Wittgenstein: Hinges, Certainty, World-Picture and Mythology

Abstract

In the second chapter I have analysed Wittgenstein’s considerations on the ordinary use of ‘to know’ and on the grammatical use of ‘I know’ mostly in relation to the premise of Moore’s proof ‘Here is my hand’. No doubt, Wittgenstein’s criticism of the Moorean use of that sentence is a leitmotif throughout the whole of On Certainty, but it does not always have the same end. In the first three sections of the text, the emphasis is on Moore’s anomalous use of ‘I know’, which goes against the criteria of its ordinary employment in our common language games and is meant to expose the fact that the philosophical use of that expression is nonsensical. In the last and major section of OC, Wittgenstein focuses instead on the role that Moore’s truisms in A defence of common sense, and propositions similar to them play in our lives and in our ‘system of judgements’ (OC 141–2).¹ Wittgenstein’s analysis becomes more and more tentative and is full of second-thoughts and doubts, up to the following remark:

Haven’t I gone wrong and isn’t Moore perfectly right? Haven’t I made the elementary mistake of confusing one’s thoughts with one’s knowledge? Of course I don’t think to myself ‘The earth has already existed for some time before my birth’, but do I know it nevertheless? Don’t I show that I know it by always drawing its consequences?

(OC 397)