The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein's On Certainty

Philosophical Investigations 8:2 April 1985 lSSN 0190-0536 $2.50

The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

John W. Cook

If the first button of a man’s coat is wrongly buttoned, all the rest will be crooked.

Giordano Bruno

Many commentators have found in Wittgenstein’s O n Certainty’ a theory of knowledge conjoined with a theory of language. Some have also argued that this theory is not only sound but provides a satisfactory answer to philosophical skepticism.* My own view differs sharply from this assessment. Undoubtedly Wittgenstein is developing some kind of theory in many passages of O n Certainty, but I find two quite different versions of the theory in Wittgen- stein’s notes. Moreover, I do not think that either version is sound, nor do I think that Wittgenstein has provided a suitable answer to philosophical skepticism. In what follows I have undertaken to show (i) that we must distinguish two versions of the theory, even if Wittgenstein does not clearly do so, (ii) that the first version results from a confusion which Wittgenstein himself, at times, recognized, and (iii) that the second version of the theory is addressed to a form of skepticism which Wittgenstein was ill-equipped to deal with because he accepted its metaphysical premises.

I

I must begin by giving some account of the theory that has been

1 . Trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Blackwell, 1969). References to the numbered sections of this book will be placed in the text. 2. Ilham Dilman, “On Wittgenstein’s Last Notes (1950-1951) O n Certainty,” Philosophy, 1971, pp. 162-168; Roger A. Shiner, “Wittgenstein and the Foundations of Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1977, pp. 103-124; Norman Malcolm, Thought and Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 1977). pp. 193-198.

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attributed to Wittgenstein. In order to do this, I will go through Wittgenstein’s notes and select passages that seem to belong to the theory. When I come upon passages that seem to undermine the theory, I will simply ignore them. And for the sake of brevity I will disregard some aspects of the theory, such as its relativistic implications, and will attend only to what I take to be the crux of the theory. At one point Wittgenstein explains this by saying that “about certain empirical propositions no doubt can exist if making judgments is to be possible a t all” (308). Wittgenstein is expressing the same idea when he remarks that “the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (341). As an allusion to Wittgenstein’s simile I will call these “hinge propositions.” It is to be understood that these propositions are about such things as trees and houses and people.

In saying that these propositions are “exempt from doubt,” Wittgenstein does not mean that we are incapable of doubting them, as a man might be incapable of doubting his son’s innocence. (“I just can’t believe he would ever do such a terrible thing.”) It is not a matter of psychology that concerns us here but a matter of logic. Wittgenstein brings this out in a number of ways. He says, for example, that hinge propositions, although they are propositions about physical objects, have the same “logical status” as propositions about “sense-data” (53). This means, presumably, that a philosopher can see that “I doubt (am not sure) that p,” where p is a hinge proposition, is absurd in the same way as “I doubt (am not sure) that I feel hot.” (We might express this by saying that in order to recognize a hinge proposition, it is sufficient to have a command of English - or of whatever language the proposition is expressed in.) There are other ways in which Wittgenstein indicates that he is thinking of something logical when he speaks of hinge propositions. He says, for example,

When Moore says he knows such and such, he is really enumerating a lot of empirical propositions which we affirm without special testing; propositions, that is, which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions. (136)

Identifying hinge propositions, then, is an exercise in ‘logic. ’ And among these propositions are those that Moore was claiming to know. But Moore was wrong in so claiming, according to

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Wittgenstein (521). These are not propositions we know but rather propositions we b e l i e ~ e . ~ They are at the rock bottom of our convictions (248). One important thing to recognize about them is that they are “groundless” (166). O r as Wittgenstein also puts it: “At the foundation of all well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded” (253). “Knowledge,” says Wittgenstein, “is in the end based on acknowledgement” (378). “For why,” he asks, “should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge?” (477). “Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?” (478). The child believer that milk exists (144), and its belief is akin to the lack of hesitancy in a cat’s pouncing on a mouse. The child asks for milk or its mother says “Drink your milk,” and no question about the existence of milk comes into the language-game. (The proposition “Milk exists,” like other hinge propositions, “simply gets assumed as a truism, never called in question, perhaps not even ever formulated” (87).) A fundamental conviction, such as the child’s conviction that milk exists, “lies beyond being justified or unjustified; [it is] as it were, . . . something animal” (359).

Wittgenstein speaks in a similar way of our “conviction that the earth exists” (210). That the earth is round is something we know. “We have definitely ascertained that it is round” (291). But our conviction that the earth exists is quite a different matter. “The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting-point of belief for me” (209). Hinge propositions, then, are those that we do not “arrive at . . . as a result of investigation”

3. Two points need to be made here. First, this odd phraseology (“propositions we know,” “propositions we believe”) is Wittgenstein’s way of putting things. Throughout On Certainty he takes it for granted that when we know something we know a proposition (see 389), that when we believe something we believe a proposition (see 313). and that when we doubt something we doubt a proposition (see 494). I find this peculiar, but I will go along with this way of putting things where Wittgenstein’s ideas seem to call for it. The second point that needs to be made here is that I am adhering to Wittgenstein’s use of “believe” in conjunction with hinge propositions. Throughout On Certainty he chooses to speak of our believing those propositions that are exempt from doubt. (See, for example, 245-253.) And yet at one point he observes that if he were to say that he believes something (rather than saying he knows it) “that would express my readiness for my statement to be tested” (355). This observation about the (non-philosophical) use of “believe” thus sharply conflicts with his use of that verb in conjunction with hinge propositions. At one point he seems to become conscious of this, for he remarks, “It would be completely misleading to say: ‘I believe my name is L. W.”’ (425).


(138). We “do not explicitly learn” (152) these propositions. A child is taught other things, such as that the earth is round, and it simply “swallows” the consequences (e.g., that the earth exists) of those things it is taught (143).

Hinge propositions, then, are not among the things we have occasion to say in the ordinary course of affairs, but they are somehow related to the things we say. What, exactly, is this relationship? The answer seems to contain two parts. The first part is given by Wittgenstein when he writes:

My life shows that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on. - I tell a friend e.g. “Take that chair over there”, “Shut the door”, etc. etc. (7)

Wittgenstein seems to be thinking that when I say to someone, “Take that chair over there,” there is another proposition involved, namely, “There is a chair over there.” It is this further proposition that Wittgenstein wants to regard as a hinge proposition. It is not something I would say in the circumstances but something implied by (or presupposed in) what I say. Similarly, if I have been washing my hands and say to someone, “This grease won’t come off my hands,” this is not a hinge proposition. But my saying this implies or presupposes a hinge proposition, namely, “I have hands.”

It is this that Wittgenstein seems to have in mind, or partly in mind, when he speaks of hinge propositions as being the “foundation” or the “scaffolding” (21 1) of our thoughts and language. He speaks of them this way because he thinks of them as the presuppositions or “assumptions” (411) of the things we say. And here we can begin to see the second part of the answer as to how hinge propositions are related to the things we actually say. Wittgenstein remarks that if one were to doubt a hinge proposition, this doubt would “drag everything with it and plunge it into chaos” (613). This remark makes clearer the image of foundations or scaffolding. If one were to doubt a hinge proposition, this would be like removing a prop from beneath the structure it supports. I could not, for example, say that the grease won’t come off my hands if I had to think that perhaps I have no hands. So if I were to imagine someone having doubts about our hinge propositions, I could not think of these as ordinary doubts; rather, he would be calling in question “our whole system” (185, 188). Wittgenstein also puts this point by saying that our fundamental convictions, our

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hinge propositions, cannot be thought to involve a mistake. A mistake, he points out, “can be fitted into” the rest of what we know (74), but if I have told someone that the grease won’t come off my hands and he then says, “But you don’t have hands,” I could not fit this into the rest of what I know. We can make mistakes about many things but not about the things described by hinge propositions. What could happen is that certain experiences might seem to contradict a proposition that is a foundation of our language-games, but if that were to happen I could regard these experiences as illusions and “decide to retain my old belief’ (516). Thus, although I cannot know that my future experience won’t seem to contradict a hinge proposition (364-365), I need not, on that account, doubt these propositions. “[A] doubt is not necessary even when it is possible. . . . [Tlhe possibility of the language- game doesn’t depend on everything being doubted that can be doubted” (392). On the contrary, our language-games depend on the fact that we simply do not have doubts about hinge propositions. “If I make an experiment I do not doubt the existence of the apparatus before my eyes. I have plenty of doubts, but not that one” (377). “My life,” says Wittgenstein, “consists of my being content to accept many things” (344). For example, when I want to get up from a chair, I do not look to see whether I have feet. Why is this? Do I have some reason to believe that it will never happen that when I go to stand up I will find I have no feet? No, says Wittgenstein. “There is no why. I simply don’t [look]. This is how I act” (148).

* * * *

What I have summarized here is the theory that many philosophers claim to find in O n Certainty. Yet I feel wholly dissatisfied with this. For when I read O n Certainty I do not find in its pages the single-mindedness, the unity of thought, that is presupposed in the kind of summary I have just given. On the contrary, it seems to me that Wittgenstein was constantly changing direction, like a man lost in a maze. He takes up now one sort of example and now another; he puts to himself now one sort of question and now another, and he does not always see how they differ. At times he seems to have insights about examples of a certain sort, which he then forgets when he returns to those examples. In giving the


foregoing summary I have had to ignore all this and much more. I have had to ignore, for example, the fact that at different times he seems to treat very different kinds of examples as hinge propositions and that what he says about one sort of example does not seem to fit his other examples. At several points, for instance, he says that our hinge propositions are never formulated, and while this seems to fit some of his examples, such as “The earth exists,” it does not fit others, such as “My name is L. W.” or “Water boils at 100°C.” To accommodate this in my summary, I stuck to one sort of example and disregarded the others. I stuck to those that Wittgenstein must have been thinking of when he said that our hinge propositions may never be formulated. And I did so for an obvious reason. For it is these examples (such as “The earth exists” and “I have hands”) that seem to suggest that hinge propositions are a kind of foundation for all that we do say, for the propositions that are formulated. I could not have made this part of the theory sound very plausible had I dwelt on examples like “My name is L. W.”.

There are still graver difficulties in the foregoing summary, but I will here mention only one of these. The summary ignores entirely the fact that Wittgenstein vascillates between two very different conceptions of hinge propositions. These two conceptions arise from the fact that at different times he seems to be addressing himself to two very different kinds of skepticism, which he does not always carefully distinguish. These two sorts of skepticism are roughly those which Hume, in Chapter XI1 of the Enquiry, distinguishes as the “popular” and the “philosophical” forms of skepticism. Hume described the former sort of skepticism as “but weak” and felt confident that such skepticism can be answered. Wittgenstein seems to be addressing himself to this sort of skepticism when he asks himself, as he often does: “Could I be mistaken when I say (or think) that . . .?”. His answer, typically, is “NO, I could not be mistaken,” and he generally (but not invariably) takes this negative answer to show that there are some propositions about which he could not be mistaken. This, then, generates one conception of hinge propositions: they are propositions about which one could not be mistaken. And generally when Wittgenstein is addressing himself to this first sort of skepticism, his examples are examples of things we would have occasion to say to someone in our daily lives.

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The second sort of skepticism, which Hume calls “philosophical” and which he claims cannot be answered (but only ignored), is a very metaphysical sort of skepticism. Its principal premise is that there are no necessary connections between objects or events to be found in nature, and its principal conclusion is that we can never know what the future holds. This is the sort of skepticism, I believe, that chiefly concerned Wittgenstein in O n Certainty, and he appears to answer it by saying that there are in our language propositions which are invulnerable to future experience.

The question we must ask ourselves is whether there are propositions that fit either of these descriptions. I will begin by considering whether there are in our language any propositions of the first sort: propositions about which we could not be mistaken. I will proceed as though the very idea of ‘propositions’ is itself harmless, although I do not think that it is.

I1

A summary of Wittgenstein’s theory such as that given a t the beginning of the preceding section is highly misleading in many respects. One of the ways in which it is misleading is that it suggests that one can easily see, when reading O n Certainty, what sort of propositions Wittgenstein counts as hinge propositions and why he counts them as such. It leaves one with the impression that it should be easy to proceed on one’s own to find additional examples of hinge propositions. Nothing could be further from the truth. For one of the peculiar things about O n Certainty is that, although Wittgenstein considers many examples, he seldom says, “This proposition is one of those that are exempt from doubt.” And even when he does say something like this, one can seldom be altogether certain why he says it, i.e., what his criterion is for treating this example as a hinge proposition. His remarks about most of his examples are either very cryptic or take the form of unanswered questions. This leaves one with the problem of trying to figure out what it is that makes Wittgenstein so confident that there are hinge propositions. By what criterion does he identify them? I have already suggested that there may be several such criteria in Wittgenstein’s notes, several conceptions of hinge propositions. This, too, is somewhat misleading. For I do not


really think that Wittgenstein ever worked out clearly in his own mind anything so definitive as a criterion. What we find, instead, is that he regularly puts certain questions to himself, such as “How could I doubt that . . .?” and “Could I be mistaken about . . .?” and “If certain things such as I don’t dream of were to happen, couldn’t I still stick with my proposition?”. It is by paying attention to these questions that one must try to understand how Wittgen- stein conceived of hinge propositions. And since one of his most frequently asked questions is “Could I be mistaken about . . .?” (or “How could I be mistaken about . . .?” or “What would a mistake here be like?”), I am going to suppose that Wittgenstein thought of this as a way of picking out hinge propositions, as a kind of criterion. (One other thing that recommends this interpretation is that at one point Wittgenstein writes: “There are certain types of cases in which I rightly say I cannot be making a mistake, and Moore has given a few examples of such cases” (647). Since “Moore’s certain propositions” (202) are plainly Wittgenstein’s paradigm of hinge propositions, it seems fair to construe this remark as revealing what Wittgenstein thought of as the essential characteristic of these propositions.) I am going to suppose, then, that where we find Wittgenstein saying - or intimating - that one could not be mistaken about such and such, we have found a hinge proposition.

One other thing must be kept in mind here. To speak of a proposition as a hinge proposition is, according to Wittgenstein’s conception, to speak of its “logical status.” Now I take it that the logical status of a proposition is something that it more or less permanently has. Wittgenstein does, in one or two places (98, 167), suggest that a proposition might at one time have one logical status (as a hypothesis) and later come to have a different logical status (as a hinge proposition). (Later, in 321, he seems to retract this.) Wittgenstein does not illustrate what, exactly, he has in mind by this shift of logical status, but he seems to be thinking of a shift that comes about as the result of scientific advances. In any case, it seems quite clear that he does not think of propositions as changing their logical status frequently and in a matter of moments. I take this to mean the following. If I am wondering whether the bird I see in yonder tree is a finch, and if I then go closer and see that it is a finch, Wittgenstein would not say that here a proposition has suddenly changed its logical status. He would not say that the

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proposition “It’s a finch” became a hinge proposition when I got close enough to the bird to see what it was. On the contrary, I think he would say that “It’s a finch” is an ordinary empirical proposition which I became certain of by walking closer and getting a better look at the bird. The logical status of the proposition remains unchanged. (Numerous passages, e.g., 167, 213, 308, and 401, make it clear that we are to think of hinge propositions and ordinary empirical propositions as differing in their ‘logical status. ’) We must not think, then, that we have found a hinge proposition just because we have found or imagined a particular circumstance in which someone could not have doubts. I might, at first, have thought that the bird sounds like a finch but looks too small. Then, when I see the bird from close range, I say, “NO doubt about it; it’s a finch.” But such a removal of one’s doubts does not create a hinge proposition. Moreover, I might have been standing very near the tree when the bird first alighted there, so that from the moment I saw it I had no doubts. I could see immediately that the bird was a finch. This, too, should not be thought of as making “It’s a finch” a hinge proposition, for then it might be a hinge proposition for me but not for someone further away who was wondering whether the bird is a finch or something else. This is not how Wittgenstein thinks of hinge propositions. If a proposition has this ‘logical status’ for one of us, it has this status for all the rest of us. (See 84, 100, and 462 for a clue to Wittgenstein’s thinking on this point.) It is not, then, a person’s circumstances that determine whether a proposition is a hinge proposition. On the contrary, we must be able to recognize hinge propositions without considering circumstances at all. We must be able to recognize a hinge proposition by considering merely what the proposition says. Indeed, this is what is meant by saying that it is a proposition that is “exempt from doubt.” This is essential to Wittgenstein’s conception of hinge propositions.

There is another way of seeing that this is so. At one point Wittgenstein compares two propositions: “At this distance from the sun there is a planet” and “Here is a hand,” and he remarks that “the second can’t be called a hypothesis” (52). He continues: “ S O one might grant that Moore was right, if he is interpreted like this: a proposition saying that here is a physical object may have the same logical status as one saying that here is a red patch. For it is not true that a mistake merely gets more and more improbable as


we pass from the planet to my own hand. No: a t some point it has ceased to be conceivable” (53-54). There are two things to notice here. The first is that Wittgenstein says nothing at all about its being some set of circumstances that make a mistake inconceivable in the case of the proposition “Here is a hand.” He says that the proposition “Here is a hand” can’t be called a hypothesis, and by this he means that it is a hinge proposition. What he does not say is this: “In some (or most) circumstances ‘Here is a hand’ is not a hypothesis” or “In some (or most) circumstances ‘Here is a hand’ can’t conceivably be a mistake.” The second thing to notice is Wittgenstein’s remark that a proposition saying that here is a hand can have the same logical status as one saying that here is a red patch. (This, of course, is meant to be a comparison with ‘sense-datum’ propositions.) The comparison is meant to suggest, in part, the following: if p is a sense-datum proposition, a philosopher can see that there would be a logical absurdity in saying “I may be wrong, but I think that p” and he can see this just because he has a command of the language; similarly, ifp is a hinge proposition (such as “Here is a hand”), a philosopher can see that it would be a logical absurdity to say “I may be wrong, but I think that p” and again he can see this just by having a command of the language. In other words, just as it is not someone’s situation or circumstances that give a sense-datum statement its logical status (of being ‘incorrigible’), so it is not a person’s situation or circumstances that give a hinge proposition its logical status. That is to say, we should be able to say in an a priori way whether a given proposition is or is not a hinge proposition, i.e., we should be able to say this without knowing whether anyone is in circumstances of this or that sort. For we want to be able to say that there are hinge propositions in our language and, speaking as philosophers, we must be able to say this without knowing any facts about the world. To identify a hinge proposition, then, nothing more is needed than a command of the language, which is to say that we need consider only what the proposition says.

With this in mind, let us return to our criterion for picking out hinge propositions. At one point Wittgenstein writes: “If someone believes that he has flown from America to England in the last few days, then, I believe, he cannot be making a mistake” (675). Do we have here an example of a hinge proposition? That is, if someone says, “I’ve just flown from America to England,” is what he says a

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hinge proposition? If Wittgenstein is right, then he (whoever he might be) cannot be making a mistake, and isn’t this the mark of a hinge proposition? Let us consider this.

Wittgenstein says that someone who believes that he has just flown from America to England cannot be making a mistake. He makes this as an entirely general claim, as though regardless of anyone’s circumstances we can see that he cannot be mistaken. But isn’t Wittgenstein, in fact, presupposing certain circumstances? For suppose the story is as follows. In the early days of aviation a young pilot, whom we shall call Smedley, attempts the first trans-Atlantic flight from America to England. Without his realizing it, he is blown off course and lands in Ireland instead of England. As there are few airports, he lands in a field, and because he is greeted by English-speaking people he does not at first realize his mistake. At some point, of course, he will be told that he has landed in Ireland. And newspaper reports of the event will relate that Smedley believed he had flown from America to England. Here, then, is a case that fits Wittgenstein’s description, and yet Smedley was mistaken.

We can think of other cases, too. For instance, Babcock is a very sick man, but in America, where he lives, he cannot get the medical treatment he needs. So he is to be flown to England for treatment. On the day of departure he is heavily sedated, owing to his heart condition, and is then carried aboard the plane, whereupon he loses consciousness. As it turns out, his flight is grounded at the last moment by exceedingly foul weather, and he is taken to a hospital in New York City to await a later flight. He is now just regaining consciousness in his New York hospital room, and of course he thinks he is in England. When a nurse walks in and gives him no special greeting, he says, “Aren’t you going to welcome me to England?”. She then explains to him what has happened. (She is not, of course, going to say to him, “You have made a mistake,” as though he ought to have known better, but if she is rather brusque, she might say, “I’m sorry, but you are mistaken. Your plane was grounded. . . .”.) So here again we have a case that fits part of Wittgenstein’s description: Babcock believes he has just flown from America to England. And yet he is mistaken.

When we produce examples such as these, we are forced to ask ourselves what Wittgenstein could have been thinking of when he wrote the passage we are here considering. And the answer, I


suspect, is that he was thinking of someone in a quite particular set of circumstances, circumstances very different from either Bab- cock’s or Smedley’s. Perhaps he was thinking of someone who boards a commercial airliner in New York and flies directly to London, where he lands at Heathrow Airport and takes a taxi to a London hotel. And of course we are to think of the man as having been conscious the whole time, so that he can, if asked, give a detailed account of his taking leave of his friends in New York, boarding the plane at such and such a time, being served certain foods aboard the plane, going through customs at Heathrow, and so on. And now Wittgenstein wants to say that someone who can tell us all this about his flight from America to England cannot be mistaken. And this would seem to be right. But what Wittgenstein failed to realize is that he was implicitly incorporating a quite particular set of circumstances into his example, circumstances very different from Babcock’s or Smedley’s. And because he failed to realize this, he put his point in an altogether general way (“If someone. . .”), and it was that way of putting it that made it appear that in this example Wittgenstein had produced an instance of a hinge proposition. However, once we have thought of cases like Smedley’s and Babcock’s we can no longer think that in the words “I have just flown from America to England” we have a hinge proposition. After all, as Smedley was setting his plane down on a field in Ireland, he might have exclaimed, “I’ve done it! I have just flown from America to England!”. And yet Smedley is badly mistaken.

Let us consider another of Wittgenstein’s examples. He writes: “Suppose now I say ‘I’m incapable of being wrong about this: that is a book’ while I point to an object. What would a mistake here be like? And have I any clear idea of it?” (17). Again one might at first suppose that Wittgenstein has here produced an example of a hinge proposition - this time in the words “This is a book,” spoken as one points to an object. But it takes little ingenuity to think of a case in which one points to something, saying “That’s a book,” and is mistaken. The situation might be this. My table wobbles badly, and to repair the matter I slip a book under the short leg. Later, without my knowing of it, another person in the house sees the book there and realizes it is the book she has been searching for. She removes the book and replaces it with a piece of wood that is, as it happens, nearly the same size and color as the book. Later

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someone asks me, “What have you put under that table leg?” and I say, as I gesture, “That’s a book.” I am wrong, of course. I have mistaken the piece of wood for the book I had placed there. So what are we to make of Wittgenstein’s remarks? We cannot now think that in the words “That is a book” we have an example of a hinge proposition. We must think that Wittgenstein had in mind a particular sort of circumstance, one rather different from that just described. Perhaps he was thinking of a situation in which he has just put down the book he was reading when someone walks into the room and asks, “What’s that?”, hoping it is a box of chocolates. Wittgenstein answers, “That’s a book.” In these circumstances no one is going to think that Wittgenstein may be mistaken. He has just been reading the book; he could hardly have mistaken something else for his book. It is in this way, then, that we must take Wittgenstein’s example, but once we do so it no longer seems to involve a hinge proposition.

Consider another example. Wittgenstein devotes a great deal of time to thinking about “My name is L. W.”. And he seems to be thinking that he has found in these words a hinge proposition. At one point he writes: ‘‘I might ask: ‘How could I be making a mistake about my name being L. W.?’. And I can say: I can’t see how it would be possible” (660). This looks like an excellent candidate for a hinge proposition. For how could Wittgenstein be mistaken about his name? Well, perhaps, given his circumstances, he couldn’t. But this goes no distance towards showing that when someone gives out his name, saying “My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein,” he is giving voice to a hinge proposition. One could think otherwise only if one thought that a person, whatever his circumstances, could not be mistaken about his name. And this is what Wittgenstein seems to have been thinking. For he writes at one point: “It is part of the language-game with people’s names that everyone knows his name with the greatest certainty” (579). But this is simply not true. Amnesia victims, for example, often do not know their own names. Moreover, we can easily imagine such a person becoming convinced that he had discovered his name (in his possession is a book with a name written on the flyleaf), so that he gives out this name as his own. Later, when the book is found to be another’s, he must tell people, ‘‘I was mistaken when I told you that my name is. . . .”. Consider also the following case. A young man is about to travel abroad for the first time. In order to do so, he


must have a passport, and so he goes to the Office of Records to obtain his birth certificate. He tells the clerk, “My name is Robert Jameson, and I was born August 23, 1942.” The clerk searches the files and reports that she can find no record of his birth. At home that evening the young man reports his problem to his parents and asks, “Wasn’t I born in this county?”. There is a long silence and then the man he has regarded as his father says to him: “The time has come for you to know something we have kept from you until now. We led you to believe that I was your father and that your name was ‘Jameson.’ We did this because we thought there were certain things you shouldn’t know until you were older. The truth is that your mother was once married to another man, and you are his son. His name was ‘Aka,’ and that is your name, too, and the name in which you will have to apply for a passport.” (We may further suppose that Aka was a notorious traitor during wartime and that the boy’s mother did not want him to suspect his father’s identity, as well he might have with the unusual name ‘Aka.’) It is thus perfectly possible for a person not to know his name and to give out the wrong name, as young Aka did at the Office of Records.

We can see, then, that in someone’s giving out (what he takes to be) his name we do not have a hinge proposition. Yet there may be something right in Wittgenstein’s thinking that he could not be wrong about his name. After all, he had not been an amnesia victim and taken his name to be that found in a book in his possession. Nor were his circumstances similar to young Aka’s. He was a grown man at the time of writing O n Certainty, and unlike young Aka, he had an intimate knowledge of his family’s history. His mother had not, for a time, been married to someone other than Karl Wittgenstein, and so on. Had his origins been anything like young Aka’s, this would have come to light years earlier when he applied for his Austrian passport. Given these circumstances, then, no one - or no one familiar with these circumstances - is going to think that Wittgenstein may have failed to know his real name. And yet someone unfamiliar with Wittgenstein’s circumstances might have thought that he, like young Aka, was mistaken about his name.

This example, then, turns out to be like the two preceding ones. What we have here is not a “proposition that is exempt from doubt” but a circumstance in which no one, unless ill-informed,

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would think that Wittgenstein may have, innocently, been giving out the wrong name.

As our final example let us consider what Wittgenstein says regarding “I am a man.” He plainly thinks that in these words he has found a hinge proposition: no one who says he is a man (or is male) could be mistaken. Wittgenstein’s discussion of this runs, in part, as follows:

That I am a man and not a woman can be verified, but if I were to say I was a woman, and then tried to explain the error by saying I hadn’t checked the statement, the explanation would not be accepted. (79)

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)

The truth of certain empirical propositions [such as “I am a man”] belongs to our frame of reference. (83)

What is Wittgenstein thinking here? Evidently this: if I were to say that I am a woman, others would have to think that I don’t know the meaning of the words “man” and “woman.” They could only think that my error is a verbal one, not an error about my gender.

Wittgenstein makes one obvious mistake here. He says that “if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them.” Yet this is plainly not so, for a person can tell lies. If a transvestite or a person at a masquerade party says he is a woman, his saying this does not tend to suggest that he does not understand what he says. This error of Wittgenstein’s, however, is irrelevant to our present concerns, for we are concerned with the person who means to be speaking the truth. Can such a person be wrong about his gender? Wittgenstein thinks not.

Suppose, however, that the story is as follows. A child, female, has been raised very differently from the rest of us. She has been kept draped in swaddling clothes and prevented from seeing any part of her torso. She has also been lied to about her gender. Her parents, who happen to be psychologists studying sexual orienta- tion, have told her she is male and have kept up the deception for many years. At the age of nineteen she survives an auto accident which takes the lives of her parents, and when she is asked about her gender by the admitting nurse at the hospital to which she is taken, she says that she is male. When she is prepped for surgery, of


course, it is discovered that she is a woman. And when she has recovered from her shock and has explained “the error,” others will accept her explanation that she never “checked” what her parents had told her, what they had led her to believe. No one will then think that she does not know the meaning of “man” and “woman” (or “male” and “female”). So Wittgenstein is wrong. A person can be mistaken about his or her gender.

Other cases are not hard to think of. For example, a few weeks after her sex-change operation a woman suffers a traumatic accident. At the hospital, when asked, “Male or female?” she gives the wrong answer. The trauma of the accident has temporarily made her forget her new sexual identity, so that she gives the answer which, for most of her life, was the right answer.

Wittgenstein’s own circumstances, of course, were in no way like either of those just described. There is no chance that he, in his circumstances, had either been deceived about or forgotten his gender. But this fact does not make “I am a man” a hinge proposition. That is, if at a masquerade party I am asked whether I am a man or a woman and I answer that I am a man, this answer does not have some special logical status - no more than does “It is raining” if I say this while standing in the rain. I might not have known that it was raining, had I remained indoors, but I might, also, not have known that I am a man, had my circumstances been those of the young woman lied to by her parents.

All four of Wittgenstein’s examples have turned out rather differently from what we might have expected. At first glance they seem to provide examples of hinge propositions, but upon giving each some second thoughts, we find that, instead, they illustrate what Wittgenstein must have been thinking when he wrote: “In certain circumstances a man cannot be making a mistake” (155). This is very different from saying that there are in our language propositions that are exempt from doubt. After considering these four examples it may, then, occur to us that Wittgenstein’s first conception of hinge propositions must contain a systematic error, that whenever he thinks that he has hit upon a hinge proposition, he has in fact only hit upon a circumstance in which no one familiar with the circumstances could think that he was making a mistake. In that case the very idea of a hinge proposition is suspect. It is an idea arrived at through the sort of confusion illustrated by the preceding examples - a confusion we might describe as resulting

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from “a one-sided diet of examples.” We will not, then, by looking further be able to find a hinge proposition. Indeed, Wittgenstein seems to be acknowledging this when he writes: “One may be wrong even about ‘there being a hand here’. Only in particular circumstances is it impossible” (25). What this suggests to me is this: take any example in which you seem to have found a proposition that is exempt from doubt, and if you then reflect on what you are thinking, you will find that what you are actually thinking of is, not a proposition, but a quite particular circumstance in which no one - or no one familiar with the circumstances - is going to think that one could be making a mistake. And in fact we find Wittgenstein in one passage reconsidering something in just this way. He writes:

“I cannot be making a mistake about the fact that I have just had lunch. ”

For if I say to someone “I have just eaten” he may believe that I am lying . . . but he won’t believe that I am making a mistake. Indeed, the assumption that I might be making a mistake has no meaning here.

But this isn’t true. I might, for example, have dropped off immediately after the meal without knowing it and have slept for an hour, and now I believe I have just eaten. (659)

Here we find Wittgenstein at first thinking that in the words ‘‘I have just eaten lunch” he had found a proposition concerning which the very thought of a mistake “has no meaning.” He then thinks of a special case and changes his mind. There is nothing like a hinge proposition here. And as we have seen, his other examples turn out this way as well4

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein gave no examples of “elementary propositions. ” He was certain that there must be such propositions, but this was not because he thought that he could produce examples. Rather, he deduced from various presuppositions about language that such propositions must exist. When one reads On Certainty, one is at first inclined to think that Wittgenstein proceeded differently here, that he produced actual examples of

4. I have discussed several of Wittgenstein’s other examples in “Notes on Wittgenstein’s O n Cerfainty,” Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Fall, 1980). and in “Malcolm’s Misunderstandings, ” Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring, 1981).


hinge propositions and based his theory on these. In truth, however, he seems to have proceeded here just as he had in the Tractatus. For although he adduced no example that could pass muster as a genuine hinge proposition - or at least none of this first sort that we have been searching for, he persuaded himself that there must be such propositions. The difference between the two books would seem to be that in On Certainty he felt obliged to produce examples and consequently settled for a number of spurious ones.

Let us turn now to Wittgenstein’s second conception of hinge propositions. This, like the conception we have been discussing, is addressed to a form of skepticism, but in this case it is a very metaphysical sort of skepticism. It is, in fact, Hume’s old problem about the future, namely, the idea that in a world of sense-data the future may, for all we know, be radically different from the past. But Wittgenstein is concerned with this not only as it seems to bear on so-called ‘generalizations’ but also as it bears on singular ‘propositions’ about physical objects. The question here can be put, although somewhat inadequately, as follows: Might not all my past and present experience, of which I have a great plenty, confirm for me that this is a house and yet some future experience contradict this and make me think that I was wrong, i.e., think that it was not a house? This question, as it arises for Wittgenstein, turns out to be a very metaphysical question, and we will need to inquire carefully into how it does arise for him. At one point he indicates that he is concerned with the question: “Can we know truths, not only about sense-data but also about things?” (426). What is this question?

In the history of philosophy there have been two entirely different versions of this question. It means one thing to those philosophers, such as Moore, who hold a causal or representative theory of perception and means something quite different to philosophers in the tradition of Hume and Mill. For philosophers of the former sort the question comes to something like this: How can I know what, if anything, lies on the far side of (or is the source 00 my sense-data? But philosophers of the latter sort, i.e.,

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phenomenalists, do not think of physical objects as being ‘behind’ or the source of one’s sense-data; rather physical objects, on their view, are (nothing but) permanent possibilities of sensations or, as later philosophers were to say, physical objects are logical constructions out of sense-data. For phenomenalists the problem of whether we can really know anything about physical objects is the question whether some future experience might not disconfirm something I had taken to be completely confirmed by my past and present experience. We will presently see why this is a problem for phenomenalists. Here I want only to say that this phenomenalist version is the problem that Wittgenstein is wrestling with, and his second conception of hinge propositions is meant to be a solution to this problem. Wittgenstein, if I may let the cat out of the bag, was a phenomenalist, and his principal concern in On Certainty was to figure out how, if at all, a phenomenalist can avoid being a skeptic, can avoid the conclusion that anything we say about a physical object might be disconfirmed by our future experience.

As this explanation of O n Certainty may come as a surprise to some, I had better present some facts at this point. Was Wittgenstein a phenomenalist? Unquestionably he was in the 1930s. In his Cambridge lecture of 1931-1932 he came out explicitly for phenomenalism, for the view that physical objects are ‘logical constructions’ out of sense-data. For instance, he writes:

. . . there is no fact that this is a physical object over and above the qualities and judgements of sense-data about it.

There is a tendency to make the relation between physical objects and sense-data a contingent relation. Hence such phrases as ‘caused by’, ‘beyond’, ‘outside’. But the world is not composed of sense-data and physical objects. The relation between them is one in language - a necessary relation. . . . We talk about the same object in terms either of sense-data or hypothesis.

The world we live in is the world of sense-data; but the world we talk about is the world of physical objects.

To talk about the relation of object and sense-datum is nonsense. They are not two separate things. “This is a brown patch” and “This is a table” are two different statements having different verifications.

There is no need to comment on this beyond calling attention to the


use of the word “hypothesis” in the first passage quoted. Wittgenstein says that we can talk about the same object in terms either of sense-data or hypothesis. He means, of course, that we can either say things like “This is a brown patch” or say things like “This is a table.” The latter is a hypothesis, he is saying. (Compare O n Certainty 60.) This is an essential part of the phenomenalist’s view, for what is meant, in part, is this: unlike “This is a brown patch,” “This is a table” cannot be verified (or completely verified), for a table is a permanent possibility of sensations and therefore the proposition about the table implies various things about the future. It is, then, a hypothesis stating that one’s future experience will, if you look and feel in the right place, be of a certain sort. This partly explains why, for phenomenalists, there is a problem about whether we can know anything about physical objects. O n their view, propositions about physical objects have the logical form of hypotheses about future sense-data, which means that regardless of past and present sense-data, they can, as a matter oflogic, be disconfirmed. (They will be disconfirmed in the event that certain future sense-data are radically abnormal.) This is the phenomenalist’s ‘logical analysis’ of propositions about physical objects, and in the 1930s Wittgenstein explicitly accepted this analysis. In his conversations with Waismann, for example, he put the matter as follows: “[The] sense of physical statements - they refer to the future ad infiniturn. They never count as proved; we always reserve the right to drop or alter them, in contrast with a real [sense-datum] statement whose truth is not subject to alteration. ”6

SO much for Wittgenstein’s views in the 1930s. Did he, however, remain a phenomenalist in the writing of O n Certainty? The

5 . Witlgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 193&-1932, ed. Desmond Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 81, 82, and 109-110. 6. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Blackwell, 1979), p. 100. In Philosophische Bemerkungen (Blackwell, 1964) Wittgenstein reiterated this idea as follows: “What is essential to an hypothesis is, I believe, that it creates an expectation by admitting of future confirmation. 1.e.. it is of the essence of an hypothesis [such as ‘That is a table’] that its confirmation is never completed. . . . An hypothesis is a law for forming [sense-datum] propositions. You could also say: an hypothesis is a law for forming expectations. A proposition is, so to speak, a slice through an hypothesis at a particular point” (pp. 285-286).

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answer, as I will argue, is a qualified “yes.” Unquestionable he retained his phenomenalist metaphysics: we live in a world of (uncaused) sense-data. Yet he tried to escape the skepticism inherent in this view by proposing a new ‘logical analysis’ of (at least some) physical object statements. We will come to this presently. First, however, we must get a better understanding of the phenomenalist’s metaphysics and the philosophical skepticism, as Hume called it, that arises therefrom.

The important thing to recognize about this sort of skepticism is that it looks to the future, not the past. It does not suggest that we may say or believe something false because of having made mistakes through carelessness or haste or because of distractions and the like. It is quite prepared to allow, at least for the sake of argument, that no mistake has been made, and then it says: But still you might be wrong. Wittgenstein is alluding to this other way of being wrong when he writes: “There is a difference between a mistake for which, as it were, a place is prepared in the game, and a complete irregularity that happens as an exception” (647). Here we have the essential clue to the sort of skepticism that was worrying Wittgenstein: it argues that there may, in the future, be “a complete irregularity.” What does this mean? Wittgenstein explains this with the following illustration:

What if something really unheard-of happened? If I, say, saw houses gradually turning into steam without any obvious cause, if the cattle in the fields stood on their heads and laughed and spoke comprehen- sible words, if trees gradually changed into men and men into trees. Now, was I right when I said before all these things happened ‘‘I know that that’s a house” etc., or simply “that’s a house” etc.? (513)

This last question is the one that concerns Wittgenstein. The question is this: How would (or should) a metaphysically nightmarish experience affect our judgment, our assessment, of something we have said, of something we have felt entirely sure of? If, to take Wittgenstein’s example, I have said to someone, “That’s a house,” should I take that back if, a moment later, I see the ‘house’ turn to steam and drift away in the breeze? O r again, was I wrong when I said “That’s a tree,” if the ‘tree’ then changes into a man? This is the problem that was worrying Wittgenstein, and I will refer to it henceforth as the problem of future experience.

102 Philosophical lnvertigations

What creates this problem? A part of the answer we have already touched on: it is the phenomenalist’s logical analysis of such propositions as “That is a house.” Physical objects, we are told, are permanent possibilities of sensation. And this is explained as meaning that when I make a statement about a physical object, then even though it is in the present tense I am implicitly affirming a number of hypothetical propositions to the effect that in such and such circumstances I would have certain sense-data. This is why what I have said, although not overtly in the future tense, is hostage to future events: what I have said implies certain things about the future. But what is implied? If I tell someone, “There’s an ice cube in your glass,” I surely do not imply that if he looks in his glass twenty minutes from now he will see an ice cube. For ice cubes, after all, do melt. The ‘permanence’ of the possibilities of sensation must, evidently, be limited to the natural life expectancy of the sort of object in question: ice cubes melt, bubbles burst, houses burn to the ground, spots are removed from garments, people age and die, cakes are eaten, pencil marks are erased, and so on. It is not, of course, the prospect of a bubble bursting or of a cake being eaten that leads the phenomenalist to say that some future experience may disconfirm something we have said. If I have reported that there is a cake in the pantry and later return to find only crumbs on the plate, I will not think that I had been wrong. I will say, “Well, there was a cake there. I wonder who ate it.” What sort of future ‘experience,’ then, is supposed to create the problem?

At this point we have to bring Hume on the scene, for according to Hume the “course of nature” (and this means: the course of our sense-data) may at any time radically change. What this suggests - or suggests to the phenomenalist - is the following: I hand someone a plate, saying “Here is a piece of cake,” and just as I say this I see the ‘piece of cake’ turn into a puff of smoke or dissolve into a puddle of liquid that tastes and smells like vinegar, or it simply vanishes before my eyes. Now surely (so the thinking goes here) when I said “Here is a piece of cake,” I meant that the object would, until eaten, remain cake-like, i.e., that it wouldn’t vanish or turn to vinegar. It is to be expected that cider may turn to vinegar, but not a piece of cake. So if, after this metaphysical nightmare, I were asked, “Did you give her a piece of cake?” I would surely not say “Yes.” I would say, “I gave her something, but I don’t know what it was. It certainly wasn’t a piece of cake!”. So here I take back

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what I had said when I offered the ‘piece of cake.’ And of course it makes no difference that I baked the ‘cake’ myself and took it from the pan and sliced it. All that past ‘experience’ is contradicted by the metaphysically nightmarish experience.

This is the problem of future experience, and it is this problem that Wittgenstein sees himself as faced with. If things are left as I have left them in the preceding paragraph, skepticism will have won the day. What is Wittgehstein’s solution?

Before trying to answer that question, it will be useful to consider how another phenomenalist dealt with the problem of future experience. In The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge A. J. Ayer presents the problem as follows:

. . . when we try to reproduce the content of a statement about a material thing by specifying the empirical situations that would furnish us with direct tests of its validity, we find that the number of these possible tests is infinite. Admittedly, when someone makes a statement of this kind he does not actually envisage an infinite series of possible verifications. He may ve;ry well be satjsfied, in familiar circumstances, with the single s@e-experience on which his statement is based; and if he does thiiik it necessary to test it further, the subsequent occurrence, in appropriate conditions, of only a limited number of “favorable” sense-data will be sufficient, in the absence of contrary evidence, to convince him that it is true. But the fact remains that however many favorable tests he may make he can never reach a stage at which it ceases to be conceivable that further sense-experience will reverse the verdict of the previous evidence. He will never be in a position to demonstrate that he will not subsequently have experiences that will entitle him to conclude that his original statement was false after all.7

What did Ayer mean by this? Did he mean that it might always turn out that I had made a mistake in thinking and saying such and such? No, he was thinking nothing of the sort. In a later essay he tells us that his argument in the passage just quoted rests on “the assumption . . . that if, for example, I am looking at my telephone and suddenly see it change into what appears to be a flower-pot, or vanish altogether, or what you will, that proves that it never was a telephone. ”’ Very significantly, Ayer continues, in the next

7. The Foundations ofEmpirical Knowledge (London: Macmillan), 1953, pp. 239-240. 8. A. J. Ayer, “Phenomenalism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XLVII (1946-1947), p. 171.


sentence, as follows: “To put the case more precisely, suppose that a series of visual and tactual sense-data were succeeded ‘in the same place’ . . . by sense-data characteristic of the appearance of a flower-pot, or that, while the surrounding conditions appeared to remain unchanged, there cease to be any sense-data characteristic of a physical object in the ‘place’ where the sense-data characteristic of the appearance of a telephone previously were, that proves that I must have been mistaken in taking these sense-data to be the appearance of a real telephone. ”9

Ayer, then, sees the matter as Wittgenstein does. Both philosophers see the issue as being this: What bearing would a metaphysically nightmarish experience have on something I have said? And like Wittgenstein, Ayer seems to have been reluctant to give in to skepticism. For in the article from which I have just quoted Ayer does an about-face. He raises the question whether, as he had earlier assumed, a metaphysically nightmarish experience would “reverse the verdict” of earlier experience. And his answer is as follows:

The only way of deciding what [such an experience] proves is to consider wha t one would say in such a case, that is, how one would describe such a situation. What I should, in fact, say would be that my present experience [of the telephone turning into a flower-pot] was hallucinatory: that the illusion lay not in the long series of my

9. Why is this rewording of the original statement significant? Because Ayer knows that no one is going to understand his problem, no one is going to understand his example, unless the phenomenalist’s ‘analysis’ of telephones and flower-pots (or of “telephone” and “flower-pot”) is brought into the picture. The cider on my back porch may turn to vinegar when the warm weather comes, and the tadpoles in my pond will become frogs this summer, but only a phenomenalist could think that a telephone might change into a flower-pot. Presumably Ayer knows this. He knows that we are going to dismiss his example as incomprehensible unless he recasts it in terms of sense-data. And he has the good sense to do so. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, when he speaks of a house changing to steam and trees changing into men, etc. (513), does not properly re-explain this in sense-datum lingo. This would be inexcusable were it not for the fact that Wittgenstein was not writing these notes for publication. He did not need to tell hirnsey that he was a phenomenalist. And Wittgenstein also has the excuse that there is a long tradition, beginning with Hume, of phenomenalists describing the scenarios of their metaphysical nightmares using our ordinary nouns, such as “house” and “tree” and “the sun,” but we all understand that Hume understood trees and the sun to be series of sense impressions. Even so, this practice by phenomenalists has caused much confusion, for philosophers who are not phenomenalists have imagined that they could cogently state Hume’s problem without Hume’s metaphysics, e.g., Russell in The Problems of Philosophy.

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past “perceptions” of a telephone, but in my present “perception” of a flower-pot. But suppose that I applied the usual tests for hallucinations, and that they were negative. Suppose that the object that I seemed to be perceiving felt as well as looked like a flower-pot, and that it went on looking and feeling like a flower-pot, and that when I asked other people they said that they perceived a flower-pot, too. In that case I should probably give up the idea that I was having a hallucination. . . . I might then say that I had been deceived all the time about the telephone. I might even start to distrust my memory, and wonder whether it had not always been the case that I perceived a flower-pot, though here the testimony of others would be a check. But what I think I should say is: “It was a telephone and all of a sudden it changed into a flower-pot.””

This passage is interesting for several reasons. One of these is that Ayer vascillates considerably here in his reaction to his own earlier thesis in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. He begins by saying that his earlier thesis was wrong. Then he says that his earlier thesis was right if the tests for hallucination are negative. And finally he changes his mind about that and says that what he should say is that it was a telephone but now it isn’t. Even more interesting, however, is the fact that Ayer never pauses to reconsider the prospect of a metaphysically nightmarish experience. He remains a good Humean to the end. As we shall see, Wittgenstein’s reflections very closely resemble Ayer’s in both these respects.

Lest there be any doubt that Wittgenstein was actually serious about this problem, we may consult a few more passages from O n Certainty. There are a great many passages tha. would serve here. I will quote only these:

I am in England. - Everything around me tells me so; whenever and however I let my thoughts turn, they confirm this for me at once. - But might I not be shaken if things such as I don’t dream of at present were to happen? (421)

May not the thing that I recognize with complete certainty as the tree that I have seen here my whole life long - may this not be disclosed as something different? May it not confound me? (425)

I look at an object and say “That is a tree”, or ‘‘I know that that’s a tree”. - Now if I go nearer and it turns out that it isn’t, I may say “It wasn’t a tree after all” or alternatively I say “It was a tree but now it isn’t any longer”. But if all the others contradicted me, and said it never had been a tree, and if all the other evidences spoke against me

10. Ibid., pp. 171-172.


- what good would it do me to stick to my “I know”? (503)

backs me up or contradicts me. (504) Whether I know something depends on whether the evidence

It is always by favor of Nature that one knows something. (505)

One cannot but be struck by the resemblance between these remarks and Ayer’s. Most significant, I think, are the final two passages, for they show Wittgenstein to have been thinking this: my future experience could always contradict something I have said with perfect confidence, and this would happen just in case there was a change in the course of Nature, i.e., in case something “I don’t dream of at present were to happen.” This, of course, is a good Humean thought: one’s waking experiences might take the same kind of uncanny twists and turns that one finds in dreams: I might see a tree turn into a man or a man into a tree.

There can really be no doubt, then, that Wittgenstein, in the writing of On Certainty, remained a phenomenalist - at least as far as his metaphysics were concerned. Yet it is also plain that he wanted to avoid the skepticism implicit in that metaphysics, and his second conception of hinge propositions was his means of doing so. What is this second conception?

Wittgenstein seems to have pursued two distinct lines of thought here. One of these was the thought that the traditional phenomenalist analysis is wrong in the case of at least some physical object propositions: they are not hypotheses. This is what he is getting at when he writes, for example: “Our ‘empirical propositions’ do not form a homogeneous mass” (213) and “I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition is one” (308). What he means by such remarks is that not all of our ‘empirical propositions’ are hypotheses. This becomes apparent when he says that “it is wrong to say that the ‘hypothesis’ that this is a bit of paper would be confirmed or disconfirmed by later experience” (60). He is saying the same thing when he remarks that Moore could be interpreted as saying quite rightly that “a proposition saying that here is a physical object may have the same logical status as one saying that here is a red patch” (53). Wittgenstein’s most explicit thoughts along these lines are the following:

If I say “Of course I know that that’s a towel!” I am making an utterance [Ausserung]. I have no thoughts of a verification. For me it is an immediate utterance.

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I don’t think of past or future. (And of course it’s the same for

It is just like directly taking hold of something, as I take hold of

Here it is plain that Wittgenstein means to be retracting his own earlier ‘logical analysis’ of such propositions as “This is a towel.” He does not offer any grounds for this retraction, but obviously he thought that this new analysis, treating “This is a towel” as an Ausserung, would permit a phenomenalist to avoid skepticism.

In other passages Wittgenstein seems to pursue a different line of thought. In these passages Wittgenstein seems to allow that propositions such as “This is a towel” are hypotheses, i.e., that they do imply certain things about future sense-data. What then, is the answer to skepticism? Wittgenstein says that if one were confronted with seemingly conflicting experiences, one could treat them as illusory (361). At one point he writes:

“I can’t be making a mistake; but if after all something should appear to speak against my proposition I shall stick to it, despite this appearance.” (636)

Moore, too.)

my towel without having any doubts. (510)

What are we to make of this? In discussing this very point with Malcolm, Wittgenstein said

this: “I might refuse to regard anything as evidence that there isn’t a tree [over there]. If I were to walk over to it and feel nothing at all, I might say that I was then deluded, not that I was previously mistaken in thinking it a tree. If I say that I would not call anything ‘evidence’ against that’s being a tree, then I am not making a psychological prediction - but a logical statement. ’”’ Now this could be made to seem very peculiar if we forget that Wittgenstein was a phenomenalist. For he might seem to be describing here a case such as the following. Wittgenstein has come with me, we will suppose, to visit my friend Harley, an amateur magician. We are in Harley’s backyard watching him produce rabbits and doves, and at one point Harley turns to Wittgenstein and says, “DO you see that tree over there?”. Wittgenstein says that he does, and then Harley instructs Wittgenstein to go lean against it. When Wittgenstein goes to do this, he cannot find the tree; there is nothing to touch. Indeed, the tree has suddenly disappeared. Wittgenstein is dumb-

11. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 1958), p. 88.


founded and shaken. Harley, of course, has been experimenting with holograms, thinking that he might use them as part of his magic act, his stage illusions. And Wittgenstein has here been the victim of such an illusion. But what will Wittgenstein now say? If we go by what he said in his conversation with Malcolm, we will have to think that he would refuse to accept Harley’s explanation about the hologram of the tree, that even when he is shown the projector and the illusion is produced for him several times more, he would still insist: “I know that that was a tree I saw there. I won’t allow anything to prove that I was wrong.” But of course Wittgenstein, in the situation I have described, would not have said any such thing. O n the contrary, he would no doubt have readily acknowledged that Harley had produced a marvellous illusion. Evidently, then, the situation I have described does not fit the requirements Wittgenstein had in mind when he made the foregoing remarks to Malcolm. But what situation would fit the requirements? I cannot think of any, nor had Wittgenstein thought of any. That is, he had not thought how there could be a situation in which when he goes to lean against a tree he meets with no resistance and yet insists that it is a tree. How, then, are we to understand Wittgenstein’s remarks to Malcolm? The answer now seems obvious: he was speaking as a phenomenalist, and he was undertaking to describe a metaphysically nightmarish experience. We must understand Wittgenstein as we understand Ayer when he says that he sees his telephone vanish or sees it change into a flower-pot. That is to say, if we are to have a chance of understanding Wittgenstein’s remarks, we must first translate them into the lingo of phenomenalism. We must think of him as saying, in effect: “First I have all sorts of visual sense-data of a tree, not just a few blurred or dim sense-data but a great many of the very finest sense-data one could hope to have from all sides of the tree, and then to my enormous surprise, when the visual sense-data of my hand approach the visual sense-data of the tree, I receive no tactile sense-data at all.”

What are we to think of all this? Well, unless we are ourselves phenomenalists we are not going to be perplexed about what we would say when faced with a metaphysically nightmarish experience. We are not going to think, for example, that a telephone might change into a flower-pot, nor are we going to think that, without some illusion being present, what looks for all the world

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like a tree might provide no resistance when we go to lean against it. So we will not think that there is any need for Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions. But even on phenomenalistic assumptions, has Wittgenstein come up with a plausible answer to skepticism? Let us play along with phenomenalism for a bit, in the spirit of Alice in Senre-data Land, to see how matters stand.

In the passages we have been considering Wittgenstein says that, given adequate past experience of an object, he would not have to retract or revise his judgment about it when he is suddenly confronted with a metaphysically nightmarish experience. But isn’t this a far too simple solution? Suppose the situation were as follows. I have just gone to my local automobile dealer and purchased a new car - a ten year possibility of auto sensations. I drive it home and then invite my friends to go for a ride. But as soon as I try to get into the car, I find that it gives me no tactile sense-data. I find that I can walk right through it. I am amazed, of course, and my amazement turns to enormous frustration when, over the next several days, this continues to happen. Now what will I say? Surely I will call up the automobile dealer and complain, saying, “I don’t know what you sold me, but it certainly isn’t a car! It seems to be some sort of fantastic illusion. I want my money back.” I mean, if we are going to play the phenomenalist’s game, isn’t this how we have to play it? Ayer seems to have been on the right track here. He begins by saying that if his metaphysically nightmarish experience were quite brief and tests showed it to be an illusion, then he would regard it as an illusion and not think that he had been wrong beforehand. Ayer then goes on to remark that if his new experience (of a flower-pot) did not prove to be an illusion, he might in that case say that he had been mistaken before, mistaken in thinking that he had had a telephone. What seems right and sensible about this is that Ayer, unlike Wittgenstein, suggests that we might say different things in different cases. Wittgenstein’s answer seems to imply that I would go on saying that I had bought a car and that it was parked in front of my house, even though I can never get into it and drive it because it never provides anything but visual sense-data. But this seems absurd. If I were a phenomenalist, I would surely not want to say this. I would not want to say with Wittgenstein that there are certain propositions of our language which we would not have to give up in the face of a metaphysically nightmarish experience. And in fact Wittgenstein himself in


Philosophical Investigations seems to be taking a different view when he writes:

I say “There is a chair”. What if I go up to it, meaning to fetch it, and it suddenly disappears from sight? - “So it wasn’t a chair, but some kind of illusion.” - But in a few minutes we see it again and are able to touch it and so on. - “So the chair was there after all and its disappearance was some kind of illusion.” - But suppose that after a time it disappears again - or seems to disappear. What are we to say now? Have you rules ready for such cases - rules saying whether one may use the word “chair” to include this kind of thing. (80)

Here Wittgenstein is saying that a phenomenalist should recognize that in at least some cases we would not know what to say in the face of a metaphysically nightmarish experience. And this seems somehow more sensible than his insistence, in passages quoted earlier, that there are some propositions in our language that we could “stick to” come what may. Near the end of On Certainty Wittgenstein seems to come around to this view, for he writes: “Certain events would put me into a position in which I could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game” (617).

As I remarked above, none of this is going to seem to make sense to us unless we, too, are phenomenalists. But this much seems clear: Wittgenstein’s theory of hinge propositions is not the right view for even a phenomenalist to take. He would do better to take the view that a metaphysically nightmarish experience might or might not make us revise our opinion depending on the nature of the nightmare.

IV

It may seem surprising that Wittgenstein, who claimed to have eschewed all metaphysical theories, remained a phenomenalist to the end. Did he not recognize that phenomenalism is a metaphysical theory? I suspect that he did not. Empiricists regarded as metaphysical only those theories which posited unobservable entities, so that they thought of their own (reductionist) theories as being simply statements of the plain, unvarnished facts. This was evident in the case of the logical positivists, who called for the elimination of all metaphysics and yet adhered to their own

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Humean metaphysics without qualms. And the same, I am suggesting, was true of Wittgenstein. He was evidently so bewitched by the notion of ‘sense impressions’ that he thought his only options were either to embrace the causal theory of perception, wherein trees and houses become unobservable, inferred entities, or to develop a phenomenalist theory. But the causal theory is open to a variety of objections, such as that no such causal relationship could ever be observed, since the supposed material entities are, per hypothesis, not given in experience. l2

Phenomenalism, then, would seem to be the only way to go, and Wittgenstein undertook to explain this to himself as follows:

A phenomenon is not a symptom of something else, but is rather the reality.

A phenomenon is not a symptom of something else which alone makes the proposition true or false, but rather is itself what verifies the proposition.

To say that I see, for example, a sphere means nothing but that I have an appearance such as a sphere presents, but this means only that I can construct appearances according to a certain law - that of the sphere - and that this is one such appearance.

Describing phenomena [as we typically do] by means of the hypothesis of a world of phvsical objects is unavoidable owing to its simplicity when compared with the unmanageable complexity of the phenomenological description.

As long as someone imagines the soul as a thing, a body, which is in our heads, this hypothesis is harmless. The harm lies, not in our models’ imperfection and crudity but in their unclarity (lack of perspecuity).

The harm begins when we notice that the old model does not suffice, but then instead of altering it, only as it were sublimating it. When I say thoughts are in my head, there is nothing amiss; harm comes when we say thoughts are not in my head but in my mind.

What one can mean by a proposition, one also may mean by it. When people say: By the proposition ‘There is a chair here’ I don’t mean merely what is shown me by immediate experience but something over and above that, you can only reply: whatever you

12. In his Cambridge lectures of 1931-1932 Wittgenstein remarked: “If there were a relation of causation [between physical objects and sense-data], you could ask whether anyone has ever seen a physical object causing sense-data” - the intended suggestion being that this is obvious nonsense (op. cit., p. 81).


can mean by it must connect with some sort of experience, and what you can always mean is ~nimpeachable.’~

This is Wittgenstein’s justification of phenomenalism. We speak of tables and chairs, instead of colors and shapes, because of the much greater simplicity of the former manner of speaking. And our speaking thus is unimpeachable in as much as this model of the world can be articulated in a phenomenalistic analysis. But because this analysis is not explicit in our language, philosophers mis- takenly imagine that our talk of tables and chairs alludes to unobservable entities behind the immediately perceived phenomena. This is like the mistake of thinking that we can improve on our talk of thoughts being in our heads by saying that they are, instead, in our minds. Just as we are inclined to misconstrue our idiom in this latter case, so we are inclined to misconstrue our talk of tables and chairs.14 We take a phrase such as “this table” or “that chair” to refer to one unanalyzable object, when in truth such phrases refer to indefinitely many sense-data. It is the philosopher’s job, then, to make explicit the real meaning, the true logical form, of our ordinary ways of speaking so that we no longer misconstrue them, so that we will no longer think, for example, that tables and chairs are the source of our sense-data. Ordinary language is all right, but “we do not command a clear view of the use of our words. Our grammar is lacking in this sort of per~picuity.”’~

It was Wittgenstein’s thought, then, that phenomenalism is the plain truth and that the philosopher’s job is to show how our familiar ways of speaking can be reconciled with phenomenalism. It is therefore understandable that Wittgenstein should have remarked to Drury that Berkeley was “a very deep thinker. ”“ Like Berkeley, he held that we should think with the phenomenalists but speak with the vulgar.

Schopenhauer, too, had praised Berkeley, and very likely

13. Philosophische Bemerkungen, op. cit., pp. 283, 286, 287-288. 14. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein states the matter as follows: “It is like the relation: physical object - sense impressions. Here we have two different language-games and a complicated relation between them. - If you try to reduce their relation to a simple formula you go wrong” (p. 180). 15. Philosophical Investigations, Sec. 122. 16. M. O’C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Blackwell: Oxford, 1981). p. 171.

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Wittgenstein’s attraction to phenomenalism dated from his early reading of Schopenhauer. Moreover, Wittgenstein was keen enough to recognize what many other phenomenalists, notably the positivists, had failed to recognize, namely, that phenomenalism (or better: a Humean metaphysics) makes science, as normally thought of, untenable. Why untenable? Because in a Humean world sense impressions have been cut loose from anything that could be thought to cause them, so that what remains is a stream of sense impressions which have no why or wherefore. Sense impressions come, so to speak, mysteriously, from nowhere. Accordingly, there is no reason whatsoever that the stream should continue in accordance with its past performance. It may so continue, but if it does so, that is merely fortuitous: the course of Nature may radically change. Telephones may ‘change into’ flower-pots; trees may ’change into’ men; and so on. Constant conjunctions, however venerable, may break down, so that water in a teapot, when placed on a gas flame, may freeze instead of boil, and bread may cease to nourish us. Which is only to say that the course of our future (uncaused) sense-data may deviate wildly from the course of our (equally uncaused) past sense-data. In a Humean world, then, scientific laws can do no more than summarize past regularities. And since those regularities are merely fortuitous, they do not serve to explain anything. As Schopenhauer had said, what pass for explanations in science must always stop at a “qualitas occulta” which we simply accept. That sense impressions of one sort should, under certain conditions, always have been followed by sense impressions of another sort is ultimately a mystery.

In the Tractutur Wittgenstein was merely making explicit this feature of phenomenalism when he wrote:

We cannot infer the events of the future from those of the present. Belief in the causal nexus [which would justify such an inference]

is superstition. (5.1361) It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest

eventuality will in fact be realized. (6.3631) It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means

that we do not know whether it will rise. (6.36311) There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another

has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity. (6.37)

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the


illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. (6.371)

Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable. . . . (6.372)

Some commentators have alleged that Wittgenstein is here the victim of rationalism, that he is disparaging science because it lacks the demonstrable certainty of logic and mathematics. l7 This interpretation, however, misses the point entirely, for in fact Wittgenstein, in the passages just quoted, is simply drawing out the implications of phenomenalism. Most phenomenalists, because they wanted to make their empiricist epistemology the secure ground for science to stand on, have failed to follow Hume’s argument where it led. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, correctly saw that sense impressions, when cut loose from any causal source, are left free to appear in any order whatsoever and that any particular order in which they have thus far appeared is wholly fortuitous and presages nothing as regards the course of our future sense impressions. Moreover, in as much as any past regularity is wholly fortuitous, it can never serve to explain anything. Bread never really did nourish us. We have gained weight after eating large portions of bread and lost weight after eliminating bread from our diet. But the bread we ate didn’t do anything. It is just that when we have eaten much bread we afterwards, mysteriously, gained weight. O r rather, first we have such and such sense impressions and then, mysteriously, we have certain others. We are like the prisoners in Plato’s cave. They see a sequence of shadows (e.g., a round one rapidly approaches a square one until they are contiguous, at which point the square one flies off at an angle), but they do not see anything being caused to happen. Shadows do not cause one another to deflect and rebound. In Plato’s story, of course, there are people on the parapet behind the prisoners who carry the objects casting the shadows. Leibniz tried to keep the analogy going by holding that God’s will is the source of the order of our sense impressions, but Hume did away with this explanation, as did Wittgenstein. In a Humean (or Wittgensteinian) world there is nothing producing the order of our sense impressions. Thus, if a plate falls on a table and leaves a dent, it is mere

17. E.g., Max Black, A Companion to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 364.

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superstition to think that the impact of the plate caused the dent. All we have here is a sequence of events: the plate falls, then a dent appears. But we cannot explain the dent by this. And thus we find Wittgenstein saying acidly: “Impact: in mechanics we are inclined to explain by this. If a thing has been explained by impact, it has been explained” - the intended suggestion being that to think of impact in this way is foolish superstition.”

This, then, was Wittgenstein’s fundamental metaphysics, and it remained, as we have seen, his life-long view. On Certainty begins from this metaphysics and merely explores some of its implications for ‘ordinary language. ’ Moore’s opposition to skepticism led Wittgenstein to re-open this chapter in his thinking - to reconsider his claim that statements about tables and towels can never be completely verified. But his new thoughts on the subject were circumscribed by the requirements of his phenomenalism. He did not, that is, look afresh at the idea that we live in a world of (uncaused and hence potentially nightmarish) sense-data. Instead, he tried out the ideas that perhaps “This is a towel” is not, after all, a ‘hypothesis,’ so that it implies nothing about the future, or that perhaps we can always simply refuse to treat a metaphysical nightmare as disconfirmation of something we have said with confidence. The two proposals will be of interest only to other phenomenalists, and I have nothing further to say about them. There is, however, another of Wittgenstein’s replies to skepticism that deserves comment here because it has led to much confusion on the part of his mi-disant followers.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein was content to say that we cannot know anything about the future, that we have not the slightest reason for believing that even the simplest eventuality will come to pass. Because our sense impressions may follow any course whatsoever, it is entirely possible that a t the hour of sunrise tomorrow our sense impressions may, despite a cloudless sky, remain as black as pitch. O r again, an engineer may find that steel beams of a sort which hitherto had borne such and such a load now unaccountably crumble and collapse under that load. Is it not, then,

18. “Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness,” Philosophia, Vol. 6 (1976). p. 433. These notes of Wittgenstein’s, written in 1937, and especially Appendix B (pp. 435-437) written in 1938, provide an excellent insight into Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism. Among other things, he tries to figure out how we can possibly think of one thing causing another.


pointless for an engineer, when designing a bridge, to calculate loads and stresses? For after all there is no telling how steel beams (read: sense-data having such and such characteristics) may behave tomorrow or next month. In short, does not the Tractarian view lead us into a complete Pyrrhonian skepticism, so that life must come to a standstill for anyone taking that view seriously? Who would undertake to design a bridge or a house if he thought he could not, by careful calculation, ensure against its imminent collapse? In the Tractatus Wittgenstein did not address himself to such matters. In O n Certainty he does so and arrives at a view very similar to Hume’s. Hume had maintained that while the skeptic’s arguments on this point are unassailable, they will never have any influence upon us, for in our lives, in our actions, we are always guided by “human nature,” whose influence is stronger than that of the skeptic’s impeccable arguments.” Our lives are guided by instinct, said Hume, and in O n Certainty this is what Wittgenstein says, too.20 That is, we simply do not have doubts even where we could have them (375, 392).

To illustrate our not having doubts where we could have them, Wittgenstein cites the ‘fact’ that if he were a chemist and were conducting an experiment, he would not doubt the existence of the apparatus before his eyes. “I have plenty of doubts, but not that one” (377). Wittgenstein wants to regard this as a plain fact: a chemist does not doubt the existence of the test-tube in his hand. But what is this doubt that he does not have? What was Wittgenstein thinking of here? The only possible answer is one that presupposes a Humean metaphysics: the chemist does not dwell on the fact that his ‘test-tube’ could, in the next moment, ‘vanish’ or turn into a flower-pot and so prove never to have been a test-tube at all. It is not, then, a plain fact that the chemist does not doubt the existence of the test-tube before his eyes. For in order to think of this as a fact at all, one must take for granted a Humean metaphysics.

Similar comments are in order for another of Wittgenstein’s illustrations of this point. He writes: “Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no

19. Enquiry, Sec. XII, Part 11. 20. Wittgenstein would no doubt have recognized his agreement with Hume on this matter had he read Hume, but according to Drury he had not. See Ludwig Witlgenstein: Personal Recollections, op. cit., p. 95.

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why. I simply don’t. This is how I act” (148). Wittgenstein presents this as a plain fact: I could look to see whether I have feet, but I don’t. But is this a fact at all? A soldier who has just stepped on a land mine and who is rolling about in agony may look to see whether his feet have been blown off. Here there is a reason for looking and something to lookfor. But if I am sitting in my study reading, what is there to look for when I go to get up? To see whether my feet have been blown off? Of course not! What is there to look for, then? Wittgenstein can only have been thinking here that my feet, like Ayer’s telephone, might ‘vanish’ and that I could look to see whether my feet have vanished. He is thinking that I know well enough that it could happen one day that when I go to get up I will find that my feet have ‘vanished’ (metaphysical nightmare) but that, despite my realizing this, I simply do not look. But obviously only Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism could allow him to think this. It is possible for the injured soldier not to look - it may be that he cannot bring himself to look. But it is not possible for me, in my quiet study, not to look to see whether I have feet. We can, of course, describe circumstances in which it could be said that I did not look to see whether I have feet. I might develop a pathological fear that my limbs will rot away, and in that case, before getting up from a chair, I might always look to see whether I still had feet - always, until one day I smell smoke and rush from the room without looking. In this instance it could be said that I did not look to see whether I have feet. But it takes a very special circumstance for this to make sense. Contrary to Wittgenstein, it is not the normal thing for people not to look to see whether they have feet.

Having remarked that “it is always by favor of Nature that one knows something” (505), Wittgenstein goes on, a few lines later, to say that “a language-game is possible only if one trusts something” (509). This is sometimes quoted to show that Wittgenstein had discovered a profound answer to philosophical skepticism*l and quoted also to show that Wittgenstein had here a profound insight into the nature of language.22 Both readings are, in different ways,

21. E.g., Ilham Dilman, Induction and Deduction: A Study in Wittgenstein (Blackwell, 1973), p. 12. 22. E.g., Norman Malcolm, “The Groundlessness of Belief’ in Thought and Knowledge, op. cit., p. 204.


wrong. What Wittgenstein was thinking of here as ‘trust’ is the sort of thing he meant to illustrate with the two examples - or pseudo-examples - we have just discussed: the chemist does not doubt the existence of the apparatus before his eyes, and Wittgen- stein does not look to see whether he has feet before standing up. There is, then, no such thing - there could be no such thing - as what Wittgenstein is thinking of here as ‘trust.’ (Wittgenstein’s ‘trust’ is born of the same metaphysical myth as Hume’s idea about our ‘expectations,’ e.g., our ‘expectation’ that the sun will not simply vanish.) This talk of ‘trust,’ then, cannot be the answer to philosophical skepticism for it presupposes the skeptic’s view of things, nor should Wittgenstein be applauded here for an insight about the nature of language. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s conception of language here is that of the philosophical skeptic. He thinks that when I say, “I can’t get this grease off my hands,” I thereby show that I believe (the proposition) that I have hands and that when I say, “Take that chair over there,” I show that I believe (the proposition) that there is a chair over there. (See footnote 3 above.) That is, Wittgenstein applies a certain formula or mode of description to the things we actually say in order to bring to light those unspoken ‘propositions’ which he regards as the “foundation” (253, 401-403) or “scaffolding” (21 1) or “substratum” (162) or “assumptions” (41 1) of our ‘language-games, ’ namely, the formula “When we say that p, we show that we believe (the proposition) that q.” From this formula he extracts q , and says, in effect: Our language-games rest on propositions such as q. But one must be deeply suspicious of this formula. It is, in fact, the mode of description employed by the skeptic. (The skeptic employs it, of course, because he thinks there may be no chair over there where I see one.) Wittgenstein acknowledges at one point that his use of this formula “sounds strange” (41 l), but he never investigates why it sounds strange. When do we say “You could see from what he said (or: he showed by what he said) that he believed (was assuming) that . . .”? We say that when we think the person was wrong or, even if right, was naive or gullible or didn’t know what he was talking about. But it is not cases of these sorts that Wittgenstein is speaking of. He wants to say that when I have scrubbed my hands and then complain that I can’t get the grease off I show that I believe (the proposition) that I have hands. It is in such cases that Wittgenstein’s use of the formula uncovers his ‘hinge

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propositions,’ and it is these he is speaking of when he says that our ‘language-games’ rest on “groundless” beliefs (166). He would not have arrived at this conception of language had he not embraced a Humean metaphysics, had he not thought that when I go to get up from my chair I groundlessly believe that I have feet, i.e., believe that they have not unaccountably vanished. Those of us who do not share Wittgenstein’s phenomenalism can only regard his account of language, with it groundless hinge propositions, as a philosophical myth. This is not because we think that hinge propositions do have rational grounds, but because we can only think that hinge propositions are themselves mythical.

If we are to give O n Certainty its due, we must place it alongside Hume’s Treatise and Enquiry as the record of the intellectual struggles of a man who is a skeptical philosopher in his theory but who also lives like the rest of us. How is a philosopher to reconcile these matters? O n Certainty is one attempt to answer that question. If Wittgenstein differs from Hume in this matter, it is only in the fact that Hume faced the epistemological consequences of phenomenalism more forthrightly and in consequence saw the human condition as rather comic. A philosopher, he said, can only smile at “the whimsical condition of mankind,” who are obliged to act despite the dictates of reason.

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The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein's On Certainty