Summary of 200-400 sections.
Throughout this book, Wittgenstein is preoccupied with the conceptual clarity regarding concepts like doubting, knowledge, and certainty. He maintains that both the sceptics and the critics of sceptics in general, Moore in particular, have misconceived these notions altogether. His job in this book is to throw some light on these concepts so that he can give a fitting reply to most of the sceptics arguments against knowledge claims.
One of the claims that he is vociferously adhering is doubt presupposes the mastery of language game. What does he mean by this? Suppose someone were to say I doubt P, then in order to doubt P, one needs to have full knowledge about this P itself, meaning one needs to have a full understanding of the language game of P. For example when a sceptic says, “I doubt that my body exists”, Wittgenstein says that to make such sorts of claims, the sceptic must understand what she means by “body” in the first place itself. Otherwise, she can’t doubt the very notion of the body itself. So, in section 306, Wittgenstein says, “If I don’t know if this is a hand.” But, do you know what the word “hand” means?
By extending this argument to little further, Wittgenstein seems to criticize Descartes notion of doubt or method of doubting itself. Descartes, in his meditations, seemed to doubt everything that he has inherited from his childhood. However, there are two things that he seems to not to question at all. They are- his own consciousness about his own mental states and processes and his knowledge of the language that he is using to express his scepticism. He seems to think that he is ‘certain’ about both these things, hence they are not in the purview of doubting itself. However, Wittgenstein questions the very same assumption in this book. Wittgenstein argues that if Descartes doubts everything, then he must also doubt the meaning of the words that he chooses to express his own scepticism. This gives a hint to one of the other prominent claim made by Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein argued that universal doubt is not possible at all.
In section 310, he has devised a situation in which the act of doubting is itself doesn’t make sense at all, whereby he tried to show the “hollowness” of some doubts. He wants to imagine a situation in which, a student is constantly asking questions to the teacher, interrupting the lecture by asking all kinds of questions, like the existence of things, the meaning of the words, etc. Suppose the teacher responds by saying “So far your doubts don’t make sense at all”, Wittgenstein says that his impatience is justified because the student hasn’t learned how to ask questions, more importantly, he hasn’t learned the language game that he is being taught.
At 283 he also says that a child will not immediately doubt what it is taught. If she started doubting from the first stage of learning itself, then one could safely say that she is incapable of learning certain language games. First, the child was given a world picture, then only she starts doubting. In this connection, he makes a claim about the interdependence between doubting and non-doubting behaviour. At section 354 he says, “...there is the first (doubting) only if there is the second (non-doubting).”
Wittgenstein even says that not doubting something is part of some language games itself. This is expressed in 329 section, where he says “If he calls that in doubt-whatever “doubt” means here-he will never learn this game.” So, this means that not calling somethings to doubt is a precondition for learning the particular language itself. He also says that the questions we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt. He also says at 342, “That is to say, it (those propositions which are exempted from doubt) belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are indeed not doubted.” Though there is a possibility of doubting every single proposition, we normally won’t do it. This is because we function or constituted in this way. He has expressed this thought in section 232, where he says “We could doubt every single one of these facts, but we couldn’t doubt them all...Our not doubting them all is simply our manner of judging, and therefore of acting.” This notion sounds similar to his notion of “form of life”.
By extrapolating the above argument to the entire domain of language-games, we can say that the act of doubting is restricted to particular language games or domains of human life because that is how our form of life is constituted. But, what are these propositions which are not prone to doubt at all? One harmless answer- propositions with certainty, and Wittgenstein say this notion of certainty is akin to human beings and form of life. So, in section 358, he says “Now I would like to regard this certainty, not as something akin to hastiness or superficiality, but as a form of life.”
In connection with the above two claims, Wittgenstein also makes another interesting claim. He says doubt needs grounds. This means that you can’t merely say that you doubt something, instead, you also need to provide reasons for your doubting. Suppose someone says that there is a table, which can vanish or alter its shape and colour when no one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again changes back to its old condition. But, he says, this idea of a table is not in "agreement with reality" (215). So, this means fanciful doubting is not a doubting at all and every legitimate doubt needs to have some grounds. This is expressed in section 323, where he says “So rational suspicion must have grounds. We might also say, The reasonable man believes this.” So, one interesting thing would be asking what he means by a “reasonable” man. Wittgenstein gives a working definition in the very next section itself. He says “Thus we should not call anybody reasonable who believed something in spite of scientific evidence.” But, at the same time he seems to cling onto a notion of rationality, which is not absolute at all, but something that is historically contingent in nature. The contingent nature of rationality is well expressed in section 336, where he says “But what men consider reasonable or unreasonable alters. At certain periods men find reasonable what at other periods they found reasonable. And vice versa.” Interestingly, Foucault also seems to echo the same kind of notion in his Archaeological method of human sciences (Foucault, Order of things, 1970).
Though Wittgenstein doesn't name Descartes in this book, he seems to refer, and sometimes, responding to his arguments. Descartes, in the first and second meditations, has devised all kinds of fanciful doubt techniques to drive his point home. But, Wittgenstein argues that the act of doubting must lead to something, some sort of the change in practical life. He says while doubting, one should ask herself “Does this doubt leads to any difference in practice at all”? So, mere fanciful doubting like Descartes's, which does not have any repercussions on practical life, amounts to nothing for Wittgenstein. In fact, he will argue that they are not at all doubts, in the strict sense of the term. A mere speculative doubt or fanciful wish can’t be considered as a legitimate doubt at all. So, there are certain conditions regarding the very notion of doubt itself. In section 230 he says, “We are asking ourselves: what do we do with a statement “I know…”? For it is not a question of mental process or mental states. And that is how one must decide whether something is knowledge or not.”
Wittgenstein seems to believe that some of Moore’s claims about the empirical propositions are valid. Moore thought that not every empirical proposition have the same status as that of others. He says there are some empirical propositions which have a special status. And Wittgenstein has presented this special status as propositions which “stands fast” for him. He would argue that they are not the result of an inquiry, rather they form the base of our inquiry itself. In section 319, Wittgenstein says “...there is no sharp boundary between propositions of logic and empirical propositions. The lack of sharpness is that of the boundary between rule and empirical proposition.” So, this means that there is some sort of merging between these two kinds of propositions at the borderline. He says at section 401 that propositions of the form of empirical propositions, and not only propositions of logic, form the foundations of all operating with thoughts.
Wittgenstein makes a distinction between a mistake and other forms of false beliefs. The difference between these could be that one can give a reason for the mistake, whereas one can only cite the cause for other forms of false belief. In section 217, he says “If someone supposed that all our calculations were uncertain that we could rely on none of them, perhaps we would say he was crazy. But can we say he is in error.” So, Wittgenstein calls other forms of false belief as some sort of mental disturbance. The reason why Wittgenstein makes this distinction is that he thinks there is a vast difference between taking someone out of mad belief and correcting a mistake. This difference is stated clearly in section 257 where he says “If someone said to me that he doubted whether he had a body I should take him to be a half-wit. But I shouldn’t know what it would mean to try to convince him that he had one. And if I said something, and that had removed his doubt, I should not know how or why.” To put in a different way, the difference between two kinds of beliefs lies in our ability to “correct” false judgement in one kind of belief, which is pretty much not possible at all in the other kind of judgement.
I can make a mistake about the date of a historical event, yet by appealing to some reliable authority, I can correct myself. But, correcting someone who doesn’t believe that the earth existed long before she was born, or correcting someone who is making a mistake in calculating 11 times 11, is different from the above kind of correction. By making this distinction, Wittgenstein thinks that there is a difference between madness and a mistake. In the latter case, there is a false judgement, whereas in the former case, there is no judgement at all. By using this distinction, Wittgenstein criticizes Descartes “dream argument”. At section 383, Wittgenstein says “The argument “I may be dreaming” is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well- and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.”
He also talked about how one comes to know or realise about these propositions of certainty in one’s life. This notion of Wittgenstein is known as “activism” or he is better known as an “activist” philosopher, opposed to both “pragmatic” and “foundationalist”. At section 232, he says “Our not doubting them all (propositions) is simply our manner of judging, and therefore of acting.” This notion of “acting” is in some sense similar to that of his “use” theory of meaning.
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