Concept
On Certainty
Overview
On Certainty (German: Über Gewissheit, original spelling Über Gewißheit) is a philosophical book composed from notes written by Ludwig Wittgenstein over four separate periods in the eighteen months before his death on 29 April 1951. He left his initial notes at the home of Elizabeth Anscombe, who linked them by theme with later passages in Wittgenstein's personal notebooks and (with G. H. von Wright), compiled them into a German/English parallel text book published in 1969. The translators were Denis Paul and Anscombe herself. (The editors also numbered and grouped the 676 passages; citations to the work are standardly given as OC1 through OC676 rather than by page number.)
The book's concerns are largely epistemological, a recurrent theme being that there are some things which must be exempt from doubt in order for human practices to be possible, including the activity of raising doubts: "A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt" (OC450). The book takes as its starting point the 'here is one hand' argument made by G. E. Moore and examines the role of knowledge claims in human language, particularly of "certain ('gewisser') empirical propositions", what are now called Moorean propositions or Moorean certainties.
An important outcome is Wittgenstein's claim that all doubt is enmeshed in belief and therefore the most radical forms of doubt must be rejected since they form a contradiction within the system that expressed them: "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty" (OC115). Wittgenstein also sketched (then-)novel refutations of philosophical skepticism in various guises: "If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words either" (OC114); "If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, not yet false" (OC205). Another recurrent motif (OC111,448,654), one that arguably unlocks the text for the lay reader, concerns the futility of endlessly re-checking an arithmetical calculation (OC77): what, precisely, is being re-checked? The calculation itself? Or, rather, the sanity, sobriety, and comprehension (say), of the re-checker? (See: Linguistic turn.) But (OC658): are not the sanity, sobriety, and comprehension of the re-checker presupposed by the very activity of, validly, checking and re-checking? "Giving grounds, however - justifying the evidence - comes to an end. But the end is not certain propositions' striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game" (OC204).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Thus philosophers come into this world as into a great house to seek the truth, but were they to reach it, they could not tell whether they really had attained to it.” The indefinite expressions of Xenophanes might also merely mean that none knows that which he (Xenophanes) here makes known. In the second passage Sextus puts it thus: “Xenophanes does not make all knowledge void, but only the scientific and…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Close in meaning to On Certainty; the term itself is not named.
The student, it seems to have been thought, ought to understand well the difference between good and bad reasoning, before he was led to reason upon subjects of so great importance.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Close in meaning to On Certainty; the term itself is not named.
Logical conduct is constituted by the cooeperation of these processes for the improvement of their further operation. To regard perception, memory, and imagination as implicit forms or as sub-species of logical operation is much like conceiving the movements of our fingers and arms as implicit or imperfect species of painting, or swimming. Moreover, this doctrine of universal logicism teaches that when that which is…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
Close in meaning to On Certainty; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed On Certainty
Related ideas
- German language
- G. E. Moore
- Philosophical realism
- Philosophy
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Linguistic turn
- Language game (philosophy)
- Philosophical skepticism
- Skepticism
- Anthony Kenny
- G. E. M. Anscombe
- Norman Malcolm
- John Henry Newman
- English language
- Epistemology
- England
- Certainty
- Here is one hand
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.