mounce, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Thomas Morawetz, D.Z. Phillips, Duncan Pritchard, Rupert Read, Anthony Rudd, Joachim Schulte, Avrum Stroll, Michael Williams.

This paper surveys the impact on neuropsychology of Wittgenstein's elucidations of memory. Wittgenstein discredited the storage and imprint models of memory, dissolved the conceptual link between memory and mental images or representations and, upholding the context-sensitivity of memory, made room for a family resemblance concept of memory, where remembering can also amount to doing or saying something. While neuropsychology is still generally under the spell of archival and physiological notions of memory, Wittgenstein's reconceptions can be seen at work in its (...) leading-edge practitioners. However, neuroscientists, generally, are finding memory difficult to demarcate from other cognitive and noncognitive processes, and I suggest this is largely due to their considering automatic responses as part of memory, termed nondeclarative or implicit memory. Taking my lead from Wittgenstein's On Certainty, I argue that there is only remembering where there is also some kind of mnemonic effort or attention, and, therefore, that so-called implicit memory is not memory at all, but a basic, noncognitive certainty. (shrink)

If I had to say what the single most important contribution Wittgenstein made to philosophy was, it would be to have revived the animal in us: the animal that is there in every fiber of our human being, and therefore also in our thinking and reasoning. This means, his pushing us to realize that we are animals not only genealogically, but as evolved human beings—whether neonate, or language-possessing, civilized, law-abiding, fully fledged adults. Constitutionally, and in everything we do, still fundamentally (...) animals. (shrink)

In _Hinge Epistemology_, eminent epistemologists investigate Wittgenstein's concept of basic or 'hinge' certainty as deployed in _On Certainty_ and show its importance for mainstream epistemology.

So-called 'hinge propositions', Wittgenstein's version of our basic beliefs, are not propositions at all, but heuristic expressions of our bounds of sense which, as such, cannot meaningfully be said but only show themselves in what we say and do. Yet if our foundational certainty is necessarily an ineffable, enacted certainty, any challenge of it must also be enacted. Philosophical scepticism – being a mere mouthing of doubt – is impotent to unsettle a certainty whose salient conceptual feature is that it (...) is lived. I appeal to psychopathology to show that the lived refutation of a basic certainty is not a manifestation of uncertainty, but of madness. (shrink)

This paper aims to distinguish Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘form of life’ from other concepts or expressions that have been confused or conflated with it, such as ‘language-game’, ‘certainty’, ‘patterns of life’, ‘ways of living’ and ‘facts of living’. Competing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s ‘form of life’ are reviewed, and it is concluded that Wittgenstein intended both a singular and a plural use of the concept; with, where the human is concerned, a single human form of life characterized by innumerable forms of (...) human life. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 6, Issue 2-3, pp 73 - 78 This introduction gives a summary of the content of the special issue _Hinge Epistemology_, grouping the papers in three sections: more exegetical accounts of Wittgenstein’s notion of hinge certainties and their bearing on a theory of justification and knowledge as well as on the topic of external world scepticism; papers critical of the very notion of hinge certainty; and papers that apply the notion to various areas of epistemology and compare (...) Wittgenstein’s views to those of other philosophers. (shrink)

In “Wittgenstein on Grammar, Theses and Dogmatism,” Peter Hacker addresses what he takes to be misconceptions of Wittgenstein's philosophy with respect to the periodisation of his thought and to what should properly be counted as part of his work; his conception of grammar since the Big Typescript ; and his conception of philosophy as grammatical investigation. I argue that Hacker's restrictive conception of what ought to be considered part of Wittgenstein's philosophy and his conservative view of Wittgensteinian grammar are unjustified (...) and prevent him from appreciating the revolutionary importance of On Certainty for epistemology. Finally, while agreeing that Wittgenstein views philosophy as grammatical elucidation, I suggest some reasons for the resistance that this view has generated.In “Wittgenstein on Grammar, Theses and Dogmatism,” Peter Hacker deals with three of the “many misunderstandings, misrepresentations and misinterpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy” ; the first of which concerns “the periodisation of Wittgenstein's thought”; the second, the supposition that what Wittgenstein called “grammar” in PI differed fundamentally from, and was more limited than, his conception of it when he was writing the Big Typescript; and the third, the claim that what Wittgenstein took to be grammatical statements are, in fact, dogmatisms, theories or doctrines inconsistent with his meta‐philosophical remarks in PI. I address each of these concerns seriatim. (shrink)

As is well known, Wittgenstein pointed out an asymmetry between first- and third-person psychological statements: the first, unlike the latter, involve observation or a claim to knowledge and are constitutionally open to uncertainty. In this paper, I challenge this asymmetry and Wittgenstein's own affirmation of the constitutional uncertainty of third-person psychological statements, and argue that Wittgenstein ultimately did too. I first show that, on his view, most of our third-person psychological statements are noncognitive; they stem from a subjective certainty: a (...) certainty which, though not the result of an epistemic process, is not invulnerable to error in that it is a kind of assumption. I then trace Wittgenstein's realization that some third-person psychological certainties are not merely subjective but 'objective' (which means, as he uses the word, that they are logically indubitable): in some cases, we can be as logically certain that someone else is in pain than we are about ourselves being in pain. This positively reinforces Wittgenstein's rebuttal of other mind scepticism. I conclude with a response to objections about the legitimacy of calling an assurance that is logical (i.e., that does not have uncertainty or doubt on its flipside) a 'certainty', by suggesting that the flipside is to be found in pathological cases, and most pertinently here, in cases of dyssemia: a rare disorder affecting the ability to properly express or recognize basic physical expressions of feeling. (shrink)

Wittgenstein demystified the notion of 'observational self-knowledge'. He dislodged the long-standing conception that we have privileged access to our impressions, sensations and feelings through introspection, and more precisely eliminated knowing as the kind of awareness that normally characterizes our first-person present-tense psychological statements. He was not thereby questioning our awareness of our emotions or sensations, but debunking the notion that we come to that awareness via any epistemic route. This makes the spontaneous linguistic articulation of our sensations and impressions nondescriptive. (...) Not descriptions, but expressions that seem more akin to behaviour than to language. I suggest that Wittgenstein uncovered a new species of speech acts. Far from the prearranged consecration of words into performatives, utterances are deeds through their very spontaneity. This gives language a new aura: the aura of the reflex action. I argue, against Peter Hacker, that spontaneous utterances have the categorial status of deeds. This has no reductive consequences in that I do not suggest that one category is reduced to another, but that the boundary between them is porous. This explodes the myth of an explanatory gap between the traditionally distinct categories of saying (or thinking) and doing, or of mind and body. (shrink)

This anthology focuses on the extraordinary contributions Wittgenstein made to several areas in the philosophy of psychology - contributions that extend to psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology. To bring them a richly-deserved attention from across the language barrier, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock has translated papers by eminent French Wittgensteinians. They here join ranks with more familiar renowned specialists on Wittgenstein's philosophical psychology. While revealing differences in approach and interests, this coming together of some of the best minds on the subject discloses a (...) surprising degree of consensus, and gives us the clearest picture yet of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of psychology. (shrink)

Shakespeare displays the dance of human passions, one might say. … But he displays it to us in a dance, not naturalistically.In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that ethics cannot be put into words. This does not mean he thought ethics could not be made manifest; and indeed I will suggest that Wittgenstein took the best manifestation of ethics to be in aesthetics, and more specifically literature. Literature uses words in such a way as to allow ethics to show itself. It (...) does this, I suggest, through perspicuous presentations, though of a different kind than those of philosophy. Wittgenstein takes us some way toward fleshing out the literary nature of perspicuous presentations, but not far enough. To do this, I will... (shrink)

This paper aims to return Wittgenstein's Tractatus to its original stature by showing that it is not the self-repudiating work commentators take it to be, but the consistent masterpiece its author believed it was at the time he wrote it. The Tractatus has been considered self-repudiating for two reasons: it refers to its own propositions as ‘nonsensical’, and it makes what Peter Hacker calls ‘paradoxical ineffability claims’ – that is, its remarks are themselves instances of what it says cannot be (...) said. I address the first problem by showing that, on Wittgenstein's view, nonsense is primarily a technically descriptive, not a defamatory, qualification, and is not indicative of Wittgenstein rejecting or disavowing his own Tractarian ‘propositions’. I then dissolve the paradoxical ineffability claim by making a technical distinction, based on Wittgenstein's own theory and practice, between saying and speaking. (shrink)

It may be said that the single track of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar—its nature and its limits. This paper will trace Wittgenstein’s evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. It will distinguish between a ‘thin grammar’ and an increasingly more fact-linked, ‘reality-soaked’, ‘thick grammar’. The ‘hinge’ certainties of On Certainty and the ‘patterns of life’ of Last Writings attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work of the third (...) Wittgenstein is the grammaticalization of experience. This reflects Wittgenstein’s realisation that grammar can manifest itself as a way of acting. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. We shall see that Wittgenstein’s hesitant but unrelenting link of grammar to the stream of life in no way infringes on the ‘autonomy of grammar’. (shrink)

How is it that we can be moved by what we know does not exist? In this paper, I examine the so-called 'paradox of fiction', showing that it fatally hinges on cognitive theories of emotion such as Kendall Walton's pretend theory and Peter Lamarque's thought theory. I reject these theories and acknowledge the concept-formative role of genuine emotion generated by fiction. I then argue, contra Jenefer Robinson, that this 'éducation sentimentale' is not achieved through distancing, but rather through the engagement (...) of our emotions. Literature does this, I claim, by its uniquely perspicuous presentations of emotional concepts, and the cognitive pleasure that such 'presentations' prompt in us. (shrink)

This introduces the special issue of Philosophia which constitutes the Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS), on 'The Third Wittgenstein', held at the University of Hertfordshire (Hatfield, UK) on 7-8 June 2008. The Introduction briefly argues for the idea of a 'third Wittgenstein', and summarizes the contributions of the volume.

Leavis would not have approved of the third epithet in our title. He saw himself as an “anti-philosopher”—philosophers being thinkers who reduce thought to “isms.” Leavis was clear that he was neither a theorist nor a philosopher, but as a literary critic he could not avoid thinking about the kind of existence works of literature have, and how they can be forms of thought. In “Leavisian Thinking,” Ian Robinson shows how this led him to develop the idea of the “third (...) realm,” which is often misinterpreted but can be useful to both the philosophy of language as well as literary criticism.Chris Joyce’s essay, “Rethinking Leavis,” seeks to establish the case for reading Leavis as a thinker and as one of the most... (shrink)

I take issue with Pieranna Garavaso’s contention - lodged in a rapprochement between Wittgenstein and Quine - that for Wittgenstein, there is no sharp categorial distinction between logical and empirical propositions, but only one of degree. I argue that Garavaso’s conclusion results from a misunderstanding of the river-bed analogy in On Certainty (96-99). When Wittgenstein maintains there is not a sharp boundary between propositions of logic and empirical propositions, he does not imply that there is not a sharp categorial difference (...) between them, but that the boundary is permeable. The consequent changeability of status of logical and empirical propositions does not entail the collapse, or even a partial blurring, of their respective categories. I then address Wittgenstein’s puzzlement, in On Certainty, about the logical status of some apparently empirical propositions, and show that he resolves this not, as is often thought, by concluding that some empirical propositions are necessary, but by recognizing the ‘empiricality’ of these propositions as merely apparent. A line is thereby drawn between empirical propositions and framework propositions that only have the form of empirical propositions (OC 401). I conclude that, unlike Quine, Wittgenstein held a foundational view of our system of beliefs, making a categorial distinction between the foundation-walls and the house, and regarding part of these foundations as immovable. (shrink)

O desenvolvimento do presente texto parte do pressuposto inicial segundo o qual grande parte do Da Certeza é dedicada a expor a distinção entre ‘certeza’ e ‘conhecimento’. Nossas certezas básicas – ou ‘fulcrais’ ou, ainda, ‘dobradiças’ [hinges] – formam a nossa imagem de mundo e sustentam o nosso conhecimento, não sendo elas mesmas, porém, de natureza epistêmica. As deliberações de Wittgenstein levamno a compreender que as nossas certezas básicas compartilham as seguintes características conceituais; elas são todas: não epistêmicas, indubitáveis, não (...) empíricas, gramaticais, não proposicionais, inefáveis, exibidas na ação [enacted] e fundacionais. Estas características necessárias das certezas fulcrais são investigadas com algum detalhe ao longo do texto que se segue. (shrink)

D. H. Lawrence famously wrote that “art-speech is the only truth.” If we are to give credibility to these words, we must know what Lawrence means by “truth.” Here is the passage in which this expression occurs:Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. Truth lives from day to day, and the (...) marvellous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.... Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.1One thing is made clear by the passage: “truth” here is not used in the sense of absolute truth, something that can never be falsified.... (shrink)

In their most recent book, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content, Dan Hutto and Eric Myin claim to give a complete and gapless naturalistic account of cognition, but it comes with a kink. The kink being that content-involving cognition has special properties found nowhere else in nature, making it the case that minds capable of contentful thought differ in kind, in this key respect, from more basic minds. Contra Hutto and Myin, I argue that content-involving practices are themselves simply a (...) further extension of action and do not therefore warrant being called ‘different in kind’ or ‘kinky’. With the help of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John V. Canfield, I show that Enactivism meets the challenge of explaining higher-level cognition; and, contra continuity sceptics, offer ‘a philosophically cogent and empirically respectable account’ of how human minds can emerge from nonhuman minds. (shrink)

This introduces the special issue of Philosophia which constitutes the Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS), on 'The Third Wittgenstein', held at the University of Hertfordshire (Hatfield, UK) on 7-8 June 2008. The Introduction briefly argues for the idea of a 'third Wittgenstein', and summarizes the contributions of the volume.

This special issue on Forms of Life was conceived on the top floor of a café overlooking one of Rome's wonderful Piazzas, after a conference, hosted by Piergiorgio Donatelli, on Forms of Life and Ways of Living. Piergiorgio, Sandra Laugier and I thought the subject cried out for a small collection of essays in which several voices would elucidate the genesis, use and potential of Wittgenstein's concept of form of life -- and we committed to producing it. This is the (...) fruit of our Roman resolution. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. (shrink)

This paper addresses the objections that Genia Schönbaumsfeld makes in The Illusion of Doubt to my view of hinge certainty as a ‘certainty’, and as nonepistemic, nonpropositional and animal. It also addresses her dissatisfaction with Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘the groundlessness of our believing’.

It may be said that the single track of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar—its nature and its limits. This paper will trace Wittgenstein’s evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. It will distinguish between a ‘thin grammar’ and an increasingly more fact-linked, ‘reality-soaked’, ‘thick grammar’. The ‘hinge’ certainties of On Certainty and the ‘patterns of life’ of Last Writings attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work of the third (...) Wittgenstein is the grammaticalization of experience. This reflects Wittgenstein’s realisation that grammar can manifest itself as a way of acting. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. We shall see that Wittgenstein’s hesitant but unrelenting link of grammar to the stream of life in no way infringes on the ‘autonomy of grammar’. (shrink)

Like Aristotle, Wittgenstein’s leitmotif was action. Wittgenstein saw action (or behaviour) as the root, manifestation and transmitter of meaning. He repeatedly demonstrated the regress manifest in seeing the proposition, or any kind of representation, as a necessary precursor to thought and action, or at least he pointed out the superfluity of such shadowy inner precursors when instinct and practices can easily be seen to be at the base of all our thought: ‘In philosophy one is in constant danger of producing (...) a myth of symbolism, or a myth of mental processes. Instead of simply saying what anyone knows and must admit’ (Z, §211). Where Aristotle warns us that Plato had been misled by the uniform appearance of a word in different contexts into believing that it had a uniform meaning across uses, Wittgenstein urges us to see the differences in meaning that are often hidden by the uniform appearance of language, insisting that meaning is dependent on use or context. Just as Aristotle in the Categories gave Plato’s forms a linguistic status, so, Wittgenstein took a linguistic turn from his predecessors, giving metaphysics a grammatical reading: both showed that concepts are not entities existing in isolated splendour in some metaphysical realm but simply abstractions from sentences in use. (shrink)