On Certainty (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)

“If I wanted to doubt whether this was my hand, how could I avoid doubting whether the word ‘hand’ has any meaning? So that is something I seem to know, after all.” On Certainty p48“What sort of progress is this—the fascinating mystery has been removed--yet no depths have been plumbed in consolation; nothing has been explained or discovered or reconceived. How tame and uninspiring one might think. But perhaps, as Wittgenstein suggests, the virtues of clarity, demystification and truth should be found satisfying enough” --Horwich ‘Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy’.First, let us remind ourselves of Wittgenstein’s (W) fundamental discovery –that ALL truly ‘philosophical’ problems (i.e., those not solved by experiments or data gathering) are the same—confusions about how to use language in a particular context, and so all solutions are the same—looking at how language can be used in the context at issue so that its truth conditions (Conditions of Satisfaction or COS) are clear. . The basic problem is that one can say anything but one cannot mean (state clear COS for) any arbitrary utterance and meaning is only possible in a very specific context. Thus W looks at perspicuous examples of the varying uses of the words ‘know’ and ‘certain’, often from his 3 typical perspectives of narrator, interlocutor and commentator, leaving the reader to decide the best use (clearest COS) of the sentences in each context. One can only describe the uses of related sentences and that’s the end of it—no hidden depths, no metaphysical insights. It is truly sad that most philosophers continue to waste their time on the linguistic confusions peculiar to philosophy rather than turning their attention to those of the other behavioral disciplines and to physics, biology and mathematics, where it is desperately needed.W wrote this ‘book’ (not really a book but notes he made during the last two years of his life while dying of prostate cancer and barely able to work) because he realized that G.E. Moore’s simple efforts had focused attention on the very core of all philosophy--how it’s possible to mean, to believe, to know anything at all, and not to be able to doubt it. All anyone can do is to examine minutely the working of the language games of ‘know’ and ‘certain’ and ‘doubt’ as they are used to describe the primitive automated prelinguistic system one (S1) functions of our brain (my K1,C1 and D1) and the advanced deliberative linguistic system two (S2) functions (my K2, C2 and D2). Of course W does not use the two systems terminology, which only came to the fore in psychology some half century after his death, and has yet to penetrate philosophy, but he clearly grasped the two systems framework (the ‘grammar’) in all of his work from the early 30’s on, and one can see clear foreshadowings in his very earliest writings.Much has been written on Moore and W and On Certainty (OC) recently, after half a century in relative oblivion. See e.g., Annalisa Coliva’s “Moore and Wittgenstein”(2010), “Extended Rationality” (2015), The Varieties of Self-Knowledge’(2016), Brice’s ‘Exploring Certainty’(2014) and Andy Hamilton’s ‘Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Wittgenstein and On Certainty’ (which I will review soon) and the many books and papers of Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (DMS) and Peter Hacker (PH), including Hacker’s recent 3 volumes on Human Nature. For an excellent quick look at how various philosophers react to OC and how they go astray see McDougall’s ‘Critical Notice of Readings of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty’ , free on the net like most phil papers now. DMS and PH have been the leading scholars of the later W, each writing or editing half a dozen books (many reviewed by me) and many papers in the last decade. However the difficulties of coming to grips with the basics of our higher order psychology, i.e., of how language (approximately the same as the mind, as W showed us) works are evidenced by Coliva, one of the most brilliant and prolific contemporary philosophers, who made remarks in a very recent article which show that after years of intensive work on the later W, she really does not get that he has solved the most basic problems of the description of human behavior. As DMS makes clear, one cannot even coherently state misgivings about the operations of our basic psychology (W’s ‘Hinges’ which I equate to S1) without lapsing into incoherence. DMS has noted the limitations of both of these workers (limitations shared by all students of behavior) in her recent articles, which (like those of Coliva and Hacker) are freely available on the net.As DMS puts it: “…the notes that make up On Certainty revolutionize the concept of basic beliefs and dissolve scepticism, making them a corrective, not only to Moore but also to Descartes, Hume, and all of epistemology. On Certainty shows Wittgenstein to have solved the problem he set out to solve – the problem that occupied Moore and plagued epistemology – that of the foundation of knowledge. Wittgenstein's revolutionary insight in On Certainty is that what philosophers have traditionally called 'basic beliefs' – those beliefs that all knowledge must ultimately be based on – cannot, on pain of infinite regress, themselves be based on further propositional beliefs. He comes to see that basic beliefs are really animal or unreflective ways of acting which, once formulated (e.g. by philosophers), look like (empirical) propositions. It is this misleading appearance that leads philosophers to believe that at the foundation of thought is yet more thought. Yet though they may often look like empirical conclusions, our basic certainties constitute the ungrounded, nonpropositional underpinning of knowledge, not its object. In thus situating the foundation of knowledge in nonreflective certainties that manifest themselves as ways of acting, Wittgenstein has found the place where justification comes to an end, and solved the regress problem of basic beliefs – and, in passing, shown the logical impossibility of hyperbolic scepticism. I believe that this is a groundbreaking achievement for philosophy – worthy of calling On Certainty Wittgenstein's 'third masterpiece'.” I reached the same general conclusions myself some years ago and stated it in my book reviews.The nonpropositional nature of basic beliefs puts a stop to the regress that has plagued epistemology: we no longer need to posit untenable self-justifying propositions at the basis of knowledge. In taking hinges to be true empirical propositions, Peter Hacker fails to acknowledge the ground-breaking insight that our basic certainties are ways of acting, and not 'certain propositions striking us as true' (OC 204). If all Wittgenstein were doing in OC was to claim that our basic beliefs are true empirical propositions, why bother? He would be merely repeating what philosophers before him have been saying for centuries, all the while deploring an unsolvable infinite regress. Why not rather appreciate that Wittgenstein has stopped the regress?” (“Beyond Hacker’s Wittgenstein”-(2013)).It is amazing (and a sign of how deep the divide remains between philosophy and psychology) that (as I have noted many times in recent reviews) in a decade of intensive reading I have not seen one person make the obvious connection between W’s ‘grammar’ and the automatic reflexive functions of our brain which constitute System 1, and its extensions into the linguistic functions of System 2. For anyone familiar with the two systems framework for understanding behavior that has dominated various areas of psychology such as decision theory for the last several decades, it should be glaringly obvious that ‘basic beliefs’ (or as I call them B1) are the inherited automated true-only structure of S1 and that their extension with experience into true or false sentences (or as I call them B2) are what non-philosophers call ‘beliefs’. This may strike some as a mere terminological trifle, but I have used the two systems view and its tabulation below as the logical structure of rationality for a decade and regard it as the single biggest advance in understanding higher order behavior, and hence of W or any philosophical or behavioral writing. In my view, the failure to grasp the fundamental importance of the automaticity of our behavior due to S1 and the consequent attribution of all social interaction (e.g., politics) to the superficialities of S2 is responsible for the inexorable collapse of industrial civilization. The almost universal oblivion to basic biology and psychology leads to endless fruitless attempts fix the world’s problems via politics, but only a drastic restructuring of society with understanding of the fundamental role of inclusive fitness as manifested via the automaticities of S1 has any chance to save the world. The oblivion to S1 has been called by Searle ‘The phenomenological Illusion’, by Pinker ‘The Blank Slate’ and by Tooby and Cosmides ‘The Standard Social Science Model’.OC shows W’s unique super-Socratic trialogue (narrator, interlocutor, commentator) in full bloom and better than anywhere else in his works. He realized by the late 20’s that the only way to make any progress was to look at how language actually works-otherwise one gets lost in the labyrinth of language from the very first sentences and there is not the slightest hope of finding one’s way out. The entire book looks at various uses of the word ‘know’ which separate themselves out into ‘know’ as an intuitive ‘perceptual’ certainty that cannot meaningfully be questioned (my K1) and ‘know’ as a disposition to act (my K2), which functions the same as think, hope, judge, understand, imagine, remember, believe and many other dispositional words. As I have suggested in my various reviews of W and S, these two uses correspond to the modern two systems of thought framework that is so powerful in understanding behavior (mind, language), and this (and his other work) is the first significant effort to show how our fast, prelinguistic automatic ‘mental states’ are the unquestionable axiomatic basis (‘hinges’) for our later-evolved, slow, linguistic, deliberative dispositional psychology. As I have noted many times, neither W, nor anyone else to my knowledge, has ever stated this clearly. Undoubtedly, most who read OC go away with no clear idea of what he has done, which is the normal result of reading any of his work.The dead hand of the blank slate view of behavior still rests heavily and is the default of the ‘second self’ of slow thinking conscious system 2, which (without education) is oblivious to the fact that the groundwork for all behavior lies in the unconscious, fast thinking axiomatic structure of system 1 (Searle’s ‘Phenomenological Illusion’). Searle summed this up in a very insightful recent article by noting that many logical features of intentionality are beyond the reach of phenomenology because the creation of meaningfulness (i.e., the COS of S2) out of meaninglessness (i.e., the reflexes of S1) is not consciously experienced. See Philosophy in a New Century (PNC) p115-117 and my review of it.Before remarking on this book, it is essential to grasp the W/S framework so I will first offer some comments on philosophy and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S),Wittgenstein (W), Baker and Hacker (B&H), Read, Hutto, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock(DMS) et. al. It will help to see my reviews of various books by Searle such as Philosophy in a New Century (PNC), and Making the Social World (MSW), the classics by W such as TLP, PI, and other books by and about these geniuses, who provide a clear description of higher order behavior not found in psychology books, that I will refer to as the Wittgenstein/Searle (W/S) framework. To say that Searle has carried on W’s work is not to imply that it is a direct result of W study, but rather that because there is only ONE human psychology (for the same reason there is only ONE human cardiology), that anyone accurately describing behavior must be enunciating some variant or extension of what W said.A major theme in all discussion of human behavior is the need to separate the genetically programmed automatisms of S1 (which I equate with W’s ‘hinges’) from the less mechanical linguistic dispositional behavior of S2. To rephrase: all study of higher order behavior is an effort to tease apart fast System 1 (S1) and slow System 2 (S2) thinking --e.g., perceptions and other automatisms vs. dispositions. Searle's work as a whole provides a stunning description of higher order S2 social behavior including ‘we intentionality’, while the later W shows how S2 is based on true-only unconscious axioms of S1, which in evolution and in each of our personal histories developed into conscious dispositional propositional thinking (acting) of S2.So, as W develops in OC, most of our shared public experience (culture) becomes a true-only extension of our axiomatic EP and cannot be found ‘mistaken’ without threatening our sanity—as he noted a ‘mistake’ in S1 (no test) has profoundly different consequences from one in S2 (testable). A corollary, nicely explained by DMS and elucidated in his own unique manner by Searle, is that the skeptical view of the world and other minds (and a mountain of other nonsense) cannot get a foothold, as “reality” is the result of involuntary ‘fast thinking’ axioms and not testable propositions (as I would put it).It is clear to me that the innate true-only axioms W is occupied with throughout his work, and especially in OC, are equivalent to the fast thinking or System 1 that is at the center of current research (e.g., see Kahneman--“Thinking Fast and Slow”, but neither he, nor anyone afaik, has any idea W laid out the framework over 50 years ago), which is involuntary and automatic and which corresponds to the mental states of perception, emotion and memory, as W notes over and over. One might call these “intracerebral reflexes” (maybe 99% of all our cerebration if measured by energy use in the brain). Our slow or reflective, more or less “conscious” (beware another network of language games!) second self brain activity corresponds to what W characterized as “dispositions” or “inclinations”, which refer to abilities or possible actions, are not mental states, are conscious, deliberate and propositional (true or false), and do not have any definite time of occurrence.As W notes, disposition words have at least two basic uses. One is a peculiar mostly philosophical use (but graduating into everyday uses) which refers to the true-only sentences resulting from direct perceptions and memory, i.e., our innate axiomatic S1 psychology (`I know these are my hands'), originally termed Causally Self Referential (CSR) by Searle (but now Causally Self-Reflexive) or reflexive or intransitive in W’s Blue and Brown Books (BBB), and the S2 use, which is their normal use as dispositions, which can be acted out, and which can become true or false (`I know my way home')--i.e., they have Conditions of Satisfaction (COS) in the strict sense, and are not CSR (called transitive in BBB). The equation of these terms from modern psychology with those used by W and S (and much else here) is my idea, so don’t expect to find it in the literature (except my reviews on Amazon, ViXra.org, philpapers.org, Academia.edu).Though seldom touched upon by philosophers, the investigation of involuntary fast thinking has revolutionized psychology, economics (e.g., Kahneman’s Nobel prize) and other disciplines under names like “cognitive illusions”, “priming”, “framing”, “heuristics” and “biases”. Of course these too are language games, so there will be more and less useful ways to use these words, and studies and discussions will vary from “pure” System 1 to combinations of 1 and 2 (the norm as W made clear, but of course he did not use this terminology), but presumably not ever of slow S2 dispositional thinking only, since any thought (intentional action) cannot occur without involving much of the intricate S1 network of the “cognitive modules”, “inference engines”, “intracerebral reflexes”, “automatisms”, “cognitive axioms”, “background” or “bedrock” (as W and Searle call our EP) which must use S1 to move muscles (action).It follows both from W's 3rd period work and from contemporary psychology, that `will', `self' and `consciousness' (which as Searle notes are presupposed by all discussion of intentionality) are axiomatic true-only elements of S1, composed of perceptions, memories and reflexes., and there is no possibility (intelligibility) of demonstrating (of giving sense to) their falsehood. As W made clear numerous times, they are the basis for judgment and so cannot be judged. The true-only axioms of our psychology are not evidential. As he famously said in OC 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.”A sentence expresses a thought (has a meaning), when it has clear Conditions of Satisfaction (COS), i.e., public truth conditions. Hence the comment from W: " When I think in language, there aren't `meanings' going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought." And, if I think with or without words, the thought is whatever I (honestly) say it is, as there is no other possible criterion (COS). Thus W's aphorisms (p132 in Budd’s lovely book on W) –“It is in language that wish and fulfillment meet and like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.” And one might note here that `grammar' in W can usually be translated as EP or LSR ( DPHOT—see table) and that, in spite of his frequent warnings against theorizing and generalizing)for which he is often incorrectly criticized by Searle), this is about as broad a characterization of higher order descriptive psychology (philosophy) as one can find (as DMS also notes).W is correct that there is no mental state that constitutes meaning, and Searle notes that there is a general way to characterize the act of meaning—“speaker meaning... is the imposition of conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction”-- which means to speak or write a well formed sentence expressing COS in a context that can be true or false, and this is an act and not a mental state. i.e., as Searle notes in Philosophy in a New Century p193—“the basic intentional relation between the mind and the world has to do with conditions of satisfaction. And a proposition is anything at all that can stand in an intentional relation to the world, and since those intentional relations always determine conditions of satisfaction, and a proposition is defined as anything sufficient to determine conditions of satisfaction, it turns out that all intentionality is a matter of propositions.” --propositions being public events that can be true or false. Hence, the famous comment by W from PI p217—“If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of”, and his comments that the whole problem of representation is contained in "that's Him" and “what gives the image its interpretation is the path on which it lies," or as S says its COS. Hence W's summation (p140 Budd) –“what it always comes to in the end is that without any further meaning, he calls what happened the wish that that should happen-and- the question whether I know what I wish before my wish is fulfilled cannot arise at all. And the fact that some event stops my wishing does not mean that it fulfills it. Perhaps I should not have been satisfied if my wish had been satisfied. Suppose it were asked -do I know what I long for before I get it? If I have learned to talk, then I do know.”One of W’s recurring themes is now referred to as Theory of Mind, or as I prefer, Understanding of Agency (UA). Ian Apperly, who is carefully analyzing UA1 and UA2 (i.e., UA of S1 and S2) in experiments, has recently become aware of the work of Daniel Hutto, who has characterized UA1 as a fantasy (i.e., no ‘Theory’ nor representation can be involved in UA1--that being reserved for UA2—see my review of his book with Myin). However, like other psychologists, Apperly has no idea W laid the groundwork for this 80 years ago. It is an easily defensible view that the core of the burgeoning literature on cognitive illusions, automatisms and higher order thought is compatible with and straightforwardly deducible from W. In spite of the fact that most of the above has been known to many for decades (and even ¾ of a century in the case of some of W’s teachings), I have never seen anything approaching an adequate discussion in philosophy or other behavioral science texts, and commonly there is barely a mention.After half a century in oblivion, the nature of consciousness is now the hottest topic in the behavioral sciences and philosophy. Beginning with the pioneering work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930’s (the Blue and Brown Books) and from the 50’s to the present by his successors Searle, Moyal-Sharrock, Read, Baker, Hacker, Stern, Horwich, Winch, Finkelstein etc., I have created a detailed table as an heuristic for furthering this study. The rows show various aspects or ways of studying and the columns show the involuntary processes and voluntary behaviors comprising the two systems (dual processes) of the Logical Structure of Consciousness (LSC), which can also be regarded as the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR-Searle), of behavior (LSB), of personality (LSP), of Mind (LSM), of language (LSM), of reality (LSOR), of Intentionality (LSI) -the classical philosophical term, the Descriptive Psychology of Consciousness (DPC) , the Descriptive Psychology of Thought (DPT) –or better, the Language of the Descriptive Psychology of Thought (LDPT), terms introduced here and in my other very recent writings. Those wishing to use the table will find it in my articles and reviews of books by Wittgenstein, Searle and others on academia.edu, philpaper.org, vixra.org and on Amazon.It is of interest to compare it with the various tables and charts in Peter Hacker’s recent 3 volumes on Human Nature. One should always keep in mind Wittgenstein’s discovery that after we have described the possible uses (meanings, truthmakers, Conditions of Satisfaction) of language in a particular context, we have exhausted its interest, and attempts at explanation (i.e., philosophy) only get us further away from the truth. He showed us that there is only one philosophical problem—the use of sentences (language games) in an inappropriate context, and hence only one solution—showing the correct context.W’s definitive arguments against introspection and private language are noted in my other reviews and are extremely well known. Basically they are as simple as pie—we must have a test to differentiate between A and B and tests can only be external and public. He famously illustrated this with the ‘Beetle in the Box’. If we all have a box that cannot be opened nor x-rayed etc. and call what is inside a ‘beetle’ then ‘beetle’ cannot have any role in language, for every box could contain a different thing or even be empty. So, there is no private language that only I can know and no introspection of ‘inner speech’. If X is not publicly demonstrable it cannot be a word in our language. This shoots down Carruther’s ISA theory of mind, as well as all the other ‘inner sense’ theories which he references. I have explained W’s dismantling of the notion of introspection and the functioning of dispositional language (‘propositional attitudes’) above and in my reviews of Budd, Johnston and several of Searle’s books. See Stern’s “Wittgenstein’s PI ”(2004) for a nice explanation of Private Language and everything by Read et al for getting to the roots of these issues as few do.Many of W’s comments come to mind. He noted 85 years ago that ‘mysteries’ satisfy a longing for the transcendent, and because we think we can see the ‘limits of human understanding’, we think we can also see beyond them, and that we should dwell on the fact that we see the limits of language(mind) in the fact that we cannot describe the facts which correspond to a sentence except by repeating the sentence (see p10 etc. in his Culture and Value, written in 1931). I also find it useful to repeat frequently his remark that “superstition is nothing but belief in the causal nexus”--written a century ago in TLP 5.1361.Also apropos is his famous comment (PI p308) about the origin of the philosophical problems about mental processes (and all philosophical problems). "How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviorism arise? The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them -- we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.) -- And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them.”Another seemingly trivial comment by W (PI p271) asked us to imagine a person who forgot what the word ‘pain’ meant but used it correctly –i.e., he used it as we do! Also relevant is W’s comment (TLP 6.52) that when all scientific questions have been answered, nothing is left to question, and that is itself the answer. And central to understanding the scientistic (i.e., due to scientism not science) failures of CDC et al is his observation that it is a very common mistake to think that something must make us do what we do, which leads to the confusion between cause and reason. “And the mistake which we here and in a thousand similar cases are inclined to make is labeled by the word “to make” as we have used it in the sentence “It is no act of insight which makes us use the rule as we do”, because there is an idea that “something must make us” do what we do. And this again joins onto the confusion between cause and reason. We need have no reason to follow the rule as we do. The chain of reasons has an end.” BBB p143He has also commented that the chain of causes has an end and that there is no reason in the general case for it to be meaningful to specify a cause.Much of academic discussion of behavior, life and the universe is high comedy (as opposed to the low comedy of most politics, religion and mass media): i.e., “comedy dealing with polite society, characterized by sophisticated, witty dialogue and an intricate plot”-(Dictionary.com). But philosophy is not a waste of time-done rightly, it is the best way to spend time. How else can we understand dispel the chaos in the behavioral sciences or describe our mental life and the higher order thought of System 2¬--the most intricate, wonderful and mysterious thing there is?Given this framework it should be easy to understand OC, to follow W’s examples describing how our innate psychology uses the reality testing of System 2 to build on the certainties of System 1, so that we as individuals and as societies acquire a world view of irrefutable interlocking experiences that build on the bedrock of our axiomatic genetically programmed reflexive perception and action to the amazing edifice of science and culture. The theory of evolution and the theory of relativity passed long ago from something that could be challenged to certainties that can only be modified, and at the other end of the spectrum, there is no possibility of finding out that there are no such things as Paris or Brontosaurs. The skeptical view is incoherent. We can say anything but we cannot mean anything.Thus, with DMS, I regard OC as a description of the foundation stone of human understanding and the most basic document on our psychology. Though written when in his 60’s, mentally and physically devastated by cancer, it is as brilliant as his other work and transforms our understanding of philosophy (the descriptive psychology of higher order thought), bringing it at last into the light, after three thousand years in the cave. Metaphysics has been swept away from philosophy and from physics.“What sort of progress is this—the fascinating mystery has been removed--yet no depths have been plumbed in consolation; nothing has been explained or discovered or reconceived. How tame and uninspiring one might think. But perhaps, as Wittgenstein suggests, the virtues of clarity, demystification and truth should be found satisfying enough” --Horwich ‘Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy’.Finally, let me suggest that with the perspective I have encouraged here, W is at the center of contemporary philosophy and psychology and is not obscure, difficult or irrelevant, but scintillating, profound and crystal clear and that to miss him is to miss one of the greatest intellectual adventures possible.

This should be the central work of modern epistemology

This review is somewhat premature as I have only read this book twice and need to read it twice more to begin to penetrate its real value. Even as a layman, though, I can appreciate the confidence of the voice here.

Excellent text and condition.

Excellent!

This is for you if you love the comedy of philosophy. Whereas Sartre is the funniest (reducing the world to slime) Wittgenstein is next funniest (reducing the world to silence is best). You can't be certain!