Williams has ‘skin in the game’ of philosophical responses to scepticism
(see especially his book Unnatural Doubts (Williams 1996)). And hence it
is unsurprising that he makes a standard philosophical move: finding in tales of
the mighty dead his own philosophy imperfectly set out. The final step in the therapeutic
and diagnostic response to scientism that he finds in Wittgenstein is to suggest
that scepticism presupposes what Williams calls ‘epistemological realism’: the assumption
that empirical judgements can be identified as a class and have to be based on epistemically
prior judgements concerning experience. In contrast to this picture, then, hinges
– the motley of certainties described in OC – help to suggest a very different conception
of the sorts of things that serve as foundations for other certain judgements.
At the start of this paper, Williams offers the following summary of
themes in OC.
1. There are bedrock certainties, propositions
or judgments that we do not and (in some way) cannot doubt. These fundamental certainties
can be thought of “framework judgments” in the following sense: by lying “apart
from the route traveled by inquiry”, they constitute the framework within which
practices of inquiring, justifying beliefs, arguing, asking for and giving reasons,
making knowledge-claims, etc. take place.
2. While recognising bedrock certainties, Wittgenstein departs from the traditional
foundationalist conception of basic beliefs. Judgments that make justification possible
are themselves outside the scope of justification. At the most fundamental level,
certainty is grounded in the conditions of meaning or understanding. It is not a
matter of evidence, even self-evidence. This is the burden of Wittgenstein’s reluctance
to think of bedrock certainties as things we know to be true.
3. In further contrast to the basic beliefs of traditional foundationalism, bedrock
certainties are extremely heterogeneous. They include (among other things) elementary
mathematical propositions (12 x 12 = 144) and simple recognitional judgments (“Here
is one hand”); but also quite general claims about the world around us (“The Earth
has existed for many years past”, “Every human being has two parents”, “There are
physical objects”). (Williams 2004b: 77)
These themes, he suggests, help to constitute what he calls the ‘Framework
Reading’ of OC and they seem to be a way to block Agrippan scepticism concerning
the regress of justifications. He summarises Agrippan scepticism thus in ‘Why (Wittgensteinian) Contextualism Is Not
Relativism’ (Williams 2007b).
Suppose
that someone (call him “the claimant”) makes a claim, P, in such a way that he represents
himself as knowing P to be true: a challenger can ask him how he knows. Aft
er all, we might think, if someone represents himself as knowing something, rather
than merely believing it, he invites the question, which therefore cannot
reasonably be refused. However, if the claimant accepts the challenge, he must give
his reason for believing that P, citing evidence for P or other grounds for supposing
P to be true. In so doing, he enters a new claim, Q, and the question will arise
as to whether Q is something that he knows (or justifiably believes). But since
anything he says in support of Q may itself be challenged, requiring a further supporting
claim we seem to have opened up a vicious regress of reasons for reasons for reasons,
and so on without end. (Williams 2007b: 95)
Agrippan scepticism amounts to a trilemma: ‘the thought that any attempt to justify a belief must end in one of three unsatisfactory ways: a vicious regress, a brute assumption, or circular reasoning’ (ibid: ). It seems plausible to attempt to block such scepticism via self standing certainties although both the ‘Framework Reading’ of OC and Williams’ own interpretation contests the terms of the trilemma. In ‘Why Wittgenstein isn’t a foundationalist’ he suggests.
For traditionally minded theorists, the
Agrippan Trilemma appears to define the space of theoretical options, foundationalism
and the coherence theory. But in the picture Wittgenstein is suggesting, which to
some extent he shares with Sellars, both foundationalism and the coherence theory,
go wrong. Foundationalists think that if there is to be non-inferential entitlement
to particular propositions, there must be a free-standing stratum of basic knowledge
on which all other knowledge rests. The semantic inter-dependence of basic and non-basic
judgements entails that there is no such stratum. The coherence theory, recognizing
semantic inter-dependence, concludes that no epistemic entitlements are genuinely
non-inferential. But semantic inter-dependence is compatible with justificational
asymmetries. (Williams 2007a: 55)
Williams argues, however – in ‘Wittgenstein’s refutation of idealism’
– that the early sections of OC are concerned not with Agrippan but Cartesian scepticism.
It is in response to this that Wittgenstein looks at Moore’s response which, Williams
plausibly suggests, fails because it attempts to answer general sceptical doubt
with an instance of the very kind of knowledge they call into question.
The Cartesian sceptic asks whether
we know that there are any physical objects at all... Moore wants to assure the
sceptic that there are physical objects. He does so by insisting that he (Moore)
knows that two such things exist, rather as I might assure a friend that he has not missed the last train
to the city, since I know that there are at least two evening departures. But the sceptic isn’t seeking reassurance and, in any case, Moore is in no special position
to give it. Moore has misunderstood the kind of response that scepticism demands. (Williams 2004b: 78)
Thus Moore’s response is no help in responding to sceptical doubts
because it trades in instances of the general class of knowledge that the
sceptic calls into question. But philosophical scepticism requires some sort of
argument or justification. Is sceptical doubt coherent? Indeed, Williams
initially stresses a stronger question: does it even make sense?
The sceptic thinks that he has found reason
to question whether we know anything whatsoever about the external world. If his
reasons for doubting are coherent, his doubts cannot be met by presenting particular
examples of the kind of knowledge that is in question generally. But do his doubts
really do make sense? (ibid: 79)
In what follows throughout the paper, Williams tries to investigate
what motivates the sceptic. So, for example, he investigates the idea that philosophy
might introduce a new context in which the sorts of doubt that would normally make
no sense in everyday circumstances might come to make sense. But this is not because
Williams agrees that it might, on Wittgenstein’s behalf or on his own.
But do his doubts really do make sense?
Wittgenstein never wavers in his conviction that they do not: the sceptic’s doubts
are wholly illusory. This is another reason why they cannot be met with a proof.
If the scruples of the sceptic or idealist are incoherent, then so are the reassurances
of the realist. No proof is possible because there is nothing to prove. (ibid:
79)
Despite the failure of Moore’s response to scepticism,
Wittgenstein clearly thought that it was interesting and relevant to an
investigation of knowledge, doubt, certainty and scepticism and Williams
follows him in this. In the first section – what he calls the ‘problem phase’ –
Williams considers the ordinary role of claims to know and doubt and of
knowledge itself and doubt itself.
While Moore’s proof is deeply misconceived,
it has considerable diagnostic interest. By reflecting on it, we can discern a number
of important features of the logic of “doubt” and “know”. We can also find clues
to a deeper diagnosis of sceptical worries. Wittgenstein makes a number of interconnected
suggestions… The first is that ordinary doubts are essentially linked to the possibility
of their being resolved… (ibid: 79)
In the ordinary setting, raising a doubt presupposes the possibility
of a resolution. To raise a doubt requires some grounds. In this respect, claims
to knowledge and doubt are symmetric. Both are moves within a game of asking for
and giving reasons and hence we might say, following Sellars and McDowell
(although Williams does not put it this way himself) knowledge and doubt are standings
or statuses in the space of reasons.
Wittgenstein’s second point is that Moore’s
proof is not just ineffective: it involves a misuse of the expression “I know”…
The things Moore assures us he knows are not ordinarily the objects of knowledge-claims.
Indeed, they are not ordinarily expressed in claims of any kind. Rather, knowledge
and certainty are shown in practice, in the way I act. (ibid: 79)
Williams suggests that Moore’s response to the sceptic itself relies
on a false picture of knowledge which likens it to a state of mind, the sort of
state over which one has authority, rather than a standing in the space of reasons.
Further, context influences what one can claim to know. Williams quotes Wittgenstein:
I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense!
I am sitting at his bedside, I am looking attentively into his face.—So I don’t
know, then, that there is a sick man lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion
makes sense. (Wittgenstein 1969 §10 quoted in Williams 2004b: 80)
In this particular context, the assertion that one knows and equally
questioning it both misfire. In general, Williams is suspicious of too quickly inferring
from a failure of an assertion to an underlying factual state (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=411aX6h3a6U at 13-14 and
17-18 minutes). So, for example, while it may make no sense in some particular
context to announce that one knows something, one still might know it, he suggests.
In this, he is more cautious of inference from the fact that an assertion would
make no sense in context to a conclusion that there is no knowledge in play
than, say, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock (Moyal Sharrock 2004). Further, he devotes much of
his paper ‘Wittgenstein, truth and certainty’ to a discussion of Wittgenstein’s
own reluctance to treat certainties such as this, or ‘hinges’, as knowledge or
even as truths (Williams 2004a).
However, connected with his
repudiation of intrinsic credibility, and perhaps even more striking, is the
fact that, in sharp contrast to traditional foundationalists, Wittgenstein is
deeply reluctant to think of basic certainties as examples of basic knowledge.
Thus:
§32 It’s not a matter of Moore’s knowing that there’s a hand there, but rather
we should not understand him if he were to say ‘Of course I may be wrong about
this’. We should ask ‘What is it like to make such a mistake as that?’—e.g.
what’s it like to discover that it was a mistake?
§58 If ‘I know etc.’ is conceived as a grammatical proposition, of course the
‘I’ cannot be important. And it properly means There is no such thing as doubt
in this case’ or ‘The expression “I do not know” makes no sense in this case’.
And of course it follows from this that ‘I know’ makes no sense either.
With regard to basic certainties, claims to knowledge are nonsensical. The
concept of knowledge does not apply. (Williams 2004a: 255-6)
Further, later in that paper, Williams appears to agree with
Wittgenstein’s view:
My commonsense and scientific
framework determines what counts as evidence for what, thus what it is to give
(or possess) grounds. But if practices of justification necessarily take place against
a background of unchallenged (and even unchallengeable) commonsense and
scientific certainties, it seems to follow that those certainties themselves
are beyond justification. But if they cannot be justified, they cannot be
known, or not known. The concept of knowledge gets no purchase here, just as
Wittgenstein says. (ibid: 257)
But later still it becomes clear that Williams’ view is nuanced.
I am sympathetic to what Wittgenstein
is trying to do here. But lacking further development, the argument I have just
given is less than fully satisfying. It may be that the judgements that belong
to our ‘frame of reference’ are not what we ordinarily think of as assumptions,
and so the sceptic should not call them such. But it is hard to shake the
feeling that, on a deeper level, the sceptic is more right than wrong. The
source of this feeling is not hard to identify. Many of our common-sense
certainties appear to be empirical propositions. That is to say, whether they
are true or false depends on what the facts are, not on what we believe. But
such certainties cannot be supported by evidence or argument: the element in
which arguments have their life cannot itself be argued for. To be sure, in one
way our bedrock certainties are justified: we are fully entitled to hold on to
them. But in another way, they are not. We do not and, in the nature of the
case, cannot have reasons to suppose that they are true. This is the sense of
‘justified’ that seems to be uppermost in Wittgenstein’s mind when he expresses
reluctance to count basic certainties as items of knowledge. We seem to be left
with substantial empirical commitments that cannot be justified. (ibid: 258)
More recently, in ‘Wittgenstein
and Skepticism: Illusory Doubts’, Williams suggests that one can know hinge propositions and
stresses some textual support in OC for this view, too (Williams 2018).
It is widely assumed that “hinge”
propositions, because they structure our epistemic practices, are not even
candidates for being known to be true. If this is what Wittgenstein intends, he
faces what Duncan Pritchard identifies as a “core problem”: that “from a
skeptical view it is hard to see just what is so anti-skeptical about the claim
that the structure of rational evaluation has at its core arational commitments.
Isn’t that just what the radical skeptic claims?”25 However, it is far from
clear that this is Wittgenstein’s view. The “hinge” remark (OC 341) begins
“That is to say . . .” and glosses Wittgenstein’s previous observation (OC
340): “We know, with the same certainty with which we believe any mathematical
proposition, how the letters A and B are pronounced, what the colour of human
blood is called, that human beings have blood and call it ‘blood.’” Apparently,
Wittgenstein doesn’t hesitate to treat hinge propositions as known.
That said, Wittgenstein often seems to take the opposite view. Is he of two
minds? However, when Wittgenstein declines to say that everyday certainties are
things he knows, it is almost invariably to distance himself from Moore’s use
of “I know” to combat skepticism. “I know,” Wittgenstein observes, may be taken
to express “comfortable certainty, not the certainty that is still struggling”
(OC §357). This use of “I know” is unexceptionable in everyday contexts. But in
a discussion of skepticism it is pointless, if not actively dangerous: remember
Moore’s mistake. (Williams 2018: 496-7)
Overall, there is reason to hold that, in what is in effect an
unedited collection of final notes, Wittgenstein does not have a settled view
of hinges but that Williams takes them to be both true and knowable, though
typically claims to know them of the sort Moore attempts are
nonsensical. Hence their identification is not a matter of avowing all one’s
commitments as Moore implies but rather looking to what is shown as fixed by
inquiry.
How are such axial points discovered?
Surely, the answer must be that we can come to see that they are
presupposed—logically implied by the particular ways in which we do and do not
ask questions. By ‘logically’ I do not necessarily mean ‘formally’. Rather,
they may be held fast by what Robert Brandom calls ‘material-inferential
connections’. Still, it is hard to see how such propositions could lack truth-value.
They are presupposed in the sense that a commitment to their truth is implicit
in our practices of inquiry and justification. This seems to be part of what
Wittgenstein is getting at when he introduces the idea of a ‘hinge’
proposition. (Williams 2004a: 259)
So, returning from the detour on Williams’ view as to whether
hinges can be true and known, I can summarise the main thrust of the ‘problem
phase’ section of Williams’ ‘Wittgenstein’s refutation of idealism’. The key
idea is that the sceptic’s doubt – and thus their claim to doubt – makes
no sense because it lacks the right context of reasons for possible error and
potential reassurances.
Wittgenstein’s initial remarks on the scope
of ordinary doubt might give the impression that only the legitimacy of the sceptic’s
“doubts” is in question. This is not so. At issue is their intelligibility. It is
not just that we do not doubt the things that Moore would like to say he knows:
the question is whether we understand what it would be to doubt them. This is where
the point that doubts too need grounds comes back into play… Just as entering a
doubt implies the possibility of saying what mistake might have been made, so entering
a knowledge-claim implies the possibility of saying how one knows. This will often
mean being able give appropriate grounds or evidence. Thus an expression of doubt,
implying the possibility of a mistake, can be met with an explanation of how one
knows, an explanation that will show that no mistake was in fact made. The symmetry
in the intelligibility requirements for doubting and knowledge-claiming—the need
to be able to say what mistake might have been made or how one knows—makes plain
why the (in principle) possibility of resolving doubts (by explaining how one knows)
is built into the language-game as one of its essential features). (Williams
2004b: 81)
This the first section of Williams’ account of Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesian
scepticism concern the idea that sceptical doubt makes no sense and that this fact
is illustrated, rather than countered, by Moore’s counter claims to knowledge.
But Williams does not think that this is the end of Wittgenstein’s account. For
this reason, he criticises the ‘Framework Reading’ for offering a too direct, too
blunt response to scepticism. A diagnostic and theoretical treatment is also called
for.
These important passages throw into relief
what I regard as so misleading about the Framework Reading: it makes Wittgenstein’s
response to scepticism too direct. As a result, it loses sight of an essential point:
that comments on the logic of ordinary doubting and knowledge-claiming will cut
no ice if we are in the grip of the illusion that there is a special kind of philosophical
doubt, purporting to call epistemic ordinary procedures into question… Marie McGinn
claims that Wittgenstein’s key insight is that, because Moorean judgments do not
embed in epistemic contexts, we do not stand in an “epistemic relation” to such
judgments. Accordingly, Moore’s insistence that he knows such things to be true
and the sceptic’s attempt to doubt them both misfire. But no such conclusion is
yet available. The most that has been shown is that such judgments are not ordinarily
treated as either supportable by evidence or open to question. (ibid: 83)
Moyal-Sharrock takes this to suggest that Williams is more
sympathetic to philosophical scepticism than, on her account, Wittgenstein (or
she) is. She says:
Williams attempts to rally
Wittgenstein to this account of the sceptical situation. I believe, however,
that both philosophers’ accounts are irreconcilable. Williams takes scepticism
seriously; Wittgenstein does not. Williams believes the sceptic’s doubt is real
and profound; Wittgenstein does not. Williams believes that the sceptic’s sin
is that he generalizes what should remain a context-bound doubt; Wittgenstein
believes so-called sceptical doubt is not doubt at all – in the study, or out…
[O]n Williams’s reading of Wittgenstein, although sceptical doubt has no
bearing on ordinary doubt, it is a legitimate manifestation of doubt, and we
are entitled to its examination. (Moyal Sharrock 2004: 158-60)
But I do not think that that is fair. It is rather that Williams
wishes to pre-empt a sceptical response that while the kind of doubts raised by
the sceptic are not normally regarded as relevant, the sceptic has,
nevertheless, revealed an embarrassing lacuna in everyday thinking. Hence
Williams suggests the need for a second and diagnostic phase.
Wittgenstein conspicuously declines to
offer a quick-and-dirty refutation. He does not argue (as we might have expected)
that, since the possibility of resolving doubts belongs to our language-game as
one of its essential features, sceptical or philosophical doubt is an obvious non-starter.
Instead, he suggests that we ask what a sceptical doubt would amount to, warning
us not to assume that we already know. His intent is clear: the peculiar character
of philosophical doubt is a not a refutation of scepticism, but it is an invitation
to pursue a diagnostic inquiry. If a doubt about existence only works in a language-game,
and if the game of philosophical reflection is distinct from that of ordinary doubting,
we are entitled to ask how the philosophical game is to be carried on. (ibid:
84)
This passage channels an early section in OC where Wittgenstein
says:
The idealist’s question would be
something like: “What right have I not to doubt the existence of my hands?”
(And to that the answer can’t be: I know that they exist.) But someone who asks
such a question is overlooking the fact that a doubt about existence only works
in a language-game. Hence, that we should first have to ask: what would such a
doubt be like?, and don’t understand this straight off. (§24)
Given that Wittgenstein ties doubting to a language game the
sceptic may claim to have such a game in mind, a specific philosophical or
epistemological context. Hence Wittgenstein both suggests the necessity of
offering them a chance to sketch this but also cautions against assuming that
such a doubt will make sense. This has echoes of the ‘Resolute Reading’s’
approach to nonsense elsewhere in Wittgenstein’s oevre. Whereas traditional Wittgensteinians
were happy to assert baldly that certain utterances were nonsense and hence to
rule them out, ‘Resolute Readers’ are critical of the idea of essentially nonsensical
senses. Nonsense is merely the lack of sense. No use has been given to a combination
of linguistic symbols, for example. And hence the diagnosis of nonsense requires
offering an opportunity for those who think they have made sense to explain the
rules of their game.
In the diagnostic phase of, Williams mainly offers a distinct response
to Cartesian scepticism entering on the idea of the existence of physical objects,
the very claim Moore takes to defend in his Proof. Williams claims, of particular
note, that that there are physical objects is not a hinge proposition.
It’s not a matter of Moore’s knowing that
there’s a hand there, but rather we should not understand him if he were to say
“Of course I may be wrong about this”. We should ask “What is it like to make such
a mistake as that?”—e.g. what’s it like to discover that it was a mistake. (Wittgesntein
1969 §32)
It is not as though we have some general-purpose concept of “making a mistake” such
that, in any circumstances whatsoever, and without any particular error-possibility
in mind, we can intelligibly say “Maybe you are making a mistake”. So once more,
what is the language-game of philosophical doubt? The absolutely crucial feature
of philosophical doubt has already been identified. It involves taking seriously
the possibility that no physical objects exist. If there is a genuine possibility
here, we can see why the idealist wants to know what right I have not to doubt the
existence of my hands. We can also see why this doubt, once entered, may turn out
to be irresolvable. I cannot resolve it Moore’s way, by examples. But it is not
obvious what other way, if any, is available to me. (Williams 2004b: 85)
Here Williams identifies the specific confrontation of Moore and
the sceptic and hence the latter’s idea that there is a kind of universal doubt
available as a result of philosophical reflection. It concerns the specific
idea of doubt that ‘external’ or physical objects exist at all. Hence also
Wittgenstein’s use of both ‘sceptic’ and ‘idealist’ to characterise this
supposed position.
So if it is nonsense both to question, with the sceptic, or to assert,
with Moore, whether or that there physical objects, what status does the proposition
have. Williams suggests that it functions as a description of the system of representation
(to which Wittgenstein often gives the description ‘logic’).
Wittgenstein does not elaborate, but the
main drift of his thought is clear. We do not have a general-purpose concept of
“object” that swings free of our ability to refer to objects in the course of playing
particular language-games. Rather, our understanding of “objects” is implicit in
our mastery of singular reference:. In other words, “objects” are what singular
terms pick out. Central to our mastery of singular reference are practices of identification
and re-identification: we know what an object is when we know what does and does
not count as the same object. These practices of identification and reidentification
sort “objects” into broad logical categories… This is why no such proposition as
“There are physical objects” can be formulated. At most it could mean “We talk about
tables, chairs, dogs, cats, etc.”. This is not at all what the realist intends to
assert or the idealist to deny. (ibid: 86)
This passage has echoes of a theme in both McGinn’s and
Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretations. They both argue that hinge propositions are
connected to language mastery. For example McGinn argues:
Thus, my certainty regarding, say, the
judgement ‘This is a hand’ is to be seen as a pre-epistemic attitude that is in
part constitutive of my practical ability to speak the language. the judgement
that this is a hand is not a piece of knowledge – a true, justified belief,
based on evidence – but an authoritative expression of my established mastery
of English. (McGinn 1989: 144)
And Moyal-Sharrock argues that it is a theme of the ‘third
Wittgenstein’ that apparent empirical claims really serve as grammatical
stipulations (Moyal-Sharrock 2004). While there is some commonality here, Williams
disagrees that this really is an instance of a hinge.
We have identified the proximate source
of the illusion of the doubt behind everyday doubt. The idealist or sceptic wants
to treat “There are physical objects” as an empirical or factual statement. He wants
to treat is as a hypothesis. It is neither. However, this is not because, as the
Framework Reading has it, that it is a “framework judgment”, lying apart from the
route traveled by inquiry, beyond evidence and justification, and non- factual because
neither true nor false. “There are physical objects” is neither true nor false because
it is nonsense. And it is nonsense because “physical object” is not the concept
of a kind of object, like “unicorn” or “planet”. “Physical object” is a piece of
logical or semantic vocabulary, thus unsuitable for formulating the empirical hypothesis
the sceptic or idealist would like to express…
Is “There are physical objects” is a hinge proposition, only more general than hinges
specific to history or physics because common to all such inquiries? No. “There
are physical objects” is not a hinge proposition: it is nonsense. (Williams
2004b: 86-7)
Thus Williams agrees with McGinn’s and Moyal-Sharrock’s claims
that some of the things said by sceptics and by philosophical responses to them
(eg Moore’s) are nonsensical. But he disagrees in so far as he thinks that this
instance is nonsense but not a hinge and that genuine hinges are not
non-sensical but true and knowable.
It is important to take note of the
special character of this diagnosis. Not all propositions that lie apart from
the route travelled by inquiry do so for the same reason. To see this, consider
another proposition much discussed by Wittgenstein in the later sets of notes:
“The earth has existed of many years past”. No one who doubted this proposition
could engage in historical investigation or seek historical understanding. The
same goes for the proposition that not all historical records are the product
of fraud or deception. All our discursive practices involve such (typically
tacit) commitments. They constitute the “riverbed” along which inquiry flows (§§95-99),
the axis around which inquiry moves (§152), or the hinges on which it turns (§§341-3).
(ibid: 87)
Genuine hinges are, according to Williams, related to Moore’s
‘Defence of common sense’ rather than his ‘Proof of the external world’.
We learn to think by learning to talk;
and we learn to talk by being trained to make particular judgments about things
around us. It is therefore inconceivable that there should be discursive beings
who had not mastered “physical-object” talk. For more specialized kinds of
talk, this is not so. Wittgenstein writes:
[W]hat goes into someone’s knowing…history, say? He must know what it means to
say: the earth has already existed for such and such a length of time. For not
any intelligent adult must know that….§85
….Men have believed that they could make rain. Why should not a king be brought
up in the belief that the world began with him?…§92
A definite conception of historical time belongs to what we take as common
sense. But not everything that belongs to common sense is a precondition of the
very possibility of rational thought. This confirms what I have claimed.
Wittgenstein’s response to idealism, the problem addressed in Moore’s “Proof”,
must be distinguished from his discussion of Moore’s “Defence”, which raises
very different issues. (ibid: 87-8)
So far, then, Williams has stressed that doubt and knowledge are symmetric,
both calling for justificatory reasons. Doubt, no less than a knowledge claim, requires
motivation and hence a merely logically possible doubt need not be an actual doubt.
Further, he has suggested that Cartesian scepticism treats a logical description
of our linguistic practices as an empirical hypothesis and hence sceptical doubt,
and Moorean defence, both fail to make sense.
Is that enough to block scepticism? It is still not, according to Williams.
The problem is that the sceptic may remain unconvinced that what they have said
is nonsensical. They may insist that it makes sense to them.
Why is it an inadequate answer to the idealist
and the realist to say that “There are physical objects” is nonsense? In saying
that it is not nonsense “to them”, Wittgenstein is not saying that it is not nonsense.
Nor is he conceding that the idealist and realist have given it a sense: not a clear
sense, anyway. The point is rather that these philosophers— all of us when we are
in the grip of sceptical anxieties--will not recognise that it is nonsense. They
(or we) think that “There are physical objects” can be understood as an empirical
hypothesis. They (we) suffer from an illusion of meaning, the source of which remains
to be exposed. (ibid: 88)
As I have already suggested this thought resembles a change of tack
in Wittgensteinian philosophy that has arisen with the resolute reading of nonsense.
This is not, in fact, Williams’ approach to scepticism. In Unnatural Doubts,
he distinguishes between two anti-sceptical approaches therapeutic and theoretical
diagnoses. There, Williams does not claim in propria persona that the sceptical
hypothesis makes no sense. So he does not say that scepticism makes
no sense either. That may count in his favour (since scepticism seems to
make sense). But, unlike philosophers such as Donald Davidson, he does not let the
sceptical argument go through and then offer a distinct argument for reassurance.
Once it does then it seems merely dogmatic to attempt to deny it. Instead, Williams
aims to show that scepticism depends on a theoretical view of knowledge which is
neither obligatory nor natural.
He claims that the sceptical argument depends on what seemed
merely an accidental feature of Descartes’ method of doubt: treating our knowledge
of the external world as a single type of knowledge, sharing a common style of justification
(via (our knowledge of) our experience). But the idea that there is such a class
as ‘our knowledge of the external world’ is not a natural idea and this category
is theoretical and artificial. So once we realise that the sceptic relies on this
assumption – for example in the way normal ways of justifying our claim that we
are not now dreaming are ruled out because we need to prove we are not dreaming
independently of anything else we know about the world – it is equally possible
to reject both it and the scepticism it leads to. Further, the very fact it leads
to scepticism (which is obvious rubbish) counts against it.
But that is not how things proceed in the next section of ‘Wittgenstein’s
refutation of idealism’. Here he takes as the key analogy knowledge of
mathematical truths.
To learn to calculate at all,
hence to learn what calculating is, we must be trained to accept certain
calculations as (normally) unquestionable. Someone who was in doubt as to
whether 12 x 12 = 144 would not have learned to calculate. He would not know
what calculating is and would not understand arithmetical statements. As
Wittgenstein explains in some later remarks:
The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements.
(§80)
That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain
whether I understand them. (§81)
And although there is no rule for distinguishing those cases in which error is
impossible from those in which it isn’t, this is not a lack: “The rule is not
needed” (§46). (Williams 2004b: 89)
(Williams adds a footnote that connects back to the question of
whether – contra Moyal-Sharrock – hinges are true and can be known.
Notice that this argument depends on a
straightforward attribution of truth to Moorean judgments. At the same time,
Wittgenstein is tempted to deny that propositions belonging to the “background”
to inquiry are properly thought of as true or false. To go into this issue
would take me too far afield. Let me just say what I take to be the source of
Wittgenstein’s hesitation: he is torn between a deflationary view of truth (in
the form of a redundancy theory) and an epistemic account (the true/false as
what we can confirm/disconfirm). What these two approaches to truth have
something in common is that on neither can we explain why certain proposition
“stand fast” by saying that they “correspond to reality”. (ibid: fn6))
Elsewhere he summarises this thought thus:
‘…it is not true that a mistake merely
gets more and more improbable as we pass from the planet to my own hand. No: at
some point it has already ceased to be conceivable. Where doubt is impossible,
we find certainty.’ (§54)
The traditional conception of a basic belief involves the idea of encapsulated
knowledge: things that we can believe without our needing to believe anything
else, potential first items of knowledge from which a more elaborate structure
of justified belief can be built up. By contrast, Wittgenstein holds that while
some beliefs do and must ‘stand fast’, they do so in virtue of their place in a
larger, inferentially articulated system of beliefs…
In sum, in taking judgement (or belief) for granted, the sceptic arrives on the
scene too late. Without judgements that are unproblematic, there are no
judgements at all. And, because meaning is a matter of use, such unproblematic
judgements must be unproblematically true. (Williams 2004a: 252-5)
In the final pages of ‘Wittgenstein’s refutation of idealism’, Williams
ascribes to Wittgenstein the Williamsian diagnosis of presupposing epistemological
realism.
The reason why sceptic and idealist think
that “There as physical objects” is a hypothesis is that they are convinced that
experiential knowledge—knowledge of coloured patches or “sense-data”—is epistemologically
prior to knowledge of physical objects. In fact, in their view, experiential knowledge
is epistemologically basic: knowledge of sense-data is distinctive in its immediacy,
certainty immunity from error. In reporting on our sense-data, we can perhaps make
verbal slips, but we cannot make mistakes. With this doctrine in place, judgments
about physical objects look to be inferential. (Williams 2004b: 90)
But he goes further to make a suggestion that links back to the
error he also ascribes to Moore which is to treat knowledge as a mental state.
That is the problem. If one thinks of knowledge
as a mental state, thus as subjective, while recognising that “know” is factive,
one will suppose that a subjective or inner state can ensure that certain facts
really do obtain. But how can a subjective state guarantee objective facts? It cannot.
Thus one is led to the view that the only facts that can be known, or “immediately”
known, are themselves subjective: facts about other mental states.
This is the ground of epistemological realism: treating knowledge
as falling into theoretical tractable kinds with risky empirical knowledge of
the world based on safer knowledge of experiential states. It turns out on
Williams’ reading that either Wittgenstein is Williams’ father or, more likely, Williams is
Wittgenstein’s.
References
McGinn, M. (1989) Sense and Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell
G.E.Moore, ‘Proof of an External World’ and ‘A Defence of
Common Sense’, both in Moore, G. E. 1970. Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn.
London: Allen and Unwin.
Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2004) Understanding Wittgenstein's on
Certainty. Palgrave-Macmillan
Williams, M. (1996) Unnatural doubts, Princeton: Princeton
University Press
Williams, M. (2004a) ‘Wittgenstein, truth and
certainty’ In Max Kölbel & Bernhard Weiss (eds.) Wittgenstein's Lasting
Significance. Routledge.
Williams, M. (2004b) ‘Wittgenstein's
refutation of idealism’ In Denis McManus (ed.) Wittgenstein and Scepticism.
Routledge.
Williams, M. (2007a) ‘Why Wittgenstein isn’t
a foundationalist’ in Moyal-Sharrock, Daniele & Brenner, William H. (eds.)
(2007) Readings on Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Palgrave-Macmillan.
Williams, M. (2007b) ‘Why (Wittgensteinian)
Contextualism Is Not Relativism’ Episteme, 4(1), 93-114.
Williams, M. (2017) ‘Hinges as knowledge
(Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty)’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=411aX6h3a6U
Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty,
Oxford: Blackwell
