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Certainty and Authority

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Peter Winch
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Extract

So is this it: I must recognize certain authorities in order to make judgments at all? (OC, 493)

I want in this paper to consider Wittgenstein's great posthumous work On Certainty in a different perspective from the usual: from the point of view of certain deep questions in political philosophy. These questions concern the nature of the state's authority and the citizen/s obligation to it; the notion of legitimacy and the role of consent in this context. Such issues have many dimensions; but they arise in part out of difficulties in reconciling the application of such concepts with our understanding of human rationality, especially practical rationality. I think it has been, and remains, characteristic of the main tradition of discussion of such issues to leave certain important questions about the nature of practical rationality unasked. I believe that these questions are asked, though in a different context, in Wittgenstein's On Certainty.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 28 , March 1990 , pp. 223 - 237
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1990

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References

1 Different writers have, for their own purposes, given very various accounts of the nature of these ‘reasons’, but these differences need not detain us in the present context.

2 Cf. too: ‘The truth of my statements is the test of my understanding of these statements’ (OC, 80). ‘That is to say: if I make certain false statements, it becomes uncertain whether I understand them’ (OC, 81). ‘The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference’ (OC, 83). ‘Can't an assertoric sentence, which was capable of functioning as a hypothesis, also be used as a foundation for research and action? I.e. can't it simply be isolated from doubt, though not according to any explicit rule? It simply gets assumed as a truism, never called in question, perhaps not even ever formulated’ (OC, 87). ‘It may be for example that all enquiry on our part is set so as to exempt certain propositions from doubt, if they are ever formulated. They lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry’ (OC, 88).

3 Cf. too: ‘Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions of physics? Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn't precisely this what we call a “good ground”?’ (OC, 608).

4 Cf. too: But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false’ (OC, 94). ‘The propositions describing this world picture might be part of a kind of mythology and their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules’ (OC, 95).

5 Cf. too: This is how one calculates. Calculating is this. What we learn at school for example. Forget this transcendent certainty, which is connected with your concept of spirit [Geist]’ (OC, 47).

6 See Hertzberg, Lars, ‘On the Attitude of Trust’, Inquiry, 31, 307–322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hertzberg suggests that we should distinguish between trustworthiness and reliability in this context.

On Certainty contains very many important observations on this topic, all of which I cannot hope to discuss adequately here. See, for instance, OC, 143, 159–162, 167, 170–172, 187–188, 233, 263, 310–317, 600.

7 ‘The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose’ (PI, I, 127).

8 Swift's Yahoos bring this point out.

9 There is an important parallel here with Wittgenstein's insistence in the Tractatus that the limits of logic can be explored only from within our language.

10 Leviathan, ch. 16 (Hobbes, 1840).Google Scholar

11 This is not to deny that the line may sometimes be difficult to draw!

12 This is not, alas, to say that On Certainty has put an end to such attempts. Nowadays, under the label of ‘artificial intelligence’, they receive large funding.

13 Behemoth, Dialogue IV (Hobbes, 1840).Google Scholar

14 In this respect his stance is just like that of Rawls, who asks his reader to adopt ‘the original position’. The ‘veil of ignorance’ that characterizes this ‘position’ runs foul of Wittgenstein's point that what is ‘reasonable’ cannot be characterized independently of the content of certain pivotal ‘judgments’. Of course this needs showing in detail in a way I cannot attempt here.