On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “‘I know’ often means: I have the proper grounds for my statement. So if the other person is acquainted with the language-game, he would admit that I know. The other, if he is acquainted with the language-game, must be able to imagine how one may know something of the kind.”
  • To be confident that someone else knows things requires both of you having common know-ledge. You have to be able to imagine how he might have acquired that knowing.
• “When someone has made sure of something, he says: ‘Yes, the calculation is right,’ but he did not infer that from his condition of certainty. One does not infer how things are from one’s own certainty.”
  • Certainty flows through the closure between subjective (psyche) and objective (observed object). Certainty is not generated by the psyche.
• “Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.”
• “The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements. That is to say: if I make certain [untrue] statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them.”
• “Suppose I replaced Moore’s ‘I know’ by ‘I am of the unshakeable conviction’?”
• ‘I know’ is supposed to express a relation between me and a fact, so that the fact is absorbed into my consciousness. If this fact is seen, we in fact know the perception of the outer event through light that projects it onto the sense organ and eventually to conscious awareness. “Only then the question at once arises whether one can be certain of this projection. And this picture does indeed show how our imagination presents knowledge, but not what lies at the bottom of the presentation.”
  • We are certain about the projection, the imaginative reconstruction, not the fact that lays beneath it.
• “Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says something like: ‘That’s how it must be.’”
• “If you are not certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words, either. If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
  • To doubt implies something certain against which the doubt is measured.
• Why is it possible to doubt that I have never been on the moon? “First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life.”
  • Low relevance.
• When someone says they know something, no matter how trustworthy they are, we can only be certain that they believe they know.
• “When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises gives one another mutual support.”
• Beliefs within a belief system are maintained not because they are intrinsically obvious or convincing, they are rather held by what lies around them. Like a fence post and its soil.
• We do not know what we assert we know, but it can stand fast for us and many others. “I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.”
• “In order to make a mistake, a man must already judge in conformity with mankind.”
  • Deviation from conformity is the mistake. Otherwise it’s a competing belief system? Insanity?
• “The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief.”
  • To doubt, one must have a belief which they doubt.
• “I believe that there is a chair over there. Can’t I be wrong? But, can I believe that I am wrong?”
  • Can I believe that my belief is wrong…that would threaten the ground upon which the belief is based, and cause everything to topple over.
• “I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own.”
• “It would be correct to say: ‘I believe…’ has subjective truth; but ‘I know…’ not. Or again ‘I believe…’ is an ‘expression’, but not ‘I know…’”
  • In the paper, opinion sections and legitimate (?) section are actually all opinions to varying degrees…just the degree of consensus varies
• The word ‘certain’ expresses complete conviction and absence of doubt, and we thereby seek to convince others. This is subjective certainty. For something to be objectively certain, we’d need for a mistake to be logically excluded from the claim.
• “‘We could doubt every single one of these facts, but we could not doubt them all.’ Wouldn’t it be more correct to say: ‘we do not doubt them all.’ Our not doubting them all is simply our manner of judging, and therefore acting.
  • Here, he is saying that the idea that we couldn’t doubt everything is a judgement, not a fact. And it is a judgment we act out, and by acting out that judgement we are certain of ourselves in that action—it is that certainty which brought about the act!
• The rock-bottom of complete convictions are when we are unable to imagine a system in which doubts might exist. Can I imagine what it is like to not have two hands, while I in fact do (I think)? No. And so I am completely convinced.
• “But it isn’t just that I believe in this way that I have two hands, but that every reasonable person does. At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.”
  • I think the belief that is not founded is the claim that reasonable people believe this…validating those beliefs of the reasonable plenty requires validating each of their beliefs—which are founded on the belief of the reasonable plenty. Unfounded.
• Do I have knowledge? Do I know? I believe it. The body of knowledge has been handed to me and I have no grounds for doubting it. But why shouldn’t I say I know all this? “But not only know, or believe, all that, but the others do to. Or rather, I believe that they believe it.
• “Here the sentence ‘I know…’ expresses the readiness to believe certain things.”
• “If we ever do act with certainty in the strength of belief, should we wonder that there is much we cannot doubt?”
• But isn’t the situation like this: “We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.”
• If a chair were in front of me, it would be wrong for me to say ‘I believe that it’s a chair’ because that would express my readiness for my statement to be tested. While ‘I know that it…’ implies bewilderment if what I said was not confirmed.
  • Ah…beliefs express a readiness for statements to be tested. Knowing expresses a shutting of doors on the possibility it could be otherwise. Knowing strives to end the conversation, belief keeps the conversation open…finite vs infinite.
• Isn’t construing a word like “know” analogously to “believe” so that we can attach shame to the statement “I know” of it turns out to be wrong? As a result, a mistake becomes something forbidden.
• “Here I am inclined to fight windmills, because I cannot yet say the thing I really want to say.”
• Knowing something is not an unconditional truth—it is the truth only inasmuch as it is an unmoving foundation of his language-games.
• Perfect certainty is only a matter of attitude.
• “A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt.”
  • Why… because a doubt requires belief, but doubting everything implies no belief. Or, it implies an absolute belief in one thing—doubt, and one with conviction cannot doubt.
• “It is always by favour of Nature that one knows something.”
• “A language-game is only possible if one trusts something.” Judgment requires an authority against which to judge it. A norm. An expected value.
• “Doubt itself rests only in what is beyond doubt.”
• “Pretentious [claims] are a mortgage which burden’s a philosopher’s capacity to think.”
• “What is odd is that I always feel like saying (although it is wrong): ‘I know that—so far as one can know such a thing.’ That is incorrect, but something right is hidden behind it.”
  • It is wrong because knowing implies the impossibility of mistake, but this implies I could be mistaken, which would make it a belief. Does this mean we merely believe everything? But then does that mean we have no solid ground on which to stand?
• “The propositions of mathematics might be said to be fossilized.—The proposition ‘I am called…’ is not. But it too is regarded as incontrovertible by those who, like myself, have overwhelming evidence for it. And this not out of thoughtlessness. For, the evidence’s being overwhelming consists precisely in the fact that we do not need to give way before any contrary evidence. And so we have here a buttress similar to the one that makes the propositions of mathematics incontrovertible.”
  • Mathematics has an objective fossilization, whereas knowing one’s name has a subjective fossilization that has been buried beneath sediments of experience: repetitive references to one’s name. In some sense, since everybody has this subjective fossilization, it approaches the fossilization akin to mathematical propositions, and hence we say we ‘know’ our names and believe others when they say it.