Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty

Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty is a full-length study of Wittgenstein's third masterpiece. It unravels Wittgentein's ultimate and highly-condensed thoughts on knowledge, certainty and scepticism. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein subverts the traditional picture of basic beliefs. They are not indubitable or self-evident propositions, but animal certainties. By this, he means that our basic certainties are nonreflective, nonpropositional attitudes. Moyal-Sharrock argues that one of the crucial accomplishments of On Certainty is the relisation that to think of our basic certainties as propositions is a misleading result of our putting them into words. What philosophers like Descartes and Moore have put forward as propositions susceptible of falsification, and hence vulnerable to scepticism, are nothing but heuristic formulations of certainties whose only occurence qua certainty is in action. The book shows how Wittgenstein solves the epistemic regress problem through his depiction of a certainty that has both the rigidity of a rule and the suppleness of a reflex action. On Certainty counters generations of philosophers have maintained by showing that there is such a thing as foundational certainty, but that it is not an epistemic assurance. Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty will prove invaluable to scholars and students of Wittgenstein in philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and the sciences of education. Book jacket.

DANIÈLE MOYAL-SHARROCK is Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She has significantly contributed to highlighting the importance of Wittgenstein's later corpus. She is the editor, with William Brenner, of Reading Wittgenstein's On Certainty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and the editor of The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works (Ashgate, 2004), as well as the translator of a forthcoming French edition of On Certainty.