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An Analysis of Certainty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Evan Simpson*
Affiliation:
McMaster University

Extract

Ever since Moore revived the gospel of certainty, philosophers content with commonsense have tried to provide a perspicuous formulation of its merits. Neither Moore nor his ablest successors have completely fulfilled this task, and although few philosophers would take up Wittgenstein's challenge, “Just try ——in a real case ——to doubt someone else's fear or pain”, many would disagree that if one does he will “find these words becoming quite meaningless”. The psychological conviction that men have in many beliefs is philosophically trivial, but the suggestion that sceptical claims are meaningless seems simply false. The problem for advocates of commonsense is that there is no evident room between psychological indubitability and logical necessity, uninteresting ‘subjective’ certainty and unattainable ‘objective’ certainty. Only by describing linguistic stringencies intermediate between psychological and logical ones can this problem be overcome.

In Philosophical Papers Moore frequently claims to ‘know with certainty’ that many empirical propositions are true.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 Bertrand Russell, ‘The Influence and Thought of G.E. Moore’, The Listener (April 30, 1959), 755-56.

2 Cf., e.g., P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of G.E. Moore, pp. 541–43; G.E. Moore, Philosophical Papers, pp. 175–76; J.L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, pp. 30–33, and How to do Things with Words, pp. 47 -52; P.F. Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory, pp. 174–79.

3 See S.C. Kleene, Introduction to Metamathematics, p. 334, for matrices satisfying this condition.

4 E.g., Dretske, FredConclusive Reasons’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 49 (1971), 1-22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 One may think here of Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 354.

6 Cf. Simpson, EvanOn the Assertion of Philosophical Doubt’, Dialogue, X (1971), 82-91.Google Scholar

7 For a survey see Lycan, W. Gregory ‘Non inductive Evidence: Recent Work on Wittgenstein's “Criteria”’, Americn Philosophical Quarterly, 8 (1971), 109-25.Google Scholar