Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Grounded Action: Wittgenstein against Skepticism
Edward Guetti, Seton Hall University, USA
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says
again and again “I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a
tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears
this, and I tell him: “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only
doing philosophy.” 1
An impassable divide between our everyday experiences
and our ideals seems to be an indelible aspect of the
human experience. How do I know that this is the good
life, how do I even know that I am the being that I think I
am? Skepticism has always thrived on this professed riff.
Any attempt that recognized the riff and attempted to
bridge it was doomed to deconstruction from the outset.
Philosophical skeptics, following Descartes’ example, have
understood their aim as infecting even the most “ordinary”
propositions with skeptical doubt. This position has
evolved into the more radical claim that not only can we
not be certain of any of our claims to knowledge, but no
certainty or knowledge exists even in the language in
which we express our knowledge claims. Such a skeptical
claim rests on a peculiar understanding of language -an
understanding which has completely ignored the
contributions of Ludwig Wittgenstein. When we begin to
investigate how language works we discover that there is
no need to bridge the riff off of which skeptics have
profited, as no riff necessarily exists!
What separates the responses of Wittgenstein, and
even Quine to a large degree, from other language-based
responses to skepticism is precisely their understanding of
language as the performance of games which are couched
in a number of contexts. Denying our ability to be certain of
the meaning of our speech, and hence, our thought,
requires much more than what the skeptic would have us
believe.
Thomas Nagel in his The View from Nowhere and
Peter Unger in his “A Defense of Skepticism” 2 both
respond to a challenge issued by recent (ca. 1950)
criticisms made by philosophers of language against a
skeptical attitude. Nagel rightly claims that “recently there
has been a revival of arguments against the possibility of
skepticism reminiscent of the ordinary language arguments
of the fifties” (L&M, 82-83) and goes on to formulate a welldefended
skeptical posture against said language-based
responses. However the argument chosen as the
response of philosophers of language by Nagel and
(though tacitly) Unger is quite certainly not the best
response.
Nagel’s skepticism relies on the realist conception of
language: “What we refer to by the terms in our statements
about the external world […] is said to be whatever actually
bears the appropriate relation to the generally accepted
use of those terms in our language. (This relation is left
undefined, but it is supposed to be exemplified in the
ordinary world by the relation between my use of the word
“tree” and actual trees, if there are such things.)” (L&M, 83)
Nagel goes on to insert his skeptical wedge between what
we intend to signify and the signifier which we use: “Such
[language-based responses to skepticism] are refuted by
the evident possibility and intelligibility of skepticism, which
1 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #467
2 Both articles are presented here as they are found in Landesman and
Meeks, 2003, henceforth (L&M).
reveals that by ‘tree’ I don’t mean just anything that is
causally responsible for my impressions of trees, or
anything that looks and feels like a tree, or even anything
of the sort that I and others have traditionally called trees.
Since those things could conceivably not be trees, any
theory that says they have to be is wrong.” (L&M, 84)
Nagel concludes that there can be no assured certainty
that the words I use are meaningful or accurately describe
what it is I wish to describe.
Unger as well bases his response on such an
understanding: he believes that what he calls “basic
absolute terms” (words like “flat”, “certain”, etc.) have no
place in our speech, and hence our knowledge, because
one hardly ever is referencing something which is, e.g.,
absolutely flat (L&M, 91-92). Unger requires a bit more
than Nagel, not only does he demand that words operate
on a empirically testable one-to-one correspondence with
the world, but the meaning of a word is to be organized
into a one-to-one relation with the word itself. This can be
seen from the disturbing feeling Unger expresses when he
observes that absolute terms can on occasion also admit
degrees of relative (i.e. contextual) meaning. It is rather
obvious at this point that this referential conception of
language to which both Unger and Nagel respond is no
match even for any lightweight version of skepticism. To
what, then, should we turn to put our skeptical worries to
rest if not a referential theory of meaning?
It is precisely a contextual theory of meaning that
will help us put our skeptical doubts to rest. This
contextualism, however, goes well beyond understanding
where and by whom a statement is made but how we use
different statements will determine meaning (as
Wittgenstein has remarked: “it is only in use that the
proposition has its sense.” On Certainty 3 , #10). In using
words meaningfully we exhibit our grasp of them and
consequently our knowledge or certainty of their meaning.
Certainty moves from being an inner, mental state to being
part of an expression, something outside of one’s own
mind. A fundamental tenet of both Quine’s and
Wittgenstein’s view is that any empirical statement about
the world is misleading in its apparent simplicity (i.e. that it
can be judged as either agreeing or disagreeing with ‘the
facts’). For Quine empirical propositions are not only
“couched” in networks of other beliefs, but “the total field
[of our beliefs] is so underdetermined by its boundary
conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of
choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of
any single contrary experience.” (L&M, 325) Our network
of beliefs only interact with experience on their periphery
and so empirical observations not only reflect something
exterior to ourselves but also, to a greater degree, reflect
greater aspects of our networks of belief. Wittgenstein
makes many similar points throughout On Certainty, e.g. a
statement about the date of a battle Napoleon fought in
also implies that the earth existed at that date, that there
were people other than Napoleon, etc. “When we first
begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single
proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light
dawns gradually over the whole.)” (OC, #141) If empirical
statements are misleading in their simplicity, if our
experiences affect our beliefs, they are only the inch or so
3 Henceforth (OC).
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