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This document provides an overview of Wittgenstein's discussions on knowledge and certainty, particularly in his work 'On Certainty'. It examines various interpretative readings of the text, including non-propositional and propositional interpretations, and highlights its significance in addressing radical skepticism. The authors, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Duncan Pritchard, explore how Wittgenstein's ideas have influenced contemporary epistemology and related fields.

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wittgenstein-on-knowledge-and-certainty

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Moyal-Sharrock and Pritchard

An overview is offered of Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking

discussion of knowledge and certainty, especially in his final
notebooks, published as On Certainty. The main interpretative
readings of On Certainty are discussed, especially a non-
propositional/non-epistemic interpretation and a variety
of propositional and/or epistemic interpretations. Surveys The Philosophy of
are offered of the readings of On Certainty presented
by such figures as Annalisa Coliva, John Greco, Danièle Ludwig Wittgenstein
Moyal-Sharrock, Duncan Pritchard, Genia Schönbaumsfeld,
P. F. Strawson, Michael Williams, and Crispin Wright. This
Element demonstrates how On Certainty has been especially
groundbreaking for epistemology with regard to its treatment

Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty

Wittgenstein
of the problem of radical scepticism.

on Knowledge
About the Series Series Editor
and Certainty
This series provides concise and David G. Stern
structured introductions to all the central University of Iowa
topics in the philosophy of Ludwig
Wittgenstein. The Elements are written
by distinguished senior scholars and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock
bright junior scholars with relevant
expertise, producing balanced and and Duncan Pritchard
comprehensive coverage of the full range
of Wittgenstein’s thought.

Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of

the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Josef Johann
Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
by Moritz Nähr, 1930
(IanDagnall Computing /
Alamy Stock Photo). ISSN 2632-7112 (online)
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Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
edited by
David G. Stern
University of Iowa

WITTGENSTEIN ON
KNOWLEDGE AND
CERTAINTY

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock
University of Hertfordshire
Duncan Pritchard
University of California, Irvine

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www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009548090
DOI: 10.1017/9781108946599
© Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Duncan Pritchard 2024
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
When citing this work, please include a reference to the DOI 10.1017/9781108946599
First published 2024
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remain, accurate or appropriate.

Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

DOI: 10.1017/9781108946599
First published online: December 2024

Danièle Moyal-Sharrock
University of Hertfordshire
Duncan Pritchard
University of California, Irvine
Author for correspondence: Duncan Pritchard, [email protected]

Abstract: An overview is oﬀered of Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking

discussion of knowledge and certainty, especially in his final notebooks,
published as On Certainty. The main interpretative readings of On
Certainty are discussed, especially a non-propositional/non-epistemic
interpretation and a variety of propositional and/or epistemic
interpretations. Surveys are offered of the readings of On Certainty
presented by such figures as Annalisa Coliva, John Greco, Danièle Moyal-
Sharrock, Duncan Pritchard, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, P. F. Strawson,
Michael Williams, and Crispin Wright. This Element demonstrates how On
Certainty has been especially groundbreaking for epistemology with
regard to its treatment of the problem of radical scepticism.

Keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein, knowledge, certainty, epistemology,

scepticism

© Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Duncan Pritchard 2024

ISBNs: 9781009548090 (HB), 9781108931199 (PB), 9781108946599 (OC)
ISSNs: 2632-7112 (online), 2632-7104 (print)

Introduction 1

1 Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty 2

2 Hinge Commitments in Contemporary Epistemology 33

List of Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works 65

References 67

Introduction
We dedicate this Element to Avrum Stroll.
This Element seeks to elucidate Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking discussion of
knowledge and certainty and its impact on epistemology, particularly as regards
the nature of our most basic commitments and their relevance for the problem
of radical scepticism. Our focus will be on Wittgenstein’s remarks in his ﬁnal
notebooks, published as On Certainty, but the themes being explored reach right
back to the Tractatus as well as to other works leading to, and broadly contem-
poraneous with, On Certainty.
On Certainty has prompted differing interpretative readings. These differences
mostly pertain to the nature of Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty. Is
it epistemic (a kind of knowledge)? Is it propositional? Is it animal? Is it
foundational? Does it succeed in confounding radical scepticism? Philosophers
interpret Wittgenstein differently on these issues. And where they agree that
Wittgenstein holds a particular view, they sometimes disagree with it.
We think the disparity of views regarding Wittgenstein’s reconceptualisation of
basic certainty and its relation to knowledge makes co-authorship of this Element a
good idea. Its authors – though very close in their understanding of On Certainty –
differ on some key questions, such as whether our basic certainties are to
be understood propositionally. On other issues – such as whether Wittgenstein
thought our basic commitments are objects of knowledge and whether he succeeds
in confounding radical scepticism – they are fellow travellers.
Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty has been gaining wider recognition in
philosophy, and we should welcome the recent arrival on the epistemology scene
of ‘hinge epistemology’.1 This new branch of epistemology has arisen from the
growing acknowledgement that Wittgenstein’s notion of basic certainty – these
days called ‘hinge certainty’ for reasons discussed in the Element – raises import-
ant questions for, indeed arguably supersedes, mainstream accounts of basic beliefs
and radical scepticism. It should also be noted, though the topic of this Element
prevents us from engaging the discussion further, that hinge certainty has impacted
many disciplines beyond philosophy, such as cognitive science, psychology,
gender studies, education, primatology, law, literature and religion.
While both authors have collaborated throughout on producing this manu-
script, the Element is divided into two main sections that are primarily authored
separately. Section 1 is written by Moyal-Sharrock. It covers the main themes of
On Certainty, sometimes comparing or contrasting them to pre-On Certainty
texts. It also makes the case for a non-propositional reading of our basic hinge
certainty. Section 2 is written by Pritchard. Its focus is on the way the core ideas
1
See Coliva & Moyal-Sharrock (2017) and Sandis & Moyal-Sharrock (2022).

from On Certainty have impacted contemporary epistemology, especially with

regard to the recent debate about radical scepticism.

1 Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty

We begin our exploration of Wittgenstein on knowledge and certainty with the
words of two philosophers who, each in his own way, importantly contributed
to what we know as On Certainty: Norman Malcolm and G. H. von Wright.
Here is Malcolm, whose discussions with Wittgenstein on Moore’s ‘A Defence
of Common Sense’ (1925) and ‘Proof of an External World’ (1939) were to
signiﬁcantly inspire the notes that make up On Certainty:2

On Certainty is a brilliant illustration of the novelty of Wittgenstein’s think-

ing. The concepts of certainty and knowledge have received a vast amount of
study in the history of philosophy. Wittgenstein presents an entirely fresh way
of viewing these concepts. (2018, 671)

As for Von Wright, he was the co-editor – with Elizabeth Anscombe – of the
selection of notes that make up On Certainty:

Wittgenstein’s treatise on certainty can be said to summarize some of the

essential novelties of his thinking. . . . The book opens new vistas on his
philosophical achievement. (1982, 166)

1.1 The Tractatus as Precursor to On Certainty

The following paragraph is from von Wright’s book Wittgenstein:

In the preface to the Tractatus, [Wittgenstein] said: ‘ The book will, therefore,
draw a limit to thinking, or rather – not to thinking but to the expression of
thoughts; for in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to
think what cannot be thought).’ Very much the same thing he could have said
in a preface, had he ever written one, to his last writings, those published
under the title On Certainty. Beyond everything we know or conjecture or
think of as true there is a foundation of accepted truth without which there
would be no such thing as knowing or conjecturing or thinking things true.
But to think of the things, whereof this foundation is made, as known to us or
as true is to place them among the things which stand on this very foundation,
is to view the receptacle as another object within. This clearly cannot be done.
If the foundation is what we have to accept before we say of anything that it is
known or true, then it cannot itself be known or true. . . . What Moore called
‘common sense’ . . . is very much the same thing as that which Wittgenstein in
the Tractatus would have referred to as ‘the limits of the world’. Wittgenstein’s
high appreciation of Moore’s article must partly have stemmed from the fact

2
See Malcolm (2018), 660–64.

that he recognized in Moore’s efforts a strong similarity with his own. And his
criticism of Moore in On Certainty we could, in the language of the Tractatus,
characterize as a criticism of an attempt to say the unsayable. (von Wright
1982, 175–76)

Although Wittgenstein came to recant the Tractatus,3 he had sown a seed there
which was to grow throughout his philosophy and bloom to full fruition in On
Certainty. This seed is the realisation that sense has nonsensical limits, or
foundations: foundations that are not themselves endowed with sense and are
not therefore, strictly speaking, sayable. That is, they can be verbalized, as one
would verbalize a rule, but because a rule is neither true nor false, it is not
propositional, not endowed with sense. Later, Wittgenstein will call these limits
‘grammar’ and expand his notion of grammar to include a brand of certainty that
is at the foundation not only of sense, but of knowledge. He will metaphorically
compare this certainty to the ‘hinges’ that must be there for the door of knowledge
to turn (OC §343).
Nonsense, the ineffable (or unsayable), grammar, knowledge, certainty: these
are the key notions that will occupy us here. Wittgenstein either modifies or
relocates them all. We shall see that certainty becomes, in Wittgenstein’s hands, a
new animal: often called ‘hinge certainty’4 and, less often, ‘objective certainty’,5
it is internally linked to nonsense, ineffability and grammar – all terms that
Wittgenstein modifies or refines. As for knowledge, Wittgenstein relocates it. In
fact, he effects a major shift in epistemology when he divests knowledge (more or
less: justified true belief) of its foundational status, which he attributes to certainty.
Whereas the early Wittgenstein is concerned with understanding the limits of
sense – what enables us to make or express sense and can therefore not itself be
endowed with sense, the third Wittgenstein6 will be concerned with the limits or
foundations of knowledge: what makes knowing possible and cannot therefore
itself be an object of knowledge. These foundations, he will call ‘grammar’ or
‘norms of description’ (OC §167; §321). Note, however, that for Wittgenstein,
grammar is not comprised merely of syntactic rules but of all the conditions
for intelligibility: it is the basis from which we can make sense and acquire
knowledge. Some of these conditions of intelligibility are due to convention7

3
See, for example, Hacker (2001) and Moyal-Sharrock (2007a).
4
See Coliva & Moyal-Sharrock (2017).
5
See, for example, Svensson (1981, 84ff) and Stroll (2002, 449ff) who refer exclusively to
‘objective certainty’; I initially referred to both ‘objective certainty’ and ‘hinge certainty’ (e.g.,
Moyal-Sharrock 2005), but then used the latter exclusively.
6
‘The third Wittgenstein’ (see Moyal-Sharrock 2004) refers to the post-Investigations
Wittgenstein: essentially Remarks and Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Remarks on
Colour and On Certainty.
7
‘Grammar consists of conventions’ (PG §138).

(e.g., ‘This is (what we call) a chair’; ‘A rod has a length’; ‘2+2=4’), keeping in
mind that conventions are not always due to a concerted consensus, but to an
unconcerted agreement in practice. Other conditions for intelligibility are natural
or acquired (causally, through enculturation or repeated exposure (OC §143)).
These conditions of sense can be verbalised (e.g., ‘There exist people other than
myself’; ‘Human babies cannot feed themselves’). Our meaningful use of words
(e.g., ‘There are two people in the other room’ or ‘I’ll go feed the baby’) is
logically based on such norms of description or rules of grammar. They constitute
‘the substratum of all [our] enquiring and asserting’ (OC §162). ‘If the true is what
is grounded, then the ground is not true nor yet false’ (OC §205), writes
Wittgenstein. The ground, he will argue in On Certainty, is logical or grammatical.
We shall have more to say on the logico-grammatical nature of our foundations.
As von Wright put it: ‘If the foundation is what we have to accept before we
say of anything that it is known or true, then it cannot itself be known or true.’
von Wright’s use of the word ‘accept’ is not fortuitous: he wants to avoid
describing the foundation as something that results from reasoning or justiﬁca-
tion, thereby underlining the fact that, for Wittgenstein, knowledge does not go
all the way down. What underpins knowledge is what has come to be called, due
to this famous metaphor, ‘hinge certainty’:

That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact
that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on
which those turn. (OC §341)

Now let us see how some of the seeds of hinge certainty – nonsense, ineffability
and grammar – are, as von Wright was right to suggest, sown in Wittgenstein’s
early work.

1.2 Nonsense, Ineﬀability and Grammar

What Wittgenstein means by ‘nonsense’ was the main object of what we
might call ‘the Tractatus wars’,8 which originated with the publication of The
New Wittgenstein (Crary & Read 2000). In that volume, so-called New
Wittgensteinians rebuked ‘ineffabilists’ – philosophers who, like Peter Hacker,
view some nonsense in the Tractatus as ‘illuminating’ – for ‘chickening out’, for
not being ‘resolute’ enough to recognise that Wittgenstein viewed all nonsense as
‘plain nonsense’; that is, gibberish. This was unwarranted: Wittgenstein was clear
on what he took to be nonsense – and it was not all ‘plain nonsense’.
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein viewed as either senseless or nonsensical any
expression that does not ‘add to our knowledge’ (cf. LE 44) – in other words,

8
An expression used by Read & Lavery (2011).

that is not a proposition of natural science (§6.53). The nonsensical included

ethics and aesthetics (§6.421), the mystical (§6.522) and his own Tractarian
sentences (§6.54). None of these have sense – none are bipolar propositions
susceptible of truth and falsity – and cannot therefore add to our knowledge.
Indeed, even his own Tractarian sentences do not add to our knowledge; they
elucidate (§6.54), which is the rightful task of philosophy (§4.112). Not adding
to knowledge makes Tractarian Sätze technically nonsensical, devoid of sense.
This, however, is a nonderogatory use of nonsense. When something does not
make sense either because it is impossible to put into words (e.g., the mystical,
ethics and aesthetics9); or because it enables or regulates sense (e.g., ‘There is
only one 1’ (§4.1272)); or because it elucidates (the bounds of) sense (e.g., the
nonsensicality of Tractarian remarks), it is nonsensical, in a nonderogatory use
of the term. In fact, nonsense that regulates sense is one of the early manifest-
ations of what Wittgenstein will later call ‘grammar’; and as we shall see, hinge
certainties are a later manifestation of regulatory or enabling nonsense. By
contrast, nonsense, understood in a derogatory way, results from a violation
of sense, as when categorial boundaries are misread and allowed to overlap
(e.g., ‘Is the good more or less identical than the beautiful?’ (§4.003); ‘2+2 at
3 o’clock equals 4’ (§4.1272)). This nonsense is plain nonsense, gibberish.10
It is clear, then, that the Tractatus contains different understandings of
nonsense, not a uniquely derogatory one.11 It was a mistake on the part of
New Wittgensteinians to insist on a monochrome, ‘austere’, reading of non-
sense as exclusively gibberish. This resulted in viewing Tractarian sentences as
gibberish – a consequence they embraced, with no enduring success.
What of ineffability? Inasmuch as in the Tractatus Wittgenstein takes only
truth-conditional utterances to be sayable (§6.53),12 any string of words that
does not express a truth-conditional proposition is not, technically speaking,
sayable. On that count, all nonsense is ineffable. However, as regards important

9
Ethics, aesthetics and the mystical ‘cannot be put into words’. (TLP §6.421; §6.522).
10
See Moyal-Sharrock (2007a) for a more elaborate discussion of the different uses of nonsense in
the Tractatus.
11
The ﬁrst sentence in the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ passage (earlier) already shows Wittgenstein
alluding to different uses of nonsense; but he was to make this clearer: ‘[. . .] the word ‘nonsense’
is used to exclude certain things [. . .] for different reasons’ (AWL 64). By the time of the
Investigations, Wittgenstein uses the terms ‘nonsense’, ‘senseless’, ‘has no sense’ indiscrimin-
ately to refer to combinations of words that are excluded from the language, ‘withdrawn from
circulation’ (PI §500), and insists that this exclusion may be for different reasons:

To say ‘This combination of words makes no sense (hat keinen Sinn)’ excludes it from
the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one
draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. (PI §499)
12
‘[. . .] what can be said; i.e. propositions of natural science – i.e. something that has nothing to do
with philosophy’ (TLP §6.53).

nonsense, the mystical, ethics and aesthetics cannot even be put into words,
whereas regulative and elucidatory nonsense, though not sayable strictly speak-
ing, can be formulated for heuristic purposes. That is, they can be formulated to
serve as steps towards a clearer access to, and demarcation of, the conditions of
sense or ‘limit to thought’ (TLP Preface). This applies to Tractarian remarks,
which must be passed over in silence in that they are not hypothetical proposi-
tions but the ‘steps’ or ‘ladder’ to intelligibility or perspicuity (§6.54). Once
used, the ladder must be thrown away (§6.54), for these heuristic aids do not
belong to the sphere of language but to its delimitation. They belong to what
Wittgenstein will later call the scaffolding of thought (OC §211).
The later Wittgenstein will extend the list of the sayable to include non-
truth-conditional uses of language (e.g., spontaneous utterances, questions,
imperatives),13 but he will never give up the idea that some things cannot
meaningfully be said ‘in the flow of the language-game’; or the idea that some
things cannot be put into words at all but can only show themselves through
words (e.g., literary content) and, he will add, through deeds. We shall see that he
adds hinge certainties to the list of the ineffable – the grammatical ineffable. All
hinge certainties – including such certainties as ‘The earth existed long before my
birth’ (OC §288) – though they appear to be empirical propositions are bounds of
sense, not objects of sense; and hence uttering them in the flow of the language
game as if they were susceptible of doubt or verification is uttering nonsense, in
its nonderogatory sense. The same goes for propositions like ‘There are physical
objects’: ‘“There are physical objects” is nonsense’ (OC 35). It is not, however –
as Pritchard contends (see, for example, 2.2, 2.4) – plain nonsense. I discuss this
further in 1.7.
This, then, is how the Tractatus sets the stage for what Wittgenstein will later
call ‘grammar’. The Tractarian ‘limits of sense’ foreshadow Wittgensteinian
grammar, but so do the Tractarian ‘limits of the world’ foreshadow what Moore
called ‘common sense’ and Wittgenstein will metaphorically call ‘background’,
‘foundations’ or ‘hinges’ – all of which belong to grammar. As Wittgenstein
will say: ‘everything descriptive of a language-game is part of logic’ (OC §56).

1.3 Knowledge Is Not Foundational

Wittgenstein’s interest in Moore’s ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925)
prompted the notes that make up On Certainty, and this interest was reawakened
by discussions he had with Norman Malcolm in the summer of 1949 in
Cornell14 on that paper and on Moore’s ‘Proof of an External World’ (1939).
In these notes, Wittgenstein examines Moore’s afﬁrmation that he knows such

13 14
See also (PI §23). See Malcolm (2018).

things as ‘Human beings are born and die’, ‘The earth has existed long before
I was born’, ‘I am standing here’, ‘I have two hands’, ‘Here is a hand’. Moore
does not see his inability to prove he knows such things as invalidating; he
insists that he cannot but ‘know’ that ‘Here is a hand’:

How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only believed it,
and that perhaps it was not the case! You might as well suggest that I do not
know that I am now standing up and talking . . .. (Moore 1939, 146–47)

On Moore’s view, then, we can know things that we cannot prove. Indeed, he
will claim that all mediated knowledge must eventually terminate in unmedi-
ated, or ‘immediate knowledge’:

if any proposition whatever is ever known by us mediately, or because some

other proposition is known from which it follows, some one proposition at
least, must also be known by us immediately, or not merely because some
other proposition is known from which it follows. (Moore 1957: 141–42; see
also 122–23)

What he calls ‘immediate knowledge’ is knowledge that is not derived:15 for the
regress to stop, some claims to know must be immediate, not susceptible of
justification. For Moore, then, some knowledge is foundational.
Solving the problem of infinite regress is, of course, crucial, but one ought not
do so by insisting that therefore knowledge must be basic. Moore’s notion of
‘immediate knowledge’ has been questioned,16 but the real problem lies in
seeking to revamp ‘knowledge’ in the first place. For the concept of knowledge
as involving some variant of truth and justification has had a prosperous history
and continues to serve (as even Gettier recognized). Rather than attempting to
repair the perennial regress problem by reconceptualising knowledge, divesting
it of its longstanding components, we should instead ask what more fundamen-
tal doxastic attitude might be underpinning it. This is what Wittgenstein does in
On Certainty. He takes on Moore’s supercilious challenge – ‘You might as well
suggest that I do not know that I am now standing up and talking’ (1939, 147):

I should like to say: Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, but it
stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of
our method of doubt and enquiry. (OC §151)

. . . how do I know that it is my hand? Do I even here know exactly what it

means to say it is my hand? – When I say ‘how do I know?’ I do not mean that

15
Another notable attempt at a sort of immediate knowledge was Bertrand Russell’s ‘knowledge
by acquaintance’ which he distinguished from ‘knowledge by description’ (Russell 1910; 1912:
Ch. 5).
16
See, for example, Malmgrem (1983).

I have the least doubt of it. What we have here is a foundation for all my
action. But it seems to me that it is wrongly expressed by the words ‘I know’.
(OC §414)

To say of man, in Moore’s sense, that he knows something; that what he says
is therefore unconditionally the truth, seems wrong to me. – It is the truth only
inasmuch as it is an unmoving foundation of his language-games. (OC §403)

Wittgenstein is clear: Moore does not know that he is now standing up and
talking or that what he is waving is a hand. He refers to his assurance of these
things as ‘knowledge’ because that is to him the concept that expresses the
greatest degree of conviction on our epistemic spectrum. Wittgenstein agrees
that Moore’s assurance is indubitable; but disagrees that it is knowledge. This is
because knowing is for Wittgenstein – as it is in our epistemic practices – an
achievement; something we come to; something of which we can retrace the
steps and invoke the grounds:

One says ‘I know’ when one is ready to give compelling grounds. ‘I know’
relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth. (OC §243)

[When] Moore says he knows the earth existed etc., . . . has he . . . got the right
ground for his conviction? For if not, then after all he doesn’t know. (OC §91)

Only in very special circumstances, such as after an accident, is it possible for

someone to ﬁnd out or make sure that they have two hands:

If I don’t know whether someone has two hands (say, whether they have been
amputated or not) I shall believe his assurance that he has two hands, if he is
trustworthy. And if he says he knows it, that can only signify to me that he has
been able to make sure, and hence that his arms are e.g. not still concealed by
coverings and bandages, etc. etc. My believing the trustworthy man stems
from my admitting that it is possible for him to make sure. (OC §23)

Outside of such special circumstances, it is not possible to make sure that one
has two hands; and, therefore, not possible to know it. However, as Malcolm
recounts, Wittgenstein makes a concession: there can be uses of ‘I know’ where
it is not sensible to speak of ‘making sure’, but only outside of philosophical
contexts:

There is an ordinary use of ‘I know’ when there isn’t any making sure. For
example, a sighted person could say it to a blind man who asks ‘Are you sure
that it’s a tree?’ And also when we have completed an investigation we can
say, ‘I know now that it’s a tree.’ Another example: if you and I were coming
through woods towards a house and I broke out into the clearing and there
was the house right before me, I might exclaim ‘There’s the house.’ You, back
in the bushes, might ask doubtfully ‘Are you sure?’, and I should reply ‘I

know it.’ Here the use of ‘I know it’ would be natural, and yet it would also be
a case of certainty ‘in the highest degree’, a case in which I should be willing
to count nothing as evidence that there isn’t a house there. Moore might have
given such examples, examples of a use of ‘I know’ in which that expression
really functions ‘im sprachlichen Verkehr’, i.e., in the actual trafﬁc of lan-
guage, in ‘the stream of life.’ But he doesn’t give such examples: he prefers to
gaze at a tree and say ‘I know there’s a tree there.’ And this is because he
wants to give himself the experience of knowing. (Malcolm 2018, 662)

Wittgenstein, then, does admit the use of ‘I know’ in ordinary life to convey
indubitable certainty, or ‘certainty “in the highest degree”’ as he puts it, but he
will not countenance it in philosophical contexts:

What I am aiming at is also found in the difference between the casual

observation ‘I know that that’s a . . . ’, as it might be used in ordinary life,
and the same utterance when a philosopher makes it. (OC §406)

For when Moore says ‘I know that that’s . . . ’ I want to reply ‘you don’t know
anything!’ – and yet I would not say that to anyone who was speaking without
philosophical intention. That is, I feel (rightly?) that these two mean to say
something different. (OC §407)

For Wittgenstein, we should not interfere with the ordinary use of language, and
therefore not correct the casual use of ‘I know’ in ordinary cases of indubitable
certainty; but a philosopher should, in philosophical argument, be more con-
ceptually responsible. A philosopher’s claim to ‘know’ in indubitable cases – by
invoking immediate knowledge, acquaintance or awareness – is misguided. As
Wittgenstein sees it, Moore – like Russell before him17 – has a confused picture
of knowledge. He takes knowledge to be something one experiences; he falls
prey to ‘the tendency to think of knowledge as a mental state’.18 According to
Wittgenstein, reports Malcolm:

Moore would like to stare at a house that is only 20 feet away and say, with
a peculiar intonation, ‘I know that there’s a house!’ He does this because he
wants to produce in himself the feeling of knowing. . . . It is as if someone had
said ‘You don’t really feel pain when you are pinched’ and Moore then
pinched himself in order to feel the pain, and thus prove to himself that the
other is wrong. Moore treats the sentence ‘I know so & so’ like the sentence ‘I
have a pain’. (Malcolm 2018, 660)

Whereas the ordinary use of ‘I know’ usually arises from making sure, the
philosophical use of ‘I know’ must always result from some investigative or

17
For Wittgenstein’s criticism of Russell’s notion of ‘intuitive awareness’, see CE, including
Appendix A.
18
In Malcolm (2018, 660).

ratiocinative process. The philosopher must be aware that, in default

circumstances,19 one’s being in the country one lives in, or one’s certainty of
having a body, or there existing people other than oneself, cannot be a result of
investigation and cannot therefore be an object of knowledge.
And so, Moore was right about the indubitability of some of our beliefs not
being due to justiﬁcation, but he was wrong to call it ‘knowledge’. The back-
ground, or substratum, of our thoughts (OC §62; §194) is not something we hold
as true or come to know; it is a given: an ‘inherited’ or assumed background:

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)

If I say ‘we assume that the earth has existed for many years past’ (or
something similar), then of course it sounds strange that we should assume
such a thing. But in the entire system of our language-games it belongs to the
foundations. The assumption,20 one might say, forms the basis of action, and
therefore, naturally, of thought. (OC §411)

For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge? (OC §477)

It should be clear, then, that Wittgenstein‘s conception of knowledge is the

traditional one: knowledge as justified true belief.21 As I have suggested, and
will show, what lies at the foundation of thought and action is certainty, not
knowledge. However, some Wittgensteinians do not take certainty to be founda-
tional, claiming instead – explicitly or implicitly – that, for Wittgenstein too, some
knowledge is foundational. For Michael Williams: ‘basic certainties are basic
knowledge, on an “infallibilist” conception of knowledge’ (2021a, 179);
‘Wittgenstein’s epistemology is “knowledge first”’ (2021b, 140); ‘groundless
knowledge’ (2021a, 194). Genia Schönbaumsfeld (2016, 116), rather than distin-
guish between ‘certainty’ and ‘knowledge’, proposes to ‘distinguish between
a “logical” and an “epistemic” sense of ‘to know’. Annalisa Coliva (2013, 2–3)
finds three possible uses of ‘I know’ and ‘knowledge’ in On Certainty: an
empirical, a grammatical and a nonsensical use; and suggests that Wittgenstein
has the grammatical use in mind when saying that certainties can be known.

19
That is, outside exceptional circumstances such as pathological or ﬁctional ones.
20
Wittgenstein further clariﬁes his use of ‘assumption’:

But it isn’t that the situation is like this: We just can’t investigate everything, and for
that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the
hinges must stay put. (OC §343)

Hinge certainties are assumptions in that they ‘go without saying’ (OC §568), not in that they are
believed to be true or probably true without proof.
21
Though see Glock (2016) and Schroeder (2024).

Wittgenstein, as we know, encouraged us to ‘show differences’. Instead, we

are here recommended to use a single concept in diverse, mutually exclusive,
ways. This may do – albeit at the risk of ambiguity and confusion – for ordinary
language, but it cannot do for philosophical elucidation. It is precisely this kind
of pot pourri of ‘knowledge’ that Wittgenstein is attempting to wean us, and
himself, from in On Certainty when he says he wants to reply to Moore: ‘“you
don’t know anything!” – and yet I would not say that to anyone who was
speaking without philosophical intention’ (OC §407). It seems very difﬁcult,
however, for epistemologists to give up on the supremacy and primacy of
knowledge: ‘One is often bewitched by a word. For example, by the word
“know”’ (OC §435).
Before going further, we should note that, inasmuch as ‘epistemic’ means
‘related to knowledge’ and ‘epistemological’ means ‘related to the branch in
philosophy we call “epistemology”’, to speak of ‘hinge epistemology’ is to say
that ‘hinges’ (or hinge certainties) have a role to play in epistemology; it does
not, however, imply that hinges are epistemic.

1.4 Hinge Certainty: Logical, Not Epistemic

Wittgenstein’s notes were entitled Über Gewissheit (On Certainty) because his
attempts to ﬁnd a better description for our most fundamental assurance – what
Moore takes to be ‘knowledge’ – repeatedly involve talk of ‘certainty’ and cognate
terms. In German, Wittgenstein uses not only Gewissheit, but also Sicherheit, and
other related expressions: Bestimmtheit (‘certainty’); Versicherung (‘assurance’);
Überzeugung (‘conviction’); (das) Sichersein (‘being sure’); unbedingt vertrauen
(‘trust without reservation’); Glaube (‘belief’); ‘es steht (für mich) fest’: ‘it stands
fast (for me).’ In the process, he also distinguishes objective from subjective
certainty:

With the word ‘certain’ we express complete conviction, the total absence of
doubt, and thereby we seek to convince other people. That is subjective
certainty.
But when is something objectively certain? When a mistake is not possible.
But what kind of possibility is that? Mustn’t mistake be logically excluded?
(OC §194)

Subjective certainty is not what Wittgenstein is after. For, although the

certainty he is striving to deﬁne is a certainty that stands fast for us individually
(‘I act with complete certainty. But this certainty is my own’ (OC §174)), it
cannot be merely personal (‘But it isn’t just that I believe in this way that I have
two hands, but that every reasonable person does’ (OC §252)). Complete
conviction, the total absence of doubt, sufﬁces for someone to be subjectively

certain (OC §194), but if the claim to certainty is to be more than a subjective
claim, the certainty needs to be objectively established:

It needs to be shewn that no mistake was possible. Giving the assurance ‘I

know’ doesn’t sufﬁce. For it is after all only an assurance that I can’t be
making a mistake, and it needs to be objectively established that I am not
making a mistake about that. (OC §15)

But if objectively establishing that we are not making a mistake about some-
thing is merely giving grounds for our conviction (‘“I have compelling
grounds for my certitude.” These grounds make the certitude objective’ (OC
§270)), then the claim to objective certainty is not really distinguishable from
the claim to knowledge. Moreover, an objective certainty that is based on
grounds – compelling or not – is susceptible of mistake: ‘For there can be
dispute whether something is certain; I mean, when something is objectively
certain’ (OC §273). The only objective certainty that would be categorially
distinct from knowing is one whose imperviousness to mistake and doubt
would not be grounded at all, but logical:

The difference between the concept of ‘knowing’ and the concept of ‘being
certain’ isn’t of any great importance at all, except where ‘I know’ is meant to
mean: I can’t be wrong. (OC §8)

But when is something objectively certain? When a mistake is not possible.

But what kind of possibility is that? Mustn’t mistake be logically excluded?
(OC §194)

Only an ‘objective certainty’ that is groundless and logically indubitable – that

is, a nonepistemic certainty – would allow Wittgenstein to say that: ‘“[k]now-
ledge” and “certainty” belong to different categories’ (OC §308). And so, in
order not to court ambiguity, I refer to that speciﬁc brand of ‘objective certainty’
as ‘hinge certainty’.
Note that the notion of certainty that emerges in On Certainty had made
budding appearances in earlier texts. Particularly – but not only22 – in ‘Cause
and Effect’, the Big Typescript and Philosophical Investigations:

The primitive form of the language game is certainty, not uncertainty. For
uncertainty could never lead to action. (CE 397)

The ﬁre will burn me if I stick my hand in it: that is certainty.

22
For more passages mentioning certainty and related notions in earlier Wittgenstein manuscripts,
see van Gennip(2008). As I argue in my Introduction to Moyal-Sharrock (2004), these passages
do not preclude the notion of a ‘third Wittgenstein’, predicated not only on OC but on all post-PI
‘works’.

That is to say: here you see what certainty means. (Not only what the word
‘certainty’ means, but also what certainty is all about.)
The belief that ﬁre will burn me is of the same nature as the fear that it will
burn me.
If I were dragged into a ﬁre I would resist and not go willingly; likewise
I would shout: ‘It’s going to burn me!’, not: ‘Maybe it will be quite pleasant!’
(BT 180)

‘The certainty that the ﬁre will burn me is based on induction.’ Does that
mean that I argue to myself: ‘Fire has always burned me, so it will happen
now too?’ Or is the previous experience the cause of my certainty, not its
ground? (PI §325)

In spite of the numerous references to ‘certainty’ throughout On Certainty,

Schönbaumsfeld (2017, 108) does not believe that we are here in the presence of
any kind of certainty: ‘“hinges” are best not conceived as certainties . . . at all.’
Evidently, Wittgenstein did not share this view. Not only does he call it that –
(e.g., ‘If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting
anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty’ (OC §115)) – his
use of ‘certainty’ is not, as Schönbaumsfeld contends, categorially alien to other
uses of ‘certainty’ or indeed to some uses of ‘belief’, ‘trust’ and ‘faith’. We
speak of ‘belief in’, ‘trust’ and ‘faith’ as doxastic attitudes and hinge certainty
resembles these in being, as we shall see, a non-propositional attitude; but he
also extends from these uses in that, in the case of hinge certainty, something not
‘standing fast’ for someone does not result in uncertainty or mistake but reﬂects
their being prey to pathology:

For months I have lived at address A, I have read the name of the street and
the number of the house countless times, have received countless letters here
and given countless people the address. If I am wrong about it, the mistake is
hardly less than if I were (wrongly) to believe I was writing Chinese and not
German. (OC §70)

If my friend were to imagine one day that he had been living for a long time
past in such and such a place, etc. etc., I should not call this a mistake, but
rather a mental disturbance, perhaps a transient one. (OC §71)

Granted, Wittgenstein struggles to ﬁnd the right words to describe our basic
assurance, but the ones he does contemplate and ends up using are epistemo-
logical concepts that are also susceptible of non-epistemic and non-propositional
use: concepts like certainty, belief and trust. Those three he does not reject. The
concept that is not thus susceptible – that is, knowledge – he rejects in the very
ﬁrst passage of On Certainty: ‘If you do know that here is one hand, we’ll grant
you all the rest’; and goes on rejecting it throughout.

1.5 No Grounds, No Doubt, No Scepticism

We saw that Wittgenstein’s view of knowledge is the standard view: knowledge
requires grounds – indeed, the right grounds (OC §91). But what is less standard
is his view that doubt, too, requires grounds:23

‘I know that I am a human being.’ In order to see how unclear the sense of this
proposition is, consider its negation. . . . what about such a proposition as ‘I
know I have a brain’? Can I doubt it? Grounds for doubt are lacking! (OC §4)

What we can ask is whether it makes sense to doubt it. (OC §2)

Just as ‘the concept of knowing is coupled with that of the language-game’ (OC
§560), so is the concept of doubt:

The idealist’s question would be something like: ‘What right have I not to
doubt the existence of my hands?’ (And to that the answer can’t be: I know
that they exist.) But someone who asks such a question is overlooking the fact
that a doubt about existence only works in a language-game. Hence, that we
should ﬁrst have to ask: what would such a doubt be like?, and don’t
understand this straight off. (OC §24)

That ‘a doubt about existence only works in a language-game’ means that doubt
cannot be gratuitous or idle; it requires reasons; or, as Olli Lagerspetz (2021, 39)
puts it, ‘some investigative context’. The absence of coherent grounds makes
one’s ‘doubt’ incoherent:

If someone said that he doubted the existence of his hands, kept looking at
them from all sides, tried to make sure it wasn’t ‘all done by mirrors’, etc., we
should not be sure whether we ought to call that doubting. We might describe
his way of behaving as like the behaviour of doubt, but his game would not be
ours. (OC §255)

Not all that has the appearance of doubt is doubt. In some cases, what looks like
doubt is only doubt behaviour. Of course, where doubt has no rational motiv-
ation or justiﬁcation, it may have (pathological) causes (OC §74), but normal
doubt must have reasons. It isn’t enough to say or imagine we doubt: genuine
doubt, like suspicion, must have grounds. (OC §322, §458)
Wittgenstein’s recognition that the sceptic’s radical doubt is only doubt
behaviour is spurred by his realisation that were her doubt not hinged on
some certainty, the sceptic could not even formulate it:

23
Here is Tiercelin (2010, 1, my translation):

We owe to both Peirce and Wittgenstein to have stressed, with uncommon emphasis,
that doubt, as much as belief, requires reasons. For both, scepticism’s mistake consists
in not asking why, how, and with what help we are able to doubt (OC §125).

If I wanted to doubt whether or not this was my hand, how could I avoid
doubting whether the word ‘hand’ has any meaning? So that is something
I seem to know after all. (OC §369)

But more correctly: The fact that I use the word ‘hand’ and all the other words
in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the
abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings – shews that
absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the
question ‘How do I know . . .’ drags out the language-game, or else does
away with it. (OC §370)

Interestingly, the germ of Wittgenstein’s recognition that the sceptic’s afﬁrm-

ation is nonsense – it is an afﬁrmation that cancels itself out – can be found in the
Tractatus:

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise

doubts where no questions can be asked.
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an
answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said. (TLP §6.51)

How can radical doubt make sense when the very possibility of formulating
a question rests on the indubitability of the meaning of the words used to
formulate it? If something cannot be doubted, radical doubt is out of the
question.
Its being essential to our making sense means that certainty underpins all our
questions and doubts (OC 341), including the sceptic’s alleged radical doubt,
thereby invalidating it:

A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt. (OC §450)

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything.
The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty. (OC §115)

Certainty is not optional or merely desirable: it is conceptually necessary for

doubt to even be formulated. This makes radical scepticism conceptually
impossible: ‘our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt
from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn’ (OC §341). Radical
doubt must be called out for what it is: the mere mouthing of doubt; doubt-
behaviour.
Radical scepticism is not sustainable; and this, not for pragmatic, but for
conceptual or logical reasons. Also, we might add, for existential reasons. If we
consider Pyrrhonism, which is allegedly a lived scepticism – that is, scepticism
as stance rather than as intellectual claim – we might ask: can it really be lived?
It might be argued, as does R. J. Hankinson, that suspension of judgement is
compatible with living:

Faced with endemic dispute, Sceptics reserve judgment; but this does not
render life impossible for them, since they will still react to the way things
appear to be, although without believing in any strong sense that things really
are as they seem. (Hankinson 1998)

Well, they may not believe in a strong sense, but they act in a strong sense. They
have to, in order to survive. Preﬁxing a judgement with ‘it seems to’ does not
mean I really suspend judgement if I act on that judgement anyway: ‘it seems to
be raining outside’, and I take an umbrella; ‘it seems to me I’m hungry’, and
I eat. This sounds very much like a case of the ‘mouthing’ of suspension of
belief. As Duncan Pritchard explains (in conversation): ‘Pyrrhonism exempts
a wide class of propositions from doubt, which is why it isn’t radical – this
is what enables it to be a lived stance.’ And so, radical scepticism is simply
untenable, in theory or in life.
The threat of radical scepticism has needlessly exercised epistemologists for
centuries. At ‘the foundation of all operating with thoughts (with language)’
(OC §401) is a certainty endorsed every time a doubt (towards it) is
formulated.24 This is a knock-down objection to radical scepticism. And yet
radical scepticism survives. Why? I think, for two reasons. The ﬁrst is that many
epistemologists are loathe to give up on the primacy and supremacy of know-
ledge and to accept the non-epistemic status of basic beliefs. Let us look at
a version of the sceptic’s paradoxical argument:

Premise 1: We are unable to know the denials of sceptical hypotheses.

Premise 2: If we are unable to know the denials of sceptical hypotheses, then we
are unable to know anything of substance about the world.
Conclusion: We are unable to know anything of substance about the world.

It is the prerogative of an unsound argument to have a valid paradoxical

conclusion. What Wittgenstein has done is show the sceptic that her argument
is unsound; that its premise – for example, that we are unable to know the
denials of radical sceptical hypotheses – is confused or nonsensical or idle. Let
us, once more, recall von Wright’s words: ‘If the foundation is what we have to
accept before we say of anything that it is known or true, then it cannot itself be
known or true.’ This is the logical condition that the sceptic is unwilling to
recognise when she requires that we know the denials of radical sceptical
hypotheses. And so, her sceptical argument – inasmuch as it requires us to
know something in order to be able to know anything else – is confused. Indeed,

24
This may be seen as a variation of Descartes’s acknowledgement that the very fact of being able
to conceive of, or formulate ‘I am’ (cogito) necessitates its ‘truth’ (ergo sum). Whether what is
being formulated is a doubt (as in the sceptical case) or an afﬁrmation makes no difference to the
very possibility of coherent formulation implying or necessitating some hinge certainty.

the strength of the hold knowledge has on epistemologists is such that even
those who agree with Wittgenstein about the groundlessness of our basic
certainties feel a kind of vertigo in experiencing that groundlessness.25
Another reason, I suggest, for the persistence of radical scepticism is that
conceivability (or imaginability) is deemed, by many philosophers, sufﬁcient
for possibility. So that sci-ﬁ scenarios, such as brain-in-a-vat (BIV) scenarios,
are viewed as rational possibilities that must be contended with and argued
against rather than dismissed as what Williams (2017) rightly calls ‘fairy-tale
imaginings’.26 And dismissed they must be, for – as Angélique Thébert (2023)
reminds us in ‘Peut-on comprendre le sceptique?’ (‘Can the sceptic be under-
stood?’) – they do not include the forms of life necessary to meaning. Sceptical
scenarios have no grip because the described situation – so detached is it from
the ‘stream of life’ which soaks utterances with meaning – is what Jean Bazin
(2002, 132 & 134) calls an ‘experimental vacuum’ or a ‘non situation’. This is
why, though we may express belief in sceptical scenarios (that beckon us to
imagine a being outside the context of a world), we do not really believe
them; for, they do not take place in ‘anthropological space’ (‘l’espace
anthropologique’)27 (2023, 327–28). As Thébert writes:

Sceptical discourse is not empowered by any social practices. Outside its

bounds as thought experiment, it ceases to fascinate us and shows itself in its
true light; that is, as a slice of inert discourse (‘frozen, deactivated’), because
‘extracted and disjuncted’28 from the shared practices necessary for sense. We
are, with the sceptic, on the same ground as with Wittgenstein’s imagined
Martian (OC §430) – that is, on empty ground. . . . In the end, what leads us
astray is the fact that it is philosophers who give voice to such a sceptic. We take
the sceptic’s words to reﬂect a mastery of language, and beyond that, a mastery
of the social practices that are implied by the mastery of language, whereas, in
fact, the sceptic is presented to us in the utmost solitude and bareness. . . . In
fact, we understand the sceptic only as a character in a ﬁctive construction,
a thought experiment created and narrated by a philosopher. However, outside
this strictly delimited context which is ‘shared ludic pretense’, her words are . . .
incomprehensible. (2023, 328–31 passim; my translation).

Radical sceptical scenarios are therefore what Pritchard (2012, 126) calls
‘unmotivated error possibilit[ies]’. They are unmotivated – that is, as
Wittgenstein might put it, ‘idle’ or ‘otiose’ – in that they are not backed by,
and therefore pertinent to, our human form of life and are therefore humanly
meaningless.

25
See Pritchard (2015a, part 4, 2019b, 2020) for a discussion of epistemic vertigo.
26
See also Moyal-Sharrock (2003), Schönbaumsfeld (2017) and Thébert (2023).
27 28
Bazin (2002, 137). Bazin (2002, 141).

One of Wittgenstein’s ‘right point[s] of attack’ (OC 36) against the sceptic is
her belief that the indubitability of our basic certainties is epistemic; that it is
a knowing. Another (related) point which the sceptic needs to accept is that doubt
can only work in a language-game, which is to say that doubt or error must be
motivated. As we have seen, they are not. And so, the scenarios concocted by the
sceptic are logically idle; not serious, pertinent, possible, threats.
Genia Schönbaumsfeld (2016) defends the thesis that radical scepticism is an
illusion by aiming to dispel the engrained notion that radical scepticism poses a real
problem for epistemology, and therefore that it needs solving. Her position is that
radical scepticism is ‘an apparent claim (or set of claims) that one cannot “refute” –
that is, show to be false – as it never adds up to a genuine, substantial position in the
ﬁrst place’, and so there is ‘in the end, no “global” sceptical scenario that requires
a solution’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2016, 1). As Claudine Tiercelin has it:

. . .it is less a question of ‘refuting’ the sceptic than of diagnosing the roots of
her illusion and the roots of our attraction to the illusion. The whole point is to
ﬁnd out what the status of these beliefs, and our relationship to them, is.
(Tiercelin 2010, 13; my translation)

Indeed, showing the sceptic the roots of her illusion is tantamount to debunking
scepticism.
I would say that the two single most important insights responsible for
Wittgenstein’s understanding of the nature of our basic beliefs is that not every-
thing that has the appearance of doubt is doubt; and that not everything that has
the appearance of an empirical proposition is one: in some cases, what look like
empirical or experiential propositions are logical bounds of sense, and so cannot
be doubted or refuted. Having discussed the ﬁrst insight, let us look more closely
at the latter.

1.6 The Non-Empirical and Non-Propositional Nature of Hinges

At some point, ‘justiﬁcation comes to an end’ (OC §192). There, where the spade
turns, is the rock solid ground of our indubitable certainties. Indubitable not
because they have been proved true beyond doubt, but because they are logically
impervious to doubt:

‘There are cases where doubt is unreasonable, but others where it seems
logically impossible.’ (OC §454)

‘I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment.’

But what sort of proposition is that? . . . It is certainly no empirical
proposition. It does not belong to psychology. It has rather the character of
a rule. (OC §494).

By ‘rule’, Wittgenstein means a norm of description; a grammatical or logical

rule. What Wittgenstein is realizing is that Moore-type propositions, though
they look like empirical propositions, are in fact expressions of our logical
bounds of sense:

When Moore says he knows such and such, he is really enumerating a lot of
empirical propositions which we afﬁrm without special testing; propositions,
that is, which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical
propositions. (OC §136)

And so, to express doubt towards them amounts to nonsense: ‘If Moore were
to pronounce the opposite of those propositions which he declares certain, we
should not just not share his opinion: we should regard him as demented’
(OC §155).
It takes Wittgenstein some time to reach the conclusion that what look like
empirical propositions are not empirical propositions. He begins by contem-
plating the idea that some empirical propositions have a logical status. Here is
Malcolm reporting Wittgenstein’s words:

Experiential propositions do not all have the same logical status. With
regard to some, of which we say that we know them to be true, we can
imagine circumstances on the basis of which we should say that the state-
ment had turned out to be false. But with others there are no circumstances
in which we should say ‘it turned out to be false.’ This is a logical remark
and has nothing to do with what I shall say ten minutes from now. Moore’s
propositions – ‘I know that I am a human being’, ‘I know that the earth has
existed for many years’, etc. – have this characteristic, that it is impossible
to think of circumstances in which we should allow that we have evidence
against them. . . . The sceptical philosophers . . . interpret Moore’s ‘I know it
with absolute certainty’ as an expression of extreme conviction. What is
needed is to show them that the highest degree of certainty is nothing
psychological but something logical: that there is a point at which there is
neither any ‘making more certain’ nor any ‘turning out to be false’. Some
experimental statements have this property. . . . Certain propositions belong
to my ‘frame of reference’. If I had to give them up, I shouldn’t be able to
judge anything. Take the example of the earth’s having existed for many
years before I was born. What evidence against it could there be?
A document? (Malcolm 2018, 662–63)

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein further contemplates the possibility of

a hybrid status: ‘Is it that rule and empirical proposition merge into one
another?’ (OC §309). But his answer is negative: it is not that rule and
empirical proposition merge into one another, but that what looks like an
empirical proposition is not always one:

That is, we are interested in the fact that about certain empirical propositions
no doubt can exist if making judgments is to be possible at all. Or again: I am
inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical
proposition is one. (OC §308)29

As Malcolm writes: ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein, in discussion, gave me the principal

idea of this paper – namely, that there is a resemblance in logic between some
a priori and some empirical statements’ (1952, 189). Wittgenstein’s answer to
the possibility of a hybrid proposition-rule is that we are here misled by form;
these seemingly empirical propositions about which no doubt can exist if
making judgements is to be possible are not propositions at all but expressions
of grammatical rules: they ‘form the foundation of all operating with thoughts
(with language)’ (OC §401).
However, some interpreters take Wittgenstein to mean that hinge certainties
are indeed a hybrid of empirical proposition and rule. For Tiercelin (2010, 7),
because the indubitable trust we have in ‘these indubitable propositions’ is not
derived from, nor grounded in, experience (OC §§130–31), but is rather due to
their role as rules and norms, they are ‘pseudo-empirical propositions.’
Similarly, Annalisa Coliva (2010, 80) views hinges as ‘Janus-faced’, as she
puts it; they are judgements (and therefore truth-conditional propositions) that
play a normative role (and are therefore non-propositional); they are, like rules,
exempt from doubt. Coliva’s view is not the one, explicitly voiced by
Wittgenstein, that the same sentence can at one time express a judgement and
at another a rule of testing (OC §98), but that a hinge is both at once: ‘Here is my

29
To the questioned suitability of taking OC §308 to be answering OC §309 (as §308 obviously
comes first), two replies can be made: a general and a specific one. The general one is that On
Certainty should not be read as a single, continuous or linear argument, but as consisting of the
repeated reformulations of a small number of questions, prompting the contemplation of various
answers and the (repeated) adoption of some. This method of philosophizing is such that
Wittgenstein does not allow previous answers to be retained or carried over to the next set of
questioning; rather the same problems are surveyed again and again, afresh, naively, from
different perspectives. This, incidentally, is not only true of the remarks that make up On
Certainty, but of most of Wittgenstein’s post-Tractarian work. In the Preface to Philosophical
Investigations, he writes: ‘The same or almost the same points were always being approached
afresh from different directions, and new sketches made’ (Preface, v). And so, the fact that
Wittgenstein has answered a question does not stop him from asking it – or rather a reformulation
of it – again. A specific reply to the objection is that the answer given by §308, as indeed the
question asked at §309, are to be found again later, at OC §319:

But wouldn’t one have to say then, that there is no sharp boundary between proposi-
tions of logic and empirical propositions? The lack of sharpness is that of the boundary
between rule and empirical proposition. (OC §319)

We now have two clear instances of Wittgenstein’s replying negatively to the question of
whether our basic certainties are instances of empirical propositions and rules merging into
one another. There are more.

hand’, ‘The earth has existed for a very long time’, ‘My name is AC’ . . . play
a normative role, while also being judgements’ (2010a, 142; my emphasis). In
2.5, Pritchard discusses Coliva’s view of ‘extended rationality’.
But rather than take a hinge certainty to be simultaneously (and therefore
paradoxically) a judgement and the rule that enables that judgement, I suggest
extending Wittgenstein’s notion that a sentence does not wear its meaning on its
sleeve to the notion that a sentence does not wear its status on its sleeve. Just as
the meaning of a sentence is dependent on use, so is the status of a sentence
dependent on use. The very same sentence can have different meanings and/or
statuses depending on its use or context. And so, rather than view hinges as
‘Janus-faced’, we should understand that identical sentences, or Doppelgänger,
can function in some contexts as a hinge and in other contexts as an empirical or
an epistemic proposition. A sentence cannot, however, function as both in
precisely the same context (e.g., at the same time for the same person): if
someone asked me to hold still in the adjacent room while they were switching
on the alarm, and I shouted back: ‘I am not moving’, that sentence would be
a formulation of my hinge certainty that I was not moving, while at the same
time function for the other person as an empirical proposition. But the sentence
cannot be both the expression of a hinge and of an empirical proposition at the
same time, for me. As Wittgenstein makes clear: ‘If you measure a table with
a yardstick, are you also measuring the yardstick? If you are measuring the yard-
stick, then you cannot be measuring the table at the same time’ (RFM III 74,
p. 199).
Hinges cannot, qua hinges, be both judgement and rule (or norm). Their
having the role of rules makes hinges non-propositional. Coliva (2010, 172–73),
however, takes hinges to be both non-propositional and propositional: ‘Hence,
the question is: how do the propositional and the non-propositional account of
certainty go together, if they do?’ I do not believe they do. Propositions are
truth-evaluable and hinges – being rules, or bounds of sense – are not.
Like Coliva, Schönbaumsfeld takes hinges to be both propositional and non-
propositional. Despite referring to them as ‘hinge propositions’, Schönbaumsfeld
(2016, 116) agrees that we have here to do with expressions of rules of grammar:
‘one might say that “hinge propositions” are an attempt to articulate the logical
enabling conditions that allow our epistemic practices to operate, and without which
even our words could not mean anything’. They are ‘logical enabling conditions
rather than ordinary empirical propositions’ (Schönbaumsfeld 2016, 128). But what
would be an extraordinary empirical proposition?
To defend their positions, Coliva and Schönbaumsfeld appeal to Wittgenstein
calling them ‘propositions’ (Sätze) in several passages of On Certainty. Indeed,
he does – and this is due to the fact that he is in the process of understanding the

nature of Moore-type ‘propositions’, and to the fact that the German word ‘Satz’
can be translated as both ‘sentence’ and ‘proposition’. It does not, however,
prevent Wittgenstein from clearly coming to realize that they are not proposi-
tions: ‘the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true i. e. it
is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of
the language-game’ (OC §204). The enactive status of hinges is further dis-
cussed in 1.7.
Because there are passages in On Certainty that back Schönbaumsfeld’s and
Coliva’s decisions to call hinges ‘propositions’, and other passages that back
rejecting it, the matter cannot be settled by a mere show of passages; it must be
bolstered by more substantive argument. The argument is as follows: we must
go beyond Wittgenstein’s deliberative and heuristic uses of some of the terms in
On Certainty (such as ‘proposition’, ‘know’ or ‘trust’) to see where he ends up –
that is, what he ultimately thinks about using such terms or concepts to describe
the kind of certainty in question here. Some passages formulate his ultimate
insights clearly enough; for example, OC §204 (earlier) as regards ‘propos-
ition’; or this, as regards ‘knowing’:

I should like to say: Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, but it
stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of
our method of doubt and enquiry. (OC §151)

Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking account of hinge certainty – the account which, in

recognising the non-epistemic and non-propositional nature of our basic certain-
ties, puts an end to the regress problem of basic beliefs and demonstrates the
incoherence of radical scepticism – is dependent on such passages and this makes
their importance a matter of fact, not a matter of interpretational preference.
Attributing the account to the interpreter would amount to crediting her with
the achievement. The endgame as to which features are retained and which are not
cannot hang on the interpreter’s predilection, but on the coherence and overall
merit of the interpretation. Coliva (2016, 81) is right to say that, when all is said
and done, Wittgenstein’s remarks ought to be ‘assessed on philosophical merit.’
Terminological red herrings should not, therefore, detract us from concluding
that doing away with the propositional nature of our basic certainties is the
key achievement of On Certainty. Arguing for the non-propositionality of hinges
is not a mere exegetical or terminological exercise. Not only is it vital to
Wittgenstein’s solution to the problem of inﬁnite regress, it also coheres with his
unrelenting effort, throughout his philosophizing, to get rid of the ‘propositional
assumption’30 that riddles epistemology, philosophy generally and the cognitive

30
An expression I owe to Harrison (2013).

sciences. That is, the misguided belief that propositions are indispensable to our
grasp of the world. Only by maintaining the non-propositionality of hinges can we
do full justice to Wittgenstein’s radical recognition that in the beginning is
‘something animal’ (OC §359; §475) – the deed, acting – and not inner beliefs
or thoughts, not basic propositions:

As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an
ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting. (OC §110)

Ask, not: ‘What goes on in us when we are certain that . . . ?’ – but:

How is ‘the certainty that this is the case’ manifested in human action?
(PI, p. 225)

1.7 Certainty as Enactive

Some philosophers contend that the groundlessness of hinge certainties is
grist to the sceptic’s mill. Williams (2021a, 184), for instance: ‘Why is
hinge epistemology an answer to skepticism rather than skepticism by
another name?’ Indeed, as Pritchard (2012b, 71) rhetorically points out:
‘from a skeptical point of view it is hard to see just what is so anti-skeptical
about the claim that the structure of rational evaluation has, at its core,
arational commitments. Isn’t that just what the radical skeptic claims?’
Pritchard elaborates on Williams’s view of hinge epistemology in 2.3.
It may be hard to see, but there is a difference between the sceptic’s and
Wittgenstein’s view of the absence of justification. The ungroundedness of
hinge certainties is not – as the sceptic would have it – due to an epistemic
failing; it is – as Wittgenstein shows – a logical necessity. And far from
precluding knowledge, ungrounded hinge certainties enable it.
What traditional epistemology has taken to be basic propositions are in
fact unreflective ways of acting, that can be heuristically formulated as
rules of thinking or bounds of sense. What the sceptic must accept is that,
as David Egan (2021, 582) nicely puts it: ‘our practices go deeper than our
reasons can reach.’ Enactivism, broadly understood,31 is the view that
mentality is – as Daniel Hutto (2014, 281) puts it: ‘rooted in engaged,
embodied activity as opposed to detached forms of thought’; a view that
favours ‘the primacy of ways of acting over ways of thinking when it
comes to understanding our basic psychological and epistemic situation’.
Norman Malcolm and G. H. von Wright were the first to engage substantively
with On Certainty, and both understood Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty as

31
As opposed to, more narrowly, the movement founded by Varela, Thompson & Rosch (1991).

what we would today call ‘enactivist’. Malcolm writes:

When Wittgenstein says that the primitive form of the language-game with
the word ‘cause’ is ‘certainty’, he does not mean that the child afﬁrms in his
mind the proposition that the other one certainly knocked him down, or that
the child has a perception or intuitive awareness of the causal connection
between his being crashed into and his falling down. No. . . . The ‘certainty’
he is talking about is a certainty in behavior, not a certainty in propositional
thought. (Malcolm 1995a, 70)

Having quoted OC §253: ‘At the foundation of well-founded belief lies

unfounded belief’ [sic]32, he writes:

In our present example, the ‘unfounded belief’ would be our belief, or we

would call it certainty, that people can and do suffer physical pain even
without visible bodily damage. This belief or certainty is displayed in our
actions and reactions. It is not the result of reasoning; it could be called
‘instinctive’. (Malcolm 1995b, 96)

This ‘certainty in behavior’ is instinctive or ‘animal’ (OC §475) in the

sense that, as Malcolm puts ‘it is not the result of reasoning’; keeping in
mind that this includes not only natural behaviour but also conditioned
behaviour.33
As for von Wright, he speaks of the background as a non-propositional
‘pre-knowledge’; in fact, a certainty in action:

Considering the way language is taught and learned, the fragments of

a world-picture underlying the uses of language are not originally and strictly
propositions at all. The pre-knowledge is not propositional knowledge. But if
this foundation is not propositional, what then is it? It is, one could say,
a praxis. (von Wright 1982, 178)

Avrum Stroll similarly acknowledged that, for Wittgenstein,

[B]elief at that level is not a matter of knowing various propositions to be true

or a kind of intellectual grasping. Instead, it is embedded in habitual action, in
such ordinary behavior as opening and closing doors. When I leave the house
my unhesitating movements exhibit the certitude that the front door is there.
The belief or certitude I have in that case is not a thought in any Fregean or
mentalistic sense. (Stroll 1994, 173)

Marie McGinn speaks of a practical mastery of a system of judgements:

32
The original translation reads: ‘At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not
founded.’
33
Malcolm (1982, 79) speaks of instinctive in the ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ senses of the word.

The idea of a foundation in certain knowledge is replaced by the idea of

a basis in practical mastery of a system of judgements which together deter-
mine our techniques for describing the world in language. . . . Our conviction
in [these judgements] is not properly conceived as epistemic certainty regard-
ing the truth of empirical propositions, for which the question of justiﬁcation
must inevitably arise, but as the immediate exercise of our practical mastery
of our techniques for describing the world, for which the question of justiﬁ-
cation makes no sense. (1989, 145–46)

In Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Wittgenstein notes: ‘Don’t

think of being certain as a mental state, a kind of feeling, or some such thing.
The important thing about certainty is the way one behaves’ (LW II, p. 21).
Certainty is enactive: it manifests itself in action; in what we say, think, do: ‘. . .
the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true . . . it is our
acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game’ (OC §204). My certainty
of having hands manifests itself in my using them to type these words or in my
saying ‘My hands are cold’. How is it then that Wittgenstein describes hinges as
rules (OC §95, §98, §494) – indeed, rules that belong to ‘the scaffolding of our
thoughts’ (OC §211); to ‘the substratum of all [our] enquiring and asserting’
(OC §162) – that is, grammatical rules? Can a hinge certainty be both a way of
acting and a grammatical rule?
One answer to this is Wittgenstein’s enactive notion of rules: ‘“following a rule” is
a practice’ (PI §202). A rule is an enabler; to follow a rule is not to make a judgement,
but to make a move: ‘A rule is best described as being like a garden path in which you
are trained to walk, and which is convenient. You are taught arithmetic by a process
of training, and this becomes one of the paths in which you walk’ (AWL 155). When
we learn rules, we do not learn a content but a technique, a skill, a mastery – how to
proceed. In the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein notes the
dispensability of propositions in arithmetic, stressing the similarity of calculating to
gestures, and of the teaching of arithmetic to a training:

Might we not do arithmetic without having the idea of uttering arithmetical

propositions, and without ever having been struck by the similarity between
a multiplication and a proposition?
Should we not shake our heads, though, when someone shewed us
a multiplication done wrong, as we do when someone tells us it is raining,
if it is not raining? – Yes; and here is a point of connection. But we also make
gestures to stop our dog, e.g., when he behaves as we do not wish.
We are used to saying ‘2 times 2 is 4’, and the verb ‘is’ makes this into
a proposition, and apparently establishes a close kinship with everything that we
call a ‘proposition’. Whereas it is a matter only of a very superﬁcial relationship.
(RFM Appendix III, 4)

Another answer to the dual aspect of hinges is that it reflects the dual perspective
from which Wittgenstein elucidates our basic certainty in On Certainty. One
perspective might be called epistemological. Here, Wittgenstein seeks to eluci-
date the status of hinge certainty in our epistemic structures, and this is where
we get the hinge metaphor; the bedrock; the background; the ground; the
substratum, which depict it as foundational; as something solid, hardened,
immovable, unmoving, anchored. Hinges are ‘the substratum of all my enquir-
ing and asserting’ (OC §162); they ‘form the foundation of all operating with
thoughts (with language)’ (OC §401). Our hinge certainties, then, do constitute
a foundation, but one that differs from the norm in epistemology in that it is not
constituted of things we know. The foundation is neither epistemic nor propos-
itional; it is logical or grammatical.
The second perspective is enactive: here, Wittgenstein is describing what it is
like to be basically certain – and the answer is that it is like an unreflective way
of acting or attitude, a know-how or reflex action (like taking hold of my towel
(OC §510)). My certainty that this is my friend DP standing in front of me
manifests itself in my speaking to him without a moment’s hesitation – that is,
without first questioning and ascertaining that it is really him; that he really is
a person or a human being; that human beings can speak; that human beings
exist and so on.
In fact, from this perspective, our hinge certainties are ineffable. Wittgenstein
makes clear that the utterance of a hinge outside a heuristic context makes no
sense. Uttering a hinge, qua hinge, in the flow of ordinary discourse is to speak
nonsense; it is to utter a rule where no reminder of the rule is needed. If I were to
say to my doctor as I point to my aching hand: ‘This is a hand’, she would look at
me perplexed. Why am I saying this? ‘The background is lacking for [this] to be
information’ (OC §461). The information the doctor requires in order to relieve
my pain is where my hand hurts: that this is a hand is the ineffable hinge upon
which her helping me out of my misery revolves. Our shared certainty that this
is a hand can only show itself in our normal transaction with my hand; it cannot
qua certainty be meaningfully said. Articulating a hinge in the language game
does not result in a display of certainty, but in a display of nonsense. It is
perceived as queer; incomprehensible; a joke; a sign of madness (OC §553;
§347; §463; §467). To utter a hinge certainty within the language-game invari-
ably arrests the game. Conversely, think of the fluidity of the game poised on its
invisible hinges: I let the doctor examine my hand while pointing to where it
hurts and she decides it is fractured and will need a cast.
Of course, Wittgenstein and Moore do verbalise some of our certainties, but
they do so in a heuristic context: their utterances are cases of ‘mention’ not
‘use’, and are not, therefore, subject to the nonsensicality to which they are

subject when uttered in non-heuristic discourse.34 Hinge certainties can be

uttered in the study without this arresting the philosophical language-game.
This is not because they become dubitable propositions when scrutinized in the
pondered atmosphere of philosophical reflection, but because in the study their
nature and status are being elucidated, and so they are mentioned, not used. On
this point, see Pritchard’s discussion of Williams’s inferential contextualism (2.3).
Schönbaumsfeld (2016, 123n21; 120) not only questions the intelligibility of
the view that certainty is both grammatical and a way of acting, she denies –
contra McGinn (1989, 160), Moyal-Sharrock (2005) and Coliva (2010) – that
certainty can be thought of as an attitude at all: ‘in ordinary circumstances,
I don’t have any particular doxastic attitude towards my hands – I just use them’
(2016, 122–23); in fact, ‘it is misleading to speak of an “attitude” here at all’
(2016, 123), doxastic or otherwise. I suggest that Schönbaumsfeld may have has
too cognitive an understanding of ‘attitude’ – an understanding which overlooks
the reflex-like nature of the diverse attitudinal metaphors used by Wittgenstein
to describe hinge certainty: ‘it is just like a direct taking hold of something, as
I take hold of my towel without having doubts’ (OC §510); ‘it stands fast for me
that’ (e.g. OC §116, §125, §144; §151); an attitude – albeit a non-propositional
one – of relying on (OC §509); of trust (OC §337); of ‘staying in the saddle
however much the facts bucked’ (OC §616). These attitudinal stances of
certainty reflect Wittgenstein’s efforts to draw a crucial difference between
traditional views of basic beliefs and his own enactive view:

I want to say: it’s not that on some points men know the truth with perfect
certainty. No: perfect certainty is only a matter of their attitude. (OC §404;
my emphasis)

Schönbaumsfeld’s objection that hinges cannot be seen as both expressing rules

of grammar and being a way of acting seems odd in that she herself takes them
to be ‘logical enabling conditions’ (2016, 128) that reveal themselves in what
we say and do (2016, 118). And inasmuch as she agrees that ‘we can, for
heuristic reasons, on occasion articulate the logical enabling conditions that
make our epistemic practices possible’ (2016, 122) – what is that if not
articulating the rules of grammar that enable our basic ways of speaking and
acting?
In opposition to our traditional conception of basic beliefs, Wittgenstein
wants to make clear that basic certainty is an unreﬂective way of acting – ‘It

34
Or when overheard by someone unaware of the heuristic nature of the circumstances:

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’. (OC §467)

is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game’ (OC §204) – not
a tacit belief. The hinge certainty verbalised as: ‘I have a body’ reﬂects the
disposition of a living creature which manifests itself in her acting in the
certainty of having a body:35 that is, she feeds, washes, scratches, dresses,
photographs herself; she complains of having aches and pains; and she says
things like ‘I’ve got goosebumps all over’ or ‘I need to go to the gym.’ Hinge
certainty has the unhesitating ﬂuidity of animal behaviour; it is not rational or
irrational but arational or animal:

I want to conceive it [‘this certainty’ (OC §358)] as something that lies beyond
being justiﬁed or unjustiﬁed; as it were, as something animal. (OC §359)

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one

grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any
logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology
from us. (OC §475)

And in order to do this – to regard man as an animal – Wittgenstein had to

confront and uproot an overly reverent view of reason:

Reason – I feel like saying – presents itself to us as the gauge par excellence
against which everything that we do, all our language games, measure and
judge themselves. – We may say: we are so exclusively preoccupied by
contemplating a yardstick that we can’t allow our gaze to rest on certain
phenomena or patterns. We are used, as it were, to ‘dismissing’ these as
irrational, as corresponding to a low state of intelligence, etc. The yardstick
rivets our attention and keeps distancing us from these phenomena, as it were
making us look beyond. (CE p. 389)

What On Certainty shows is that our distrust of the arational and our reliance on
reason are excessive. Reason does not go all the way down: at the substratum of
our thought is a logic that is animal – which means, it is nonreﬂective and,
therefore, non-propositional. Exit inﬁnite regress.

1.8 Hinge Certainties: A ‘Reality-Soaked’ Grammar

As we saw, the enactive and grammatical nature of hinges does away with the
propositionality of hinges. Hinges are not propositions: ‘the end is not an
ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting’ (OC §110).
Ways of acting36 which, when formulated, do not express empirical propositions

35
When asleep or unconscious, this certainty remains a disposition, but becomes occurrent in any
normal use she makes of her body – for example, in her eating, running, her not attempting to
walk through walls as if she were a disembodied ghost.
36
Though mathematical hinges, for example, might not seem like ‘ways of acting’, recall:

but rules of grammar. That is, in Wittgenstein’s sense, the reality-soaked37

conditions of sense that manifest themselves in what we say and do. By ‘reality-
soaked’ is meant embedded in or conditioned by reality – as opposed to grounded
in or justified by reality: ‘Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of
a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?’ (OC §617; my emphasis).
In his examination of the nature of our basic certainties, Wittgenstein does not
limit himself to Moore’s examples of things he indubitably ‘knows’: On
Certainty contains about 300 examples of basic or hinge certainties. I have
classified these into four kinds: ‘linguistic’, ‘personal’, ‘local’ and ‘universal’
hinges. These categories seem to me to best reflect and encompass the diverse
examples evoked in On Certainty.
Hinge certainties are all foundational, but some are universally, others only
locally so. All our certainties are unfounded, but some because they are instinct-
ive, others because their acquisition is effected through sedimentation (implicit
or explicit conditioning or repeated exposure). Whatever their origin, all hinges
function as rules of grammar: they condition meaning and action. Being rules,
they cannot be falsified but some can be abandoned, become obsolete, while
others cannot (their rejection would ‘drag everything with it and plunge it into
chaos’ (OC §613)).
The grammatical status of linguistic hinges (e.g., ‘2+2 = 4’, ‘What the colour
of human blood is called’, ‘The words composing this sentence are English’, ‘A
is a physical object’ (OC §455, §340, §158, §36)) is obvious. Not themselves an
object of analysis in On Certainty, they are mentioned as a benchmark against
which the less obviously grammatical nature of the other three types of hinges is
measured.38
Personal hinges (e.g., ‘For months I have lived at address A’, ‘I am now
sitting in a chair’, ‘I am in England’, ‘I have never been in Bulgaria’, ‘I have
never been on the moon’, ‘I have just had lunch’, ‘The person opposite me is my
old friend so and so’ (OC §70, §§552–53, §421, §269, §111, §659, §613)) have
to do with our individual lives.
Local hinges (e.g., ‘No one was ever on the moon’, ‘It isn’t possible to get to
the moon’, ‘The earth is round’, ‘Trains normally arrive in a railway station’
(OC §106, §106, §291, §339)) belong, or have belonged, to the world picture of
a community of people at a given time. Some local hinges (e.g., ‘It is possible to
get to the moon’) begin life as objects of knowledge or propositions (e.g., we

A rule is best described as being like a garden path in which you are trained to walk, and
which is convenient. You are taught arithmetic by a process of training, and this
becomes one of the paths in which you walk. (AWL 155)
37 38
An expression I borrow from Bernard Harrison. See, e.g., (OC §448 & §657).

knew it is possible to get to the moon when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the
moon on 20 July 1969). However, it is not qua empirical propositions that they
become hinge certainties, but by fusing into the foundations through repeated
exposure, hardening, fossilization (e.g., ‘This fact is fused into the foundations
of our language-game’ (OC §558)). Conversely, some hinges can be ousted
from bedrock (e.g., ‘No one was ever on the moon’), like rules that have become
obsolete.39 Not all hinges are susceptible of expulsion; it is impossible to
dislodge from one’s bedrock personal hinges such as ‘I have a daughter’, or
local hinges such as ‘Human beings have been to the moon’, or any of our
universal hinges.
Universal hinges are foundational for all normal human beings at any given
time (e.g., ‘I have forbears’, ‘If someone’s head is cut off, the person will be
dead and not live again’, ‘Trees do not gradually change into men and men into
trees’ (OC §234, §274, §513). Wittgenstein speaks of the bedrock of our
thoughts as consisting ‘partly of sand, which now in one place now in another
gets washed away, or deposited’, but also ‘partly of hard rock subject to no
alteration’ (OC §99; my emphasis). The hard rock that is subject to no alteration
stands for some of our personal certainties (e.g., ‘I have never been on the
moon’) as well as our universal certainties: those that ‘underlie all questions and
all thinking’ (OC §415; my emphasis). ‘Human beings express feelings’ is such
an example; so were we to meet a tribe of people brought up from early youth to
give no expression of feeling of any kind, we could not see these people as
human:

‘These men would have nothing human about them.’ Why? – We could not
possibly make ourselves understood to them. Not even as we can to a dog. We
could not ﬁnd our feet with them. (Z 390)

That human beings express feeling is part of the ‘substratum’ of human thought
(OC §161); it is one of those ‘universal certainties’ that logically or grammat-
ically underpin anything any normal human being can say or think about other
humans. Universal certainties are conditioned by very general facts of nature
which importantly include ‘the common behaviour of mankind . . . the system of
reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language’ (PI 206) – by

39
It may seem that because the hinge is ousted by my finding out something, it was susceptible of
falsification. But as hinges are rules or ways of acting (depending on whether we are describing
them from an epistemological or from an enactive perspective (see 1.7)), and therefore not
susceptible of truth and falsity, their ousting is not due to falsification but to finding out that the
rule is otiose. In the same way that when, for some empirical, practical or other reason, we decide
to cancel a rule in a game or in a code of conduct, this doesn’t make the rule susceptible of
falsification. For a more detailed discussion of the processes by which some of our hinges
become ‘fixed’ (and, conversely, ‘unhinged’), see Moyal-Sharrock (2005, 104–16, 137–47).

which is meant any human language. Very general facts of nature – such as that
we are creatures who inhabit and interact in a world peopled by other creatures;
and (excepting pathological cases) acquire and use language, have and express
feelings and emotions – logically condition the concepts or grammar of all
normal human beings; the intelligibility of any human language.
Whereas very general facts of nature are objects of certainty for all humans,
the facts that frame the various forms of human life are objects of certainty for
only some humans, depending on culture, society, education, interest and so on.
It will be a given for all human beings that people need to breathe air, eat, drink,
sleep; that most can walk, feel pain, and use language; that they normally live in
communities. But only for some will it be a given that there is a God, or that
sacriﬁces should be performed, or that the future can be read in the entrails of
a chicken.40
The last three sets of hinges may seem unlikely candidates for the role of
grammatical rules, but it is precisely to Wittgenstein’s credit that he uncovered
the logical role played by what appear to be empirical and epistemic proposi-
tions. The status of a sentence is not determined by its appearance but by its use.
For Wittgenstein: ‘What belongs to grammar are all the conditions (the method)
necessary . . . for the understanding (of the sense)’ (PG, p. 88): our hinge
certainties are all part of this ‘method’ (OC §151).

1.9 Psychological Certainty

Of the many examples Wittgenstein gives of hinge certainties in On Certainty,
there is a subgroup of personal hinges that, though present in On Certainty,
is mostly addressed in his writings and lectures on philosophical psychology,
the last of which – Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II – is
contemporaneous with the notes that make up On Certainty. These are psycho-
logical certainties.41
As is well known, Wittgenstein pointed out an asymmetry between ﬁrst- and
third-person psychological statements: ‘The salient thing [about the psycho-
logical verb] is the asymmetry; “I think”, unlike “he thinks”, has no veriﬁcation’
(LPP 49); ‘The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt
whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself’ (PI 246). The latter, unlike
the former, are dependent on observation, and are thereby constitutionally open

40
On universal and local moral hinge certainty, see Pleasants (2008) and O’Hara (2018).
41
The mentions in On Certainty, of what can be called psychological certainties, are to our basic
reliance on / certainty about our memory (cf. OC §§66, 201, 337, 345, 346, 416, 419, 497, 506,
632); to one’s certainty of being in pain as the benchmark for basic, noncognitive certainty (cf.
OC §§41, 178, 504); and to one’s claim that someone else is in pain as cognitive (OC §555) or
perhaps not (OC §563).

to uncertainty: ‘[The] characteristic [of psychological verbs] is this, that their

third person but not their ﬁrst person is stated on grounds of observation’ (RPP I,
836; cf. also RPP II, 63). However, following relentless questioning and
wavering; for example:

The uncertainty of the ascription ‘He’s got a pain’ might be called

a constitutional certainty. (RPP I, 141; see also RPP II, 657)

The uncertainty whether someone else . . . is an (essential) trait of all these

language-games. But this does not mean that everyone is hopelessly in doubt
about what other people feel. (LW I, 877)

Subjective and objective certainty.

Why do I want to say ‘2x2=4’ is objectively certain, and ‘This man is in
pain’ only subjectively? (LW II, p. 23)

Need I be less certain that someone is suffering pain than that 12 x 12 = 144?
(LW II, p. 92)

– Wittgenstein qualiﬁes this asymmetry by challenging the constitutional

uncertainty of third-person psychological sentences. He concedes that some
third-person psychological certainties are not merely subjective; they are logic-
ally indubitable (that is of the same order as ‘I am in pain’ or ‘2 x 2 = 4’):

Just try – in a real case – to doubt someone else’s fear or pain. (PI 303)

If we see someone falling into the ﬂames and crying out, do we say to
ourselves: ‘there are of course two cases: . . . ’? Or if I see you here before
me do I distinguish? Do you? You can’t! That we do in certain cases, doesn’t
show that we do in all cases. (LPE 287; my emphasis)

‘I can only guess at someone else’s feelings’ – does that really make sense
when you see him badly wounded, for instance, and in dreadful pain? (LW I,
964)

If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think, all the
same, his feelings are hidden from me. (LW II, 22)

But of course it isn’t true that we are never certain about the mental processes
in someone else. In countless cases we are. (LW II, 94)

Psychological uncertainty about others turns out not to be pervasive. There are
cases where we cannot be mistaken because there is no logical room for
mistake, even in the case of third-person psychological certainties.42 This, of
course, bolsters Wittgenstein’s noncognitive approach to mentality. The insight

42
For a more elaborate discussion of psychological certainty, see Moyal-Sharrock (2007b).

that, in some cases, we are logically certain of what someone else is feeling
makes the necessity of ‘mindreading’, or the positing of a default ‘theory of
mind’, otiose.
The extraordinary thing about Wittgenstein’s philosophising is that it is never
behind the scenes. Because what we have of it is mostly in the form of notes or
lectures, we see the work in progress. Though in no linear progression, we see the
doubts, the confusion, the emerging clarity and the eureka moments. In the ﬁrst
section of this Element, we have followed him in his questioning of the primacy
of knowledge and his bequeathing this primacy to certainty – a certainty from
which he gradually peels off the epistemic veneer to ﬁnd the spontaneity of the
animal and the rigour of the rule. With this, he leaves epistemology transformed.

2 Hinge Commitments in Contemporary Epistemology

2.1 Introductory Remarks
In Section 1, we were introduced by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock to some of the
main themes in On Certainty and the manner in which these themes intersect
with the rest of Wittgenstein’s work. Moyal-Sharrock then set out the case for
thinking of our hinge commitments (or hinge certainties, as she prefers to call
them) – this core notion that Wittgenstein introduces in On Certainty (albeit not
with this terminology exactly) – along non-propositional lines. The goal of
Section 2 is to offer an alternative perspective on these issues by considering
some of the main ways in which On Certainty has been read in contemporary
epistemology (excluding, of course, Moyal-Sharrock’s own inﬂuential reading,
which has already been covered). In doing so, we will get a sense of the
tremendous impact this work has had, particularly with regard to thinking
about the problem of radical scepticism.
Bringing hinge commitments into one’s epistemology leads to a profoundly
anti-foundationalist account of the structure of rational evaluation. Rather than
our knowledge being ultimately supported by beliefs that enjoy a paradigmatic
rational status (and hence function as something akin to ‘unmoved movers’ in
the structure of rational evaluation), such as by being self-evident or incorri-
gible, the regress of reasons instead terminates, quite properly, with our optimal
certainty in arational hinge commitments.43 As we will see, although the On
Certainty-inspired proposals in the contemporary literature that we will be
looking at are fairly diverse in nature, what they share is the idea that our
hinge commitments are contentful propositional commitments, albeit of
a distinctive epistemic kind. In particular, while our hinge commitments are
43
Here I diverge from Moyal-Sharrock’s comments in this regard in Section 1, where she takes On
Certainty to be offering a distinctive kind of foundationalism.

fundamentally rooted in action and also perform a rule-like role in our practices,
this is held to be compatible with them being propositional commitments, such
that there is a particular proposition that one is hinge committed to. This thus
sets these views apart from the position considered in Section 1.
One important caveat to make before proceeding is to alert the reader to the
fact that while all the figures we discuss treat hinge commitments as propos-
itional commitments, they don’t all agree on which propositional commitments
count as hinge commitments. With this in mind, there will be cases where what
counts as an example of a hinge commitment for one author does not count as an
example of an hinge commitment for another author. Moreover, some of these
proposals grant that there are putative hinge commitments ascribed to
Wittgenstein that are lacking in content, but this is not because they are siding
with a non-propositional reading. Rather their claim is that it was a mistake to
regard these particular propositions as hinge commitments in the first place.
I just described these contemporary proposals as ‘On Certainty-inspired’, and
that leads me to a second point of qualification. This is that several of the main
treatments of hinge commitments in the contemporary literature are not explicitly
offered as interpretations of On Certainty but rather as proposals that merely draw
inspiration from this work. This is, of course, in marked contrast to the kind of
project described by Moyal-Sharrock in Section 1, which is overtly exegetical.44

2.2 Strawson’s Naturalism

We will begin with the ﬁrst major philosopher to offer a sustained engagement
with On Certainty, Peter Strawson in his Skepticism and Naturalism: Some
Varieties.45 Like the other commentators we will be looking at, Strawson is
particularly interested in how On Certainty can provide the resources to deal
with the problem of radical scepticism.46 He argues for a naturalistic reading in
this regard, one that allies the later Wittgenstein with Hume.

44
Inevitably, in any survey of this kind some interesting proposals will not be covered. I want to
mention two in particular: McGinn (1989) and Schönbaumsfeld (2016). McGinn’s view is
significant both because she was one of the first to offer a sustained discussion of On
Certainty and because she takes the line that our hinge commitments amount to a distinctive
kind of non-inferential knowledge, a contention that she relates to similar proposals found in the
work of Sellars and McDowell. For a useful overview of McGinn’s position in this regard, see
McGinn (2010). While space prevents me from discussing Schönbaumsfeld’s proposal, I do
offer some brief remarks about its main features in endnotes 72 and 77 (and her position is also
discussed in Section 1). For two surveys of the contemporary epistemological literature on hinge
commitments, see Pritchard (2011a, 2017a).
45
See Strawson (1985, especially ch. 1). So far as I’m aware, the first book-length discussion of On
Certainty is Morawetz (1979).
46
This treatment of scepticism is a marked change from Strawson’s (1959, 1966) previously
transcendental response to scepticism, as he acknowledges.

The following passage is worth quoting (almost) in its entirety, as it usefully

summarizes the main contours of Strawson’s proposal:

[Hume and Wittgenstein] have in common the view that our ‘beliefs’ in the
existence of body and, to speak roughly, in the general reliability of induction
are not grounded beliefs and at the same time are not open to serious doubt.
They are . . . outside our critical and rational competence in the sense that they
define, or help to define, the area in which that competence is exercised. To
attempt to confront the professional skeptical doubt with arguments in sup-
port of these beliefs is to show a total misunderstanding of the role they
actually play in our belief-systems. The correct way with the professional
skeptic is not to attempt to rebut it with argument, but to point out that it is
idle, unreal, a pretense: and then the rebutting arguments will appear as
equally idle; the reasons produced in those arguments to justify induction
or belief in the existence of body are not, and do not become, our reasons for
these beliefs; there is no such thing as the reasons for which we hold these
beliefs. We simply cannot help accepting them as defining the areas within
which the questions come up of what beliefs we should rationally hold on
such-and-such a matter. (Strawson 1985, 21)

There is a lot to unpack here, but we can discern the main contours of Strawson’s
reasoning. To begin with, the hinge commitments that Strawson are concerned
with (although he doesn’t use this terminology) are primarily anti-sceptical
claims about the existence of an external world (‘existence of body’) and of the
general reliability of induction. In what follows, we will focus on the former,
given its prominence in contemporary epistemology. Strawson is interpreting
Wittgenstein as claiming that our hinge commitments, so construed, are the
product of our natures rather than reason. As such, they are groundless commit-
ments that we simply cannot help but have. Accordingly, it is held to follow that
doubt of them, while not senseless, is nonetheless idle, as it is simply impossible,
given our natures.47 Strawson concludes that radical scepticism, since it involves
treating such claims as open to doubt, rests on a misunderstanding. Indeed,
according to Strawson, traditional anti-scepticism, which attempts to rebut radical
scepticism, rests on the same misunderstanding. The correct respond to scepti-
cism is rather to ignore it.
It is certainly true that Wittgenstein emphasises the brute, arational nature of
our hinge commitments. Rather than being due to reason, as we might ante-
cedently imagine, they constitute instead a visceral kind of certainty, one that is

47
At least, he suggests that they cannot be subject to ‘serious’ doubt anyway, but it is clear from the
context that the relevant contrast in play here is not with a bona ﬁde type of doubt of a less serious
kind, but rather with a non-genuine kind of doubt that is a mere ‘pretense’ (as when a philosopher
presents themselves as doubting these claims, when in fact, according to Strawson, they could do
no such thing).

‘animal’, ‘primitive’ (e.g., OC §395, §475). Relatedly, Wittgenstein also

emphasises the primacy of action in this regard, a topic that was covered
extensively in Section 1. Indeed, he approvingly quotes Goethe in this respect:
‘In the beginning was the deed’ (OC §396). Wittgenstein would thus agree that
doubt of our hinge commitments would be either a pretense, and so not genuine
at all, or else genuine but then of a kind that we could make no sense of it. As he
notes at a number of places, if we came across someone who genuinely doubted
a hinge commitment, we would treat that person as mentally disturbed, and
hence try to make sense of their doubt in terms of causes rather than reasons (has
the person had a bump on the head?) (e.g., OC §§71–75).
While there are these surface agreements between Strawson’s proposal and
Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty, however, there are also fundamental
differences. The most signiﬁcant for our current purposes is that while
Wittgenstein makes these naturalistic claims about our hinge commitments,
they do not play any load-bearing role in his response to radical scepticism.
What carries the load is rather the diagnostic story that he offers about the
structure of rational evaluation (which we will come to presently). I would also
add a further fundamental difference (though this is more controversial), which
is that, as I read On Certainty at least, Wittgenstein doesn’t regard philosoph-
ical claims like ‘There is an external world’ as being hinge commitments at all,
but rather treats them simply as nonsense (as occurs when language ‘goes on
holiday’, to use his famous metaphor from the Philosophical Investigations).
(PI §38) For Wittgenstein, our hinge commitments are not theoretical in nature,
but rather fundamental nodes of commonsense (this is a point I will be
returning to).48
That Wittgenstein’s response to radical scepticism is not naturalistic is fortu-
nate, as such a line gains no purchase at all on the contemporary problem of
radical scepticism.49 The reason for this is that this problem is formulated as
a paradox rather than as a position.50 That is, the putative problem of radical

48
Strawson recognizes that Wittgenstein’s conception of our basic ‘natural’ commitments is
broader than Hume’s, in that it takes in these everyday commonsense claims (he writes that
Wittgenstein’s naturalism is as a consequence of a ‘social’ kind), but he also (mistakenly in my
view) reads Wittgenstein as in addition treating the Humean claims as hinge commitments as
well. It is quite common among contemporary epistemological work to treat a claim like ‘There
is an external world’ as a hinge commitment. See, for example, Wright (2004b) or Coliva (2015).
Like Williams (2004, 2018), however, I think this is a misreading of the ﬁrst notebook of On
Certainty (§§1–65), which I take to be making the case that such statements are simply nonsense.
See Pritchard (2015, part 2, 2022b).
49
I am here disagreeing with Moyal-Sharrock’s remarks in this regard in 1.5, as she clearly does
hold that this naturalistic point has a bearing on the radical sceptical paradox.
50
The contention that we should think of the contemporary problem of radical scepticism in this
fashion is usually credited to Stroud (1984). For further discussion of the contemporary debate
regarding radical scepticism, see Coliva & Pritchard (2022).

scepticism is meant to consist in a fundamental tension within our own natural

ways of thinking about knowledge, such that there is no way of resolving this
paradox that does not involve large-scale revisionism of our ordinary epistemic
concepts. So construed, radical scepticism does not incorporate any claim to the
effect that there is a radical sceptical conclusion that can coherently be
endorsed. Accordingly, the problem posed by this paradox survives the point
that radical scepticism is incoherent as a position.
It will be useful at this juncture to ﬂesh out what this paradox is supposed to
be. The putative tension is between the following three claims:

The Radical Sceptical Paradox

(1) We have lots of everyday knowledge.
(2) We cannot know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses.
(3) The closure principle.

The ﬁrst claim captures our ordinary anti-sceptical epistemic commitments. As

regards the second claim, the suggestion isn’t that in our ordinary epistemic
practices we routinely consider radical sceptical scenarios. Even so, however,
the thought is that we can grasp what such scenarios involve, not least from
ratcheting-up from more mundane error-possibilities of a kind that we do
routinely encounter in everyday life. (Indeed, that we do grasp such scenarios,
or at least seem to, is suggested by their prevalence in some non-philosophical
contexts, such as in literature or the movies.) Since radical sceptical scenarios
call one’s beliefs into question en masse, so it seems that there cannot be a non-
bootstrapping way of knowing that they are false.
On the face of it, of course, there is no obvious tension between the idea that
we know lots of mundane facts about cabbages and kings and yet fail to know
the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses. But this is where the closure
principle comes into play. In its most plausible form, this principle states that
where one undertakes competent deductions from one’s knowledge, and forms
a belief on this basis, then the resulting belief amounts to knowledge.51 So if
I know that Paris is the capital of France, and competently deduce from this
knowledge that Madrid is not the capital of France, then I know that Madrid is
not the capital of France. Such a principle seems to be highly intuitive and also,
relatedly, embedded within our ordinary epistemic practices. The closure prin-
ciple is usually benign, but generates quite startling results when we plug-in

51
Since this is a diachronic principle, then strictly speaking we should also add the requirement that
the knowledge of the antecedent proposition is retained throughout the competent deduction
(though for simplicity we will take this complication for granted in what follows). This version of
closure is essentially that put forward by Williamson (2000, 117) and Hawthorne (2005, 29).

radical sceptical scenarios.52 The problem is that most of our everyday beliefs,
such as that one has hands, are unhesitatingly regarded as amounting to know-
ledge. But if they are knowledge, then it seems that one can use the closure
principle to competently deduce the denial of radical sceptical hypotheses (if
one had hands, then one cannot be a handless brain-in-a-vat, for example).
We thus get the fundamental sceptical tension that was advertised. Moreover,
this tension appears to be arising within our ordinary ways of thinking about
knowledge, as each claim, at least when taken in isolation, seems to be some-
thing that we would naturally endorse. Insofar as these three claims really are in
tension as the radical sceptic maintains, however, then it follows that the only
way out of the paradox is to reject at least one of them, and that means
embracing the radical revisionism of our ordinary epistemic practices that this
implies. Radical scepticism qua position would involve the rejection of the ﬁrst
claim, but notice that radical scepticism qua paradox does not involve the
rejection of any of these claims. In particular, as with any genuine philosophical
paradox, the one proposing the puzzle merely needs to note the fundamental
tension that exists within our own natural ways of thinking within the relevant
domain and nothing more. Indeed, someone who was presenting the problem of
radical scepticism qua paradox would be wise to emphasise the absurdity of
denying the radical sceptical horn of the trilemma, just as denying either of the
other two horns would also be absurd.
With the foregoing in mind, it is entirely irrelevant to the contemporary
version of the problem of radical scepticism to note that one is unable to
coherently embrace the radical sceptical conclusion. Such a point fails to
engage with the problem of radical scepticism qua paradox; in fact, it is
something that the purveyor of the radical sceptical paradox can herself
endorse. What we require is instead a diagnosis of where the radical sceptical
paradox goes awry, where this means either an explanation of why one of the
revisionary options is palatable or, ideally, an explanation of why this ostensible
paradox is in fact illusory.53 Wittgenstein’s line in On Certainty, as we will see,
is very much along the latter lines, in keeping with his more general approach to
apparently deep philosophical problems.

52
It has been suggested that such a principle can undermine our (putative) everyday knowledge
even when local error-possibilities are in play. See, for example, Dretske (1970), bearing in mind
that he was discussing a precursor of our current formulation of the closure principle (though his
point, if it held, should equally apply to our formulation). As I argue in Pritchard (2010b, 2012a,
2022c), however, this is based on an impoverished conception of the rational basis for our
everyday beliefs.
53
See Pritchard (2015a, part 1) for further discussion of these two styles of anti-scepticism as,
respectively, overriding and undercutting responses. See also Williams (1991, ch. 1) and Cassam
(2007, ch. 1) for discussion of similar distinctions between kinds of anti-sceptical proposal.

It is an interesting question why Strawson failed to recognise this point

himself, given his otherwise acute philosophical sensibilities. One reason
might be that the framing of the radical sceptical problem as a paradox was
not particularly explicit in the literature at the time he was writing. A related
issue in this respect is the extent to which his eagerness to relate Wittgenstein’s
anti-sceptical line to Hume’s naturalistic response to scepticism blinded him to
the fact that these philosophers were effectively engaging with very different
sceptical problems. The radical sceptic that Hume is directing his naturalism
against was the Pyrrhonian sceptic, and of course this is an embodied scepti-
cism, scepticism as a position.54 It is thus entirely relevant for Hume to point out
that such scepticism cannot be coherently lived because of the necessity of
certain anti-sceptical commitments. But such a line is completely ineffective, as
we have seen, if we direct it against radical scepticism qua paradox.55

2.3 Williams’s Inferential Contextualism

In his widely inﬂuential book, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and
the Basis of Scepticism, Michael Williams (1991) offers an important account of
hinge commitments – or ‘methodological necessities’, as he calls them
(Williams 1991, 123) – and their relevance to radical scepticism. Williams is
explicit that he takes his proposal to be inspired by On Certainty rather than
being completely faithful to it. In any case, the resulting position is a form
of contextualism, albeit of a very different kind to the attributor contextualism
that is familiar from contemporary epistemology.56 Elsewhere I have called
Williams’s proposal inferential contextualism, on the grounds that it regards the
inferential structure in play in our rational practices as determined by context,
such that what counts as a good reason for what can change quite dramatically in
response to contextual factors.57

54
Note that although Wittgenstein’s target is radical scepticism as a paradox, there are undoubted
Pyrrhonian influences on his work (just as there also clear Pyrrhonian influences on Hume’s anti-
scepticism, even despite it being explicitly opposed to this form of scepticism – see also endnote
56). For further discussion of these influences, see Sluga (2004), and Pritchard (2019a, 2019b,
forthcomingb).
55
I discuss this point (including the exegetical issues surrounding Hume’s oddly Pyrrhonian
response to Pyrrhonian scepticism), and Strawson’s anti-scepticism more generally, in more
detail in Pritchard (forthcomingd). For further discussion of the contrasts between Humean and
Wittgensteinian anti-scepticism specifically, see Pritchard (2024d). For some useful critical
treatments of Strawson’s (1985) naturalistic response to radical scepticism, see Putnam (1998,
cf. Strawson 1998b), Sosa (1998, cf. Strawson 1998a), Stern (2003), and Callanan (2011).
56
For some of the key texts on attributer contextualism, see Lewis (1996), DeRose (1996), and
Cohen (1999).
57
See especially Pritchard (2002), which critically compares and contrasts inferential and attributer
versions of contextualism.

Before we get to Williams’s distinctive brand of contextualism, however, it

will be useful to map out some of the core features of his proposal that lead him
to develop this view. According to Williams, Wittgenstein is responding to the
particular challenge that is posed by radical scepticism qua paradox. Williams
argues, correctly in my opinion, that Wittgenstein is offering a diagnostic story
about the structure of rational evaluation that undercuts the putative paradox
posed by radical scepticism. In particular, what Wittgenstein is trying to get us
to see is the incoherence of universal rational evaluations – that is, rational
evaluations that bring all of our commitments under scrutiny at once.
As we saw in 2.2, it is possible to present the radical sceptical paradox such
that it seems to rest only on uncontentious features of our ordinary epistemic
practices. In particular, while it is true that radical sceptical doubts do not
normally arise in ordinary epistemic contexts, it seems that there is no in
principle barrier to us extending the scope of our rational evaluations without
limit in response to challenges, such that we could potentially rationally evalu-
ate our entire worldview. If this were correct, then that would suffice to put the
radical sceptical paradox on a firm footing, since it would show that there are
deep tensions in our natural ways of thinking about our epistemic concepts, of
a kind that entails contradictions. The radical sceptic isn’t introducing anything
new but is rather merely drawing out how our ordinary epistemic concepts, at
least when employed in thorough-going ways, generate paradox.
In contrast, Williams treats Wittgenstein as making vivid how the very idea of
universal rational evaluations is in fact completely alien to our ordinary epi-
stemic practices. This is because those practices presuppose one’s arational
certainty in one’s hinge commitments. In particular, the idea is that it is not an
incidental feature of our epistemic practices that they function in this way, but is
rather built into the very idea of what it means for there to be a rational practice.
As Wittgenstein emphasises at a number of junctures, the point he is making is
one of ‘logic’ (e.g., OC §342). If that’s right, then what the radical sceptic is
doing in introducing such radical doubt is not applying our ordinary epistemic
practices in a purified fashion, but in fact trading on a conception of an epistemic
practice that is entirely divorced from our everyday practices and which is
independently implausible. It follows that the putative radical sceptical paradox
is shown to be illusory, since it is motivated by dubious theoretical claims
masquerading as commonsense. Our ordinary epistemic practices are thus
entirely in order as they are (at least with regard to the threat of radical scepticism
at any rate).
This is a considerable advance on Strawson’s naturalism, as we now have
a concrete way of understanding how hinge commitments can be employed to
block the radical sceptical paradox. Unfortunately, other features of Williams’s

view are less compelling. Williams argues that once we embrace hinge com-
mitments, and thereby discard the idea of universal rational evaluations, we are
led to reject a particular metaphysical view about the objects of epistemological
study. Williams calls this faulty metaphysical thesis epistemological realism,
which is the claim that a proposition can have an inherent epistemic status in
virtue of its content alone. In particular, Williams is especially interested in the
idea, familiar to traditional foundationalism, that propositions concerning the
‘inner’ realm of one’s own mind (e.g., regarding one’s current mental states)
have a privileged epistemic status relative to propositions concerning the ‘outer’
realm of an empirical world (e.g., regarding one’s immediate environment).
This is what Williams refers to as epistemic priority.
The thought is that beliefs regarding this inner realm can enjoy a privileged
epistemic status simply in virtue of what they are about. In contrast, beliefs
about the empirical world cannot enjoy a privileged epistemic status, where this
again follows from their content. The upshot is that the inferential structure
concerning these two classes of claims must inevitably be such that beliefs
about the inner realm of the mind are epistemically more basic than beliefs
about the empirical world. Indeed, Williams argues that it is from this picture
that we get the foundationalist idea that beliefs about the inner realm have an
intrinsic epistemic authority that allows them to be known non-inferentially,
while beliefs about the world can only be known inferentially, drawing in the
process from the base class. So, for example, on traditional foundationalist
views rationally grounded empirical knowledge that there is chair in front of one
must be based on an inference from one’s beliefs about one’s mental states (e.g.,
regarding one’s experiences as of there being a chair before one).
Williams takes hinge epistemology to be opposed to epistemological realism,
and this is where his inferential contextualism comes in. Williams argues that
once we embrace hinge commitments, then what counts as a reason for what can
vary with context. Just as moving the hinges on a door can lead to the door
opening in a different direction, so any change in one’s hinge commitments can
alter what can count as a reason for what. Moreover, Williams is quite explicit
that changes in context can change one’s hinge commitments. In order to
determine the epistemic status of a given belief it is thus vital to ﬁrst determine
what contextual parameters are in play, since otherwise a crucial ingredient in
determining epistemic status is lacking:

. . . the epistemic status of a given proposition is liable to shift with situ-

ational, disciplinary and other contextually variable factors: . . . independ-
ently of such inﬂuences, a proposition has no epistemic status whatsoever.
(Williams 1991, 119)

In particular, Williams argues that we should reject epistemic priority and thereby
allow that in some contexts (as part of a psychological investigation, say) it can be
entirely appropriate to reason from claims about the ‘outer’ realm of the external
world to claims about the ‘inner’ realm of someone’s mental states.58
One feature of Williams’s view that is problematic is his conception of
hinge commitments. The purpose of the hinge metaphor for Wittgenstein is
that something must stand fast (the arational certainty) in order for something
else to function (rational evaluation). The point is that this hinge certainty
performs a framework role in our rational practices by enabling rational
evaluations to occur (which is also why the hinge must itself be arational, as
there is no way to rationally evaluate it on this picture). This is just one
metaphor that Wittgenstein uses in this regard, but it is the one that has
stuck with commentators. Other metaphors he uses to describe our arational
hinge certainty include ‘scaffolding’, ‘inherited background’ and the ‘river-
bed’ of our system of rational evaluation. (OC §211, §94, §§401–3; §§96–99)
Wittgenstein also talks of our hinge certainty as a ‘foundation’ of this system
too, but he is quite explicit that it is not a foundation in the way that traditional
foundationalism might imagine (i.e., in the epistemic ‘unmoved mover’
sense). He remarks that it is not that the foundation walls are carrying the
house but rather that the whole house (i.e., one’s worldpicture) is supporting
the foundations (OC §§246–48).
The relevance of these other metaphors is that they reinforce the idea that
what makes the hinge metaphor apt is merely that our hinge certainty is required
to be in place for our system of rational evaluation to occur – that is, that it plays
a framework role. Williams takes the hinge metaphor in a different direction,
however. For as he notes, one can move one’s hinges and when one does so the
door will turn in different ways. So construed, the hinge metaphor implies a kind
of optionality. That is to say, while it might always be essential that we have
hinge commitments, it can be to a certain extent up to us which hinge commit-
ments we elect to endorse. With this in mind, Williams imagines his hinge
commitments being such that they are determined by, for example, what kinds
of inquiries we choose to undertake, such that we can change our hinge
commitments at will simply by changing our inquiries. So, for instance, when
doing history it might be necessary to endorse hinge commitments regarding,

58
I argue in Pritchard (2015a, part 2, 2018d) that it is a mistake to think that Wittgenstein’s
argument against universal rational evaluations has a bearing on an issue like epistemic priority.
In particular, I argue that there are two logically distinct formulations of the radical sceptical
paradox, one that trades on the closure principle and a second formulation that turns on an entirely
different epistemic principle known as underdetermination. Issues about epistemic priority
concern this latter formulation of the radical sceptical paradox, while the Wittgensteinian line
only engages with the former formulation.

say, the general veracity of certain types of historical documentation that

wouldn’t be appropriate in other contexts:

For a subject like history, there is more to method than abstract procedural
rules. This is because the exclusion of certain questions (about the existence
of the Earth, the complete and total unreliability of documentary evidence,
etc.) amounts to the acceptance of substantial factual commitments. These
commitments, which must be accepted, if what we understand by historical
inquiry at all, have the status, relative to that form of inquiry, of methodo-
logical necessities. (Williams 1991, 123)

This is not how Wittgenstein was conceiving of our hinge commitments, how-
ever, so I think this is a case where a commentator has been misled by a metaphor.
On the contrary, Wittgenstein is emphatic about how we have no direct control
over our hinge commitments. This is one of the points that Strawson got right
earlier: the primitive, animal nature of this commitment.
More generally, I think the wider point that Williams misses is that while he
emphasises the heterogeneous nature of our hinge commitments, claiming that
there are multiple types playing very different roles in our epistemic practices,
for Wittgenstein our hinge commitments have a common source. For although
Wittgenstein does describe lots of different kinds of proposition that play this
hinge role, his primary contention is not about these hinge commitments to
speciﬁc propositions at all but rather concerns an overarching arational certainty
that we need to have in our worldview. This is what I have elsewhere termed the
über hinge commitment, which involves an arational commitment to the general
veracity of one’s worldview. As Wittgenstein puts it:

. . . 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)

It is this über hinge certainty that needs to be in place in order for a child to acquire
a worldview and thereby enter into the space of reasons at all. Here is Wittgenstein:

The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief. (OC §160)

To lack the über hinge commitment is to be unable to acquire the worldview

and thereby undertake rational evaluations. It is this overarching certainty that is
manifest in our actions and which is by its nature arational, given the framework
role that it places in our epistemic practices.
The über hinge commitment will also manifest itself in hinge commitments to
speciﬁc propositions where those propositions are so fundamental to one’s
worldview that a doubt here would call the über hinge commitment into question
and hence ‘drag everything with it and plunge it into chaos’ (OC §613). Our hinge

commitments to speciﬁc propositions – such as that (in normal circumstances)

one has hands (e.g., OC §1), what one’s name is (OC §425), and the language that
one is speaking (OC §158) – are thus manifestations of our über hinge
commitment.
Understanding this feature of our hinge commitments explains why our hinge
commitments aren’t such a disparate bunch after all, as they in fact all stand in
a specific relationship to the über hinge commitment. Moreover, it also explains
why our specific hinge commitments have the features that they do. It might
antecedently be puzzling that one’s certainty in one’s hands is essentially
arational, much less that it plays some sort of scaffolding or framework role
in one’s epistemic practices, but this becomes much less puzzling when we
understand how it is essentially a manifestation of the arational über hinge
commitment. But the key point for our current purposes is that so construed our
hinge commitments are not optional in the way that Williams imagines, such
that one can elect to change them at will (such as by simply changing one’s
direction of inquiry), much less are they theoretical claims (as might be applic-
able to the methodological necessities of a particular discipline).
This doesn’t mean that one’s hinge commitments to specific propositions
cannot change, as obviously they do, but it does impose restrictions on how this
might occur. For one thing, this will not happen as the direct result of rational
processes, as this certainty is not grounded on reasons. But that doesn’t entail
that the processes by which they change are non-rational. For example, take
one’s hinge commitment, in normal circumstances, to having hands. If one were
in suitably abnormal conditions, such as waking up in hospital after an explo-
sion, then it might make perfect sense to wonder whether one has hands and,
indeed, to take one’s sight of one’s hands as providing a rational basis for
believing this. What such a case illustrates is that which specific hinge com-
mitments manifest the über hinge commitment will change as circumstances
change and, with them, one’s wider non-hinge beliefs (which, since they are
grounded in reasons, will usually be responsive to reasons). This is part of the
point of Wittgenstein’s river-bed analogy noted earlier, in that what can be at
one time part of the river-bank (i.e., a manifestation of one’s über hinge
commitment) can be at another time part of the river (i.e., an ordinary
empirical belief).59 The kind of change that Wittgenstein is envisaging in

59
This is one of the reasons why I depart from most other contemporary commentators in
describing our hinge certainties as hinge commitments rather than as hinge propositions. This
is because the particular proposition that is functioning as the hinge is not what is important –
indeed, in different circumstances, as we’ve just seen, it might no longer function as a hinge – but
rather the distinctive kind of certainty that we have to this proposition, one that manifests our
overarching über hinge certainty.

our hinge commitments is not what Williams has in mind, however, as there is
nothing optional about this process at all. Moreover, our hinge commitments
are never theoretical claims as Williams allows but rather the fundamental
nodes of commonsense that lie at the heart of our worldview.
Williams’s brand of contextualism is thus not entailed by endorsing hinge
commitments and hence rejecting the coherence of universal rational evalu-
ations. This is fortunate, as Williams’s contextualism leads him to make some
important concessions to the radical sceptic. Consider this passage:

The sceptic takes himself to have discovered, under the conditions of philo-
sophical reﬂection, that knowledge of the world is impossible. But in fact, the
most he has discovered is that knowledge of the world is impossible under the
conditions of philosophical reﬂection. (Williams 1991, 130)

Just as attributor contextualism usually concedes that the radical sceptic asserts
truths relative to their speciﬁc context of ascription, so Williams ends up
granting that there is a coherent context of inquiry in which the radical sceptic,
employing the hinge commitment of epistemological realism, ends up demon-
strating the truth of radical scepticism (albeit only in a context-bound way).
Once one goes down the road of inferential contextualism, then a concession of
this kind becomes inevitable, since what would prevent the radical sceptic from
embracing their own distinctive set of hinge commitments that would licence
their unusual line of inquiry?
Rather than concede this point to the radical sceptic, however, I think it is far
preferable to stick with Williams’s original diagnostic treatment of radical
scepticism as attempting to do something that is fundamentally incoherent
(while passing this off as merely appealing to our commonsense conception
of our epistemic practices). If we take that point seriously, then there simply is
no radical sceptical context of inquiry, as the falsity of its imagined methodo-
logical necessities rules it out in advance. More generally, we should jettison the
idea of hinge commitments as being variable in the manner that Williams
proposes and instead take seriously their essentially visceral nature.60

2.4 Wright on Entitlement

One interesting feature of Williams’s proposal is that he departs from most
contemporary epistemologists in arguing that our hinge commitments amount
to knowledge, even despite their lack of rational support.61 His overarching

60
I offer a more detailed critique of Williams’s inferential contextualist proposal in Pritchard
(2018d).
61
See, for example, Williams (2018, 384 & ff.). McGinn (1989) takes a similar line – see endnote
44.

thought seems to be that so long as one’s hinge commitments are true, then their
hinge status ought to sufﬁce to ensure that they are reasonable commitments to have
and hence they can amount to knowledge. Williams also argues that Wittgenstein
was committed to this claim, due to some of his remarks where he describes
everyday certainties as being known (e.g., that other human beings have blood).
(OC §341) I think this last point is based on a misreading of On Certainty, as I will
explain below – not every certainty that Wittgenstein discusses in this work is
a hinge certainty. But the idea that our hinge commitments might amount to
knowledge also features in the next proposal that we will look at, which is due to
Crispin Wright. Signiﬁcantly, however, Wright offers an intriguing account of how
our arational hinge commitments might enjoy this epistemic status.
Wright reads Wittgenstein in On Certainty as conceding to the radical sceptic
that we are subject to a deep cognitive limitation, whereby there are presupposi-
tions of our system of beliefs that cannot be themselves rationally grounded due to
their presuppositional nature on pain of circularity. Wright thus understands the
notion of a hinge commitments as a response to this cognitive limitation that the
radical sceptic exposes. If it really is the case that we are required to have these
presuppositional hinge commitments, then we can argue that such commitments
must be reasonable even if they are not supported by rational support.
We can see the main moving parts of the negative component of Wright’s
proposal at work in this passage:

I suggest that the principal message of On Certainty is that scepticism

embodies an insight which Moore missed: the insight that to be a rational
agent, reﬂectively pursuing any form of cognitive enquiry, means placing
trust in suppositions which – at least on the occasion – are not themselves the
fruits of such enquiry and are therefore not known. (Wright 2004a, 305)

As Wright puts it, radical scepticism incorporates an ‘insight’ about our cogni-
tive limitations, one that turns on the fact that we are unable to rationally ground
the ‘suppositions’ that are required for our enquiries. We are thus faced with
a situation whereby we are obliged to simply trust these presuppositions in our
inquiries, as they cannot be known.
The positive part of Wright’s proposal is the ingenious suggestion that there
might be a kind of epistemic support that can apply even to rationally ground-
less suppositions. This is the notion of entitlement:

Trusting without evidence can still be rational or not. Entitlements are

warrants to trust . . .. (Wright 2004b, 204)62

62
It is important to note that Wright’s notion of entitlement is not the same as that defended under
the same name by Burge (1993, 2003).

The basic idea behind Wright’s entitlement proposal is that where a commit-
ment is required in order for one to be a rational agent at all – and where there
are no speciﬁc reasons to doubt the proposition involved in this commitment
(which there obviously won’t be in the case of hinge commitments) – then one is
entitled to trust this commitment. In short, trusting is in these conditions
reasonable, even if it is not supported by reasons that indicate the truth of
what is being presupposed in the target commitment. It will be useful to quote
the following passage in full, as it offers a useful summary of Wright’s positive
proposal:

[The moral . . .] to be taken from On Certainty is that the concept of warranted

belief only gets substance within a framework in which it is recognised that
all rational thought and agency involves ineliminable elements of blind trust.
Since rational thought and agency are not an optional aspect of our lives, we
are entitled – save when there is speciﬁc evidence to the contrary – to make
the presuppositions that need to be made in living out our conception of the
kind of world we inhabit and the kinds of cognitive powers we possess.
To be entitled to accept a proposition in this way, of course, has no direct
connection with the likelihood of its truth. We are rationally entitled to
proceed on a basis of trust merely because (or when) there is no extant reason
to believe it is misplaced and because, unless we do so, we cannot proceed at
all. An epistemological standpoint which falls back on a conception of
entitlement of this kind for the last word against scepticism needs its own
version of (what is sometimes called) the Serenity Prayer: in ordinary
enquiry, we must hope to be granted the discipline to take responsibility for
what we can be responsible, the trust to accept what we must merely presup-
pose, and the wisdom to know the difference. (Wright 2004a, 305)

One point that should be emphasised about Wright’s notion of entitlement is that it
is not a purely pragmatic notion, even though it is also not fully epistemic (or, at
least, not epistemic in a straightforward way). Wright is not claiming that we
should embrace our hinge commitments because they are useful, even though
rationally groundless. Rather, his contention is that if we are rational subjects – of
a kind that undertake enquiries, form beliefs, engage in reasoning and so forth –
then we are obliged to embrace our hinge commitments, even though they are
rationally groundless. The thought is thus that our hinge commitments are the kind
of commitments that rational subjects will have, which is why although they are
rationally groundless they are nonetheless reasonable presuppositions to have, even
from a purely epistemic point of view.
In construing our hinge commitments in this strategic fashion, Wright is led
to think of hinge commitments along very speciﬁc lines. Hinge commitments
for him are the presuppositions that one is rationally obliged to have if one is to
undertake certain kinds of fundamental inquiries. The kinds of claims that he

conceives of as hinge commitments thus include statements like ‘There is an

external world’, ‘There are other minds’, ‘The world did not come into exist-
ence moments ago’, and ‘There are regularities present in nature’. These are
very different to the paradigmatic examples of hinge commitments that
Wittgenstein gives, which as we’ve noted are core commonsense nodes of
one’s worldpicture rather than general theoretical claims of this kind. (Indeed,
as I also noted earlier, Wittgenstein doesn’t regard a statement like ‘There is an
external world’ as a hinge commitment at all, since it is simply nonsense.)
By arguing that our hinge commitments can enjoy entitlements, Wright thus
ﬁnds a way to allow them to amount to knowledge even while lacking rational
support. That is, a true belief that enjoys the epistemic standing of an entitle-
ment can amount to knowledge in virtue of that alone. Wright’s concern to show
that our hinge commitments can be known stems from his desire to retain the
closure principle. Interestingly, however, the version of the closure principle
that Wright wants to preserve is not the diachronic formulation we offered
earlier. This was competent deduction closure, which we can express as follows:
Competent Deduction Closure
If one knows that p, and one undertakes a competent deduction from this know-
ledge, and forms a belief that q on this basis (while retaining one’s knowledge that
p throughout), then one knows that q.

The closure principle that Wright has in mind, in contrast, is instead a much
simpler synchronic formulation that demands only that knowledge is closed
under known entailments. Call this simple closure:

Simple Closure
If one knows that p, and knows that p entails q, then one also knows that q.

We noted earlier that the version of the radical sceptical paradox that primar-
ily concerns us trades on a closure-style principle, and we offered competent
deduction closure as the relevant formulation, given that it is the most compel-
ling way to understand this principle. By putting the two principles side-by-side,
we can easily see why this formulation is preferable. Imagine, for example,
someone who knows that p and knows that p entails q, but who forms a belief
that q on a basis that has nothing whatever to do with either instance of
knowledge. Perhaps, for example, they know that the murderer is the person
with access to the basement and that this entails that Jones is the murderer (since
only he had access to the basement), but their belief that Jones is the murderer is
solely the result of an irrational prejudice towards Jones (and so unconnected to
this other knowledge). We would thus have a counterexample to simple closure,
as the subject would lack knowledge of the entailed proposition even despite

their knowledge of the entailing proposition and the entailment. In contrast, this
sort of scenario is excluded by competent deduction closure, given that the
belief in the entailed proposition needs to be based on the competent deduction.
Accordingly, if we want to capture the radical sceptical paradox in its strongest
form, then we need to appeal to competent deduction closure rather than simple
closure.
Nonetheless, Wright’s main concern with showing that our hinge commit-
ments can amount to knowledge is to preserve simple closure. In particular, his
worry is that if we don’t have knowledge of our hinge commitments, then there
will be straightforward counterexamples to simple closure. Consider, for
example, one of Wright’s putative hinge commitments, that the world didn’t
come into existence moments ago. There are lots of propositions that we take
ourselves to know which entail this claim (and which we know entail this
claim), such as that one played soccer at the park yesterday. Accordingly, if
this hinge commitment were unknowable, then even simple closure could be
marshalled to bring one’s knowledge of this everyday proposition into question
(since if one knew it, then one ought to be in a position to know the hinge
commitment too). If hinge commitments can amount to knowledge via their
entitlement status, however, then this particular sceptical line of attack is
neutralised.
Of course, since simple closure has independent problems, and since as
we’ve noted it is in any case more plausible to conceive of the radical sceptic
as making use of competent deduction closure, then this point of Wright’s is
somewhat moot. Interestingly, the closure-style principle that Wright thinks
should be rejected is effectively competent deduction closure. Wright argues
that what we should conclude from our rational obligation to embrace hinge
commitments is that the rational support that our beliefs enjoy does not ‘trans-
mit’ across known entailments. In the case just offered, for example, although
knowledge transfers across the known entailment, the rational support that one
has for the everyday claim (that one played soccer at the park yesterday) doesn’t
transfer to being rational support for the entailed claim (that the universe didn’t
just come into existence moments ago) for the simple reason that the entailed
claim, qua hinge commitment, cannot enjoy rational support.
Although there are some technical differences between the kind of ‘transmis-
sion’ principle that Wright is envisaging here and competent deduction closure,
we can set them to one side for our purposes.63 The key point is that since
competent deduction closure demands that one’s belief in the entailed propos-
ition be based on the competent deduction from one’s prior knowledge, then it

63
For a useful discussion of these differences, see Wright (2022).

ought to follow from such a principle that the knowledge that results from this
deduction is rationally grounded. Accordingly, where the entailed proposition is
a hinge commitment that cannot be rationally grounded, then competent deduc-
tion closure is in trouble. Wright’s strategy is thus to meet this issue head-on by
rejecting this version of the closure principle by appealing to the essential
groundlessness of our hinge commitments. Given the plausibility of competent
deduction closure, this commit’s Wright’s approach to a signiﬁcant degree of
revisionism.
One puzzling aspect of Wright’s position is why one would go to the trouble
of retaining simple closure if one is willing to reject competent deduction
closure, particularly since (as we’ve noted), simple closure has independent
problems. Normally when philosophers respond to the radical sceptical paradox
by denying the closure principle, it is because they believe that the relevant
entailed anti-sceptical propositions are not known.64 In contrast, Wright wants
to maintain that they are known, albeit not in a fashion that would enable them
to satisfy competent deduction closure.
Even setting this point aside, there is a question mark over whether Wright
can establish that our hinge commitments are known in the manner that he sets
out. One issue here is that it is hard to understand what it would be for a belief to
genuinely count as knowledge if one has no rational basis for the truth of what is
believed. This is why it is more natural to treat Wittgenstein as maintaining that
they are not known at all. (Indeed, that they are not just unknown but also, qua
hinge commitments, not the kind of thing that is in the market for knowledge in
the ﬁrst place. We will return to this point below.)
A related issue in this regard is that knowledge entails belief and yet it is not
clear that the propositional attitude that we have towards our hinge commit-
ments on Wright’s view could be one of belief. This is because belief, at least in
the sense relevant to knowledge (we will come back to this point), seems to be
a propositional attitude that bears certain basic conceptual connections to
reasons and truth. In particular, if one recognises that one has no rational
basis for regarding p as true, then whatever one’s propositional attitude towards
p, it cannot be one of belief in this sense. Wright (e.g., 2004b, §2) is fully aware
of this issue, as he argues that our hinge commitments are a kind of trusting
rather than a form of believing. In order to continue to maintain the thought that
hinge commitments are known, such that simple closure is respected, it is thus

64
This was, famously, the sort of line spearheaded by Dretske (e.g., 1970) and Nozick (1981,
part 3), though note that at this point in the debate about radical scepticism it was thought that the
sceptical puzzle turned on simple closure rather than competent deduction closure (indeed, in
Dretske’s case, the idea was that it turns merely on the claim that knowledge is closed under
entailments, regardless of whether the entailments are known).

necessary for Wright to weaken the connection between knowledge and belief.
What’s required by knowledge, it seems, is just an outright commitment to the
truth of the target proposition, and not necessarily a belief in this proposition.
I think the bigger problem facing Wright’s proposal is how it makes import-
ant concessions to the radical sceptic, of a kind that I would argue are contrary to
what Wittgenstein was envisaging in On Certainty. Relatedly, I think Wright
completely mischaracterises the propositional attitude involved in our hinge
commitments, in that they are not assumptions or presuppositions that one is
obliged to trust.
That Wright’s proposal makes important concessions to radical sceptic is
already apparent in the ‘Serenity Prayer’ quotation offered earlier. Consider
also this passage:

[The Wittgensteinian line . . .] concedes that the best sceptical arguments have
something to teach us – that the limits of justiﬁcation they bring out are
genuine and essential – but then replies that, just for that reason, cognitive
achievement must be reckoned to take place within such limits. The attempt to
surpass them would result not in an increase in rigour or solidity but merely in
cognitive paralysis. (Wright 2004b, 191)

Notice that by saying that radical sceptical arguments teach us something, it

follows that they can’t simply rest on a mistake, as in that case we could reject
them wholesale. Indeed, Wright is elsewhere quite explicit that aiming to
respond to the sceptical argument by showing that it rests on a mistake is a
hopeless endeavour:

But there is no disguising the fact that the exercise comes as one of damage
limitation. That will disappoint those who hanker after a demonstration that
there was all along, actually, no real damage to limit – that the sceptical
arguments involve mistakes. Good luck to all philosophers who quest for
such a demonstration. (Wright 2004b, 206–7)

What is surprising about this line is that it does seem very clear that Wittgenstein
is offering the notion of a hinge commitment precisely as a way of showing that
radical scepticism rests on a mistake. As we noted earlier, the mistake is to
suppose that the very idea of universal rational evaluations is not only coherent
but also grounded in our ordinary epistemic practices. In contrast, Wittgenstein
is trying to get us to see that there is nothing in our ordinary epistemic practices
that could license such a conception of the structure of rational evaluation. This
conception of the structure of rational evaluation turns out to be not only
fundamentally incoherent but also such that it is entirely alien to our ordinary
epistemic practices (i.e., it is not merely a ‘puriﬁed’ version of them). This is the
sense in which Wittgenstein is offering a powerful diagnosis of the putative

radical sceptical paradox, one that shows that it is not a genuine paradox at all. If
this is correct, however, then Wright is mistaken in thinking that Wittgenstein is
exposing some deep sceptical truth by advancing his notion of hinge commit-
ments, and Wright has accordingly blunted the anti-sceptical import of this
notion by construing it along these lines.
I think this point is also evident in how Wright conceives of the propositional
attitude involved in our hinge commitments as a trusting, with the hinges
themselves functioning as assumptions or presuppositions. This is not how
Wittgenstein describes them. Indeed, he explicitly contrasts our hinge commit-
ments with assumptions (e.g., OC §343). There is a good reason for this, as
Wittgenstein regards our hinge commitments as brute certainties, as we have
noted earlier. Conviction of this kind is very different to trust, however, and it is
certainly not the kind of propositional attitude we have to our groundless
presuppositions. For example, trusting that p is compatible with agnosticism
about the truth of p. Indeed, in a case where one is actively trusting a groundless
presupposition, the appropriate rational stance to take towards the truth of p is
precisely one of agnosticism (if not plain doubt). But Wittgenstein clearly
regards our brute certainty that p as precluding any degree of hesitancy of this
kind. As our actions reveal, we are fully, viscerally, committed to the truth of our
hinges. Wright’s conception of our hinge commitments is thus very different to
that put forward by Wittgenstein.65

2.5 Coliva on Extended Rationality

In a series of important works, Annalisa Coliva (e.g., 2010a, 2015, 2022) has
advanced a distinctive account of our hinge commitments, one that shares some
core features with Wright’s proposal but which also departs from it in important
ways. Like Wright, Coliva’s main conception of hinge commitments is as
presuppositions that are essential for our cognitive lives. Unlike Wright, how-
ever, Coliva is explicit that she is offering a more restrictive account of hinge
commitments than that offered by Wittgenstein himself (and hence this is
a proposal that, like Williams’s earlier, is merely inspired by On Certainty
rather than being a straightforward interpretation of it).66 For example, on
Coliva’s view many of the paradigmatic instances of hinge commitments that
Wittgenstein discusses, such as that (in normal circumstances) one has hands,

65
I expand on this point about the difference between our hinge conviction and the propositional
attitude of trusting in Prichard (2023a), where I also offer a more detailed critique of Wright’s
position.
66
See, especially, Coliva’s contribution to Coliva, Moyal-Sharrock & Pritchard (forthcoming).

are not genuine hinge commitments.67 Her examples of hinge commitments are
instead the kind of necessary presuppositions of cognitive project that Wright
outlines, such as that there is an external world.
One key area where Coliva departs from Wright’s account is that she grants
that the hinge commitments, so construed, do not amount to knowledge.
Relatedly, she doesn’t just reject competent deduction closure but also rejects
simple closure too.68 Accordingly, Coliva has no need of Wright’s notion of
entitlement (which was proposed as a way of explaining how our hinge com-
mitments can amount to knowledge). Coliva’s proposal is instead that we
should adopt a different conception of epistemic rationality – what she refers
to as an extended rationality – that is concerned not only with rational support
but also with those presuppositions that are necessary for our cognitive projects.
Coliva calls such an account of hinge commitments constitutivist, in that the
idea is that hinge commitments are constitutive of epistemic rationality even
while being essentially groundless. In a Wittgensteinian spirit, they are proposi-
tions that function like epistemic norms which enable us to be epistemically
rational. As such, she claims that it would be a mistake to exclude them from
epistemic rationality on the grounds that they lack rational support. As she puts
it, to exclude them would be akin to excluding the rules of a game from being
part of the game on the grounds that they are not moves within the game.69 In
this way we are in a position to argue, in response to the radical sceptic, that our
hinge presuppositions are epistemically rational even though rationally ground-
less. Coliva’s idea is thus that the radical sceptic has been too quick to conclude
from the groundlessness of our hinge commitments that they are not epistemic-
ally rational.
Many of the issues raised for Wright’s proposal will transfer to Coliva’s.
Since Coliva, like Wright, rejects competent deduction closure, she is also
committed to a high level of revisionism. There is also the question of whether
she has captured the notion of a hinge commitment correctly, even granted her
restricted emphasis in this regard. We’ve already noted that it seems
Wittgenstein’s view was that a statement like ‘There is an external world’ is
in fact meaningless, in which case it cannot function as a contentful hinge
commitment. More generally, it is signiﬁcant that Wittgenstein’s focus when it
comes to hinge commitments is not on general presumptions of inquiry but

67
A distinction that is often made in the literature is between local, or de facto, hinge commitments
and universal, or de jure, hinge commitments, with many of Wittgenstein’s favoured examples of
hinge commitments (such as the hands example) falling on the former side of the distinction. See,
for example, Moyal-Sharrock (2005, chs. 5 & 7). In terms of this distinction, Coliva is arguing
that the only genuine hinges are de jure hinge commitments.
68 69
See especially Coliva (2014). See Coliva, Moyal-Sharrock & Pritchard (forthcoming).

rather on mundane everyday claims. Relatedly, the relevant propositional atti-

tude doesn’t seem to be a presuppositional one at all, but rather a brute, visceral
outright conviction. We will return to these points below.

2.6 Greco on Common Knowledge

John Greco (2016) has recently put forward an intriguing proposal regarding
how to understand the notion of a hinge commitment. He argues that we should
regard them as knowledge but of a particular kind, what he refers to as ‘common
knowledge’. This is a kind of background, tacit knowledge that is generally
accepted within one’s epistemic community. It also has a further, crucial, feature
on Greco’s account, which is that it is form of knowledge that one gets for ‘free’,
without having to do any cognitive work, which makes is completely unlike
other forms of knowledge. The analogy that Greco has in mind here is that of
common property. Here is Greco:

In addition to the categories of generated knowledge and transmitted know-

ledge, each governed by the norms appropriate to their distinctive function,
we should allow that there is a third such category – that of common
knowledge. Common knowledge would be analogous to common or public
property – roughly speaking, everyone gets to use it for free. On this extended
model, there is knowledge that you produce for yourself, knowledge that
someone gives you, and common knowledge that is available for everyone.
(Greco 2016, 320)

Greco argues that thinking of our hinge commitments in terms of common

knowledge can explain some of their most distinctive properties. For example, it
seems to make no sense to claim to know one’s hinge commitments in ordinary
contexts. If they are the kind of thing which everyone knows, then of course no
practical purpose is served by stating them. Or consider that one lacks a rational
basis for believing one’s hinge commitments. On Greco’s proposal this merely
reﬂects the fact that these are common knowledge and thus a kind of knowledge
that one has without grounds, simply by being part of the relevant epistemic
community. Similarly, that we aren’t explicitly taught our hinge commitments,
but rather ‘swallow them down’ in what we are explicitly taught (OC §143), can
be accounted for by how common knowledge is tacitly presupposed in a
practice rather than made explicit.
Greco further motivates his account by appealing to his wider epistemo-
logical views about what he calls the ‘information economy’.70 This is the set of
norms that ‘govern the acquisition and distribution of actionable information
(information that can be used in action and practical reasoning) within

70
See Greco (2020).

a community of information sharers’ (Greco 2016, 318). Greco claims that there
are two core activities involved in the information economy. On the one hand,
there will be activities concerned with the acquisition and gathering of know-
ledge – here the relevant epistemic norms will serve, as Greco puts it, a ‘gate-
keeping’ function to ensure that only information that is of epistemically good
quality enters the system. On the other hand, there will be activities associated
with the distribution of knowledge, such as via testimonial routes like educa-
tion, news sources and so on. As Greco points out, since the gate-keeping
function is served by the epistemic norms covering the acquisition and gather-
ing of knowledge, so the epistemic norms associated with the distribution of
knowledge can be relatively permissive, as their role is not to keep out sub-
standard information but rather to ensure the flow of bona fide knowledge
within the system. Greco’s idea is that common knowledge can fit into this
system of norms by being a kind of knowledge where there is no need for any
gate-keeping requirement and hence which is freely available to all:

The idea is that such knowledge can be freed up for common use without
further concern for quality control. It is so well known, and so widely known,
that we are happy to grant it to everyone. (Greco 2016, 321)

Hinge commitments are thus a kind of knowledge on Greco’s view, albeit

knowledge of a special kind that one acquires without needing to expend any
cognitive effort.
While this is an intriguing suggestion, it doesn’t really stand up to closer
scrutiny. For one thing, it is hard to see how Greco’s appeal to an information
economy is meant to be compatible with common knowledge that one can
acquire without meeting any epistemic standard. The very notion of an infor-
mation economy as Greco presents it is wedded to the idea that there can be
a variable gate-keeping role, but that entails that there is always some degree of
epistemic hurdle required for knowledge – knowledge is never ‘free’. But the
more important issue for our purposes is that this proposal is not a good way of
thinking about hinge commitments. In order to bring out why this is so, it will be
useful to ﬁrst discuss an important exegetical issue that bears on this discussion.
Greco makes a mistake in reading in On Certainty that I think afﬂicts many
readers of this work, which is to suppose that every certainty that Wittgenstein
discusses is a hinge commitment. We’ve already noted one pitfall with this
approach, which is that the Moorean certainty that there is an external world is
treated by Wittgenstein as simply nonsense, in which case it cannot be a hinge
commitment at all. But there is a further reason why Greco’s approach is
problematic in this respect. This is that a close reading of On Certainty reveals
that Wittgenstein is contrasting two kinds of everyday certainty, one that he

treats as knowledge (roughly, ‘common knowledge’, though it’s not quite as

Greco describes it) and another that he treats as a hinge certainty and which isn’t
regarded as knowledge. Admittedly, with On Certainty being composed of
notebooks that Wittgenstein never got the chance to edit, the distinction is not
always very clear, but if one reads the notebooks as a whole the contrast is
returned to again and again, and becomes increasingly explicit as one moves
through the notebooks (as if this is a distinction that Wittgenstein is developing
via his jottings).
I noted earlier that what is central to Wittgenstein’s conception of a hinge
commitment to a speciﬁc proposition is the relation that it bears to the über
hinge commitment, which is the overarching visceral certainty in one’s world-
view. This is why our hinge commitments are mundane commonsense nodes in
our worldview, such as that one has hands, since these are precisely the kinds of
claims which, if false, would call one’s worldview as a whole into question. As
Wittgenstein puts it, a doubt here would ‘drag everything with it and plunge it
into chaos’ (OC §613). The thought is thus that one’s visceral certainty in these
everyday commonsense claims is essentially a manifestation of one’s overarch-
ing über hinge certainty in one’s worldview. This is why these are essentially
groundless commitments, since they inherit this property from the über hinge
commitment.
Many of the everyday certainties that Wittgenstein discusses in On Certainty
are not manifestations of the über hinge commitment in this way, however.
Consider, for example, a statement like ‘water boils when heated’, which is an
example of an everyday certainty that Wittgenstein considers in a number of
passages in On Certainty (e.g., OC §338, §555, §558, §613). While Wittgenstein
notes that this is something that we all are certain of, he also treats it as an instance
of knowledge. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s thought seems to be that with statements
like this we have captured a kind of everyday knowledge that is so widely shared
that it effectively functions as part of the – usually tacit – common epistemic
background of our practices. One might thus call it ‘common knowledge’. Note,
however, that the suggestion is not that this is knowledge that one gets for free,
like the notion of common knowledge that Greco proposes. Instead, Wittgenstein
is highlighting a kind of everyday knowledge that we are certain of which is
evidentially grounded. As he puts it with regard to this example of water boiling
when heated, experience has shown us that it is true:

We say we know that water boils when it is put over a ﬁre. How do we know?
Experience has taught us. (OC §555)

The thought is thus not that this is a kind of common knowledge that we
acquire without clearing any epistemic hurdle, but rather that it is knowledge

that is easy to acquire because the grounds for this knowledge are so readily
available.
The everyday certainties that amount to common knowledge in this way are
very different from our hinge certainties. We’ve already noted that the former is
evidentially supported and known, while the latter is essentially arational. But
the more signiﬁcant divergence is that only the latter is a manifestation of the
overarching über hinge commitment. By the time we get to the fourth, and ﬁnal,
notebook that makes up On Certainty, Wittgenstein is increasingly explicit
about this contrast and its implications. Consider, for example, this passage,
where Wittgenstein compares the certainty of the common knowledge that
water will boil when heated, as opposed to the hinge commitment that the
dear friend in plain view in front of him is who he appears to be:

If I now say ‘I know that the water in the kettle in the gas-ﬂame will not
freeze but boil’, I seem to be as justiﬁed in this ‘I know’ as I am in any. ‘If
I know anything I know this’. – Or do I know with still greater certainty that
the person opposite me is my old friend so-and-so? . . . But still there is
a difference between cases. If the water over the gas freezes, of course
I shall be as astonished as can be, but I shall assume some factor I don’t
know of, and perhaps leave the matter to physicists to judge. But what could
make me doubt whether this person here is N.N., whom I have known for
years? Here a doubt would seem to drag everything with it and plunge it into
chaos. (OC §613)

Wittgenstein’s point is that not everything that we are completely conﬁdent of is

a hinge commitment. In the case of the common knowledge certainties, in
particular, doubt of them wouldn’t call into the question the über hinge commit-
ment (and thereby ‘drag everything into chaos’) but would merely be very
puzzling. This highlights that there is a very different kind of certainty in play. It
is, however, the distinctive kind of certainty that is associated with the über
hinge commitment that is the hinge commitment.
By uncritically listing a bunch of certainties that are discussed by Wittgenstein
in On Certainty as hinge commitments, Greco has overlooked this important
distinction. For some of the examples that he offers, it would be plausible to
conceive of them as common knowledge, but that is precisely because they are
not genuine hinge commitments. For other examples, where a genuine hinge
commitment is in play, the idea that these commitments amount to knowledge is
not a credible reading of On Certainty.
Understanding that Wittgenstein’s discussion in On Certainty is in part aimed
at distinguishing common knowledge certainties from hinge commitments is
also relevant to Williams’s treatment of this notion that we examined earlier. As
we noted, Williams thinks that our hinge commitments are known, even though

we lack any rational basis for them. In this regard they are very much akin to
common knowledge in Greco’s sense, in that they are knowledge that we get for
free. Williams is led to this interpretation because of the fact that Wittgenstein
describes a number of certainties in On Certainty as knowledge. But I think
a more plausible reading of On Certainty would regard these remarks as being
concerned not with our hinge certainties but rather with our common knowledge
certainties.71

2.7 Pritchard on Our Visceral Hinge Commitments

The foregoing discussion will likely have given the reader a good sense of
where I stand on this debate about hinge commitments. There are two elements
of my reading of On Certainty that should be highlighted. The first is that I want
to take seriously how Wittgenstein’s primary concern in this regard is to capture
the certainty that permeates our worldview, with our hinge commitments to
specific propositions flowing from this overarching über hinge certainty.
The second is to embrace what Wittgenstein says about the visceral, animal,
brute nature of our hinge commitments.
By placing the über hinge certainty at the heart of the proposal, we gain
a plausible story about why our hinge certainties should play a framework role
in our rational practices, whereby they enable such practices without thereby
subject to rational evaluations themselves. The idea that one cannot justify one’s
worldview as a whole, such that rational evaluations must necessarily be
undertaken from within that worldview, is independently plausible, since
where would one stand to undertake such a wholesale rational evaluation?
That acquiring a worldview at all, such that one can even be in the space of
reasons, requires this permeating certainty in the worldview is surely an innov-
ation on Wittgenstein’s part, but it is no less compelling for it. Once we see this
certainty as an essential backdrop to our rational evaluations, then we can also
understand how it will manifest itself in particular commonsense commitments
that lie at the very heart of that worldview. That is, our hinge certainties are not
theoretical claims, like the presuppositional generalities at issue in Wright and
Coliva’s proposals, much less are they philosophical theses (such as about an
external world), but are rather, for the most part anyway, utterly mundane,
everyday claims.
Moreover, such hinge certainty must, perforce, be animal, rather than
rational, in nature, something that is grounded in our actions rather than our
reasons. This is why our hinge commitments are very different to trustings, as
they are a propositional attitude that is by its nature incompatible with any kind

71
I discuss Greco’s proposal in more detail in Pritchard (2022b). See also Coliva (2023).

of intellectual distance from the target proposition (such as agnosticism about

the truth of that proposition). One shows one’s complete conviction in one’s
hinge commitments, and thus in one’s worldview, in one’s actions. Contra
Moyal-Sharrock’s reading, I think we can capture this sense of the primacy of
action without going so far as to regard our hinge certainty as non-propositional
in nature. Nonetheless, since I emphasise the visceral, action-based, nature of
our hinge commitments, of the proposals we have considered in this section
mine is probably the closest in spirit to Moyal-Sharrock’s reading.72
Taking these aspects of Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty seriously is
crucial to recognising their anti-sceptical appeal. Like Williams, I regard
Wittgenstein’s underlying insight to be that the radical sceptical paradox is
illusory. The point is not just, à la Strawson, that we simply cannot doubt certain
empirical claims, but rather that it is in the very nature of rational evaluations
that they presuppose a framework of arational certainty. It follows that the very
idea that there can be fully general rational evaluations is simply incoherent.
Moreover, Wittgenstein is trying to get us to see how sceptical doubts are not
just unnatural but positively alien to our normal epistemic practices, such that
their employment cannot be plausibly cast as mere reﬁnements of those
practices.
On my view of hinge commitments, they are essentially arational and hence
unknown. I would argue, however, that it would be misleading to simply
describe them as unknown, as if we take seriously Wittgenstein’s point about
the necessity of our groundless hinge commitments to our practices of rational
evaluation, then it follows that they are not even in the market for knowledge. It
is not as if, for example, we are ignorant of our hinge commitments, as would
apply to a proposition that we ought to know but fail to.73 This marks
a fundamental difference between my account and that offered by, for example,
someone like Wright, who treats Wittgenstein as highlighting how radical scepti-
cism reveals a fundamental cognitive limitation on our parts. I would rather claim
that it no more reveals a cognitive limitation on one’s part that one cannot know

72
A possible exception in this regard is Schönbaumsfeld’s (2016) provocative reading of On
Certainty. Space prevents me from undertaking a detailed discussion of this complex work,
but one key element of her view that is of note for our current purposes is that while she follows
the authors in this part in treating our hinge commitments as propositional in nature, she not only
rejects the idea that they are knowledge but also that they are even certainties. In essence, her
claim is that certainty and knowledge are categories that only have application where doubt is
possible, something that is excluded by the nature of our hinge commitments. For a useful recent
symposium on this work, see Moyal-Sharrock (2021), Ranalli (2021a) Schönbaumsfeld (2021a,
2021b) and Williams (2021b).
73
Note that this observation that one is not ignorant of one’s hinge commitments illustrates the
more general point that there is more to ignorance than simply a lack of knowledge. See Pritchard
(2021b, 2021c).

one’s hinge commitments than the fact that one cannot imagine a circle-square
reveals an imaginative limitation.
Nonetheless, one might wonder how, exactly, my line on hinge commitments
responds to the radical sceptical paradox. Since I claim that our hinge commit-
ments are unknown, then does that mean that I deny competent deduction
closure, like Wright and Coliva? As I noted earlier, I regard taking such
a route out of radical sceptical paradox to be highly revisionary, given the
centrality of this principle to our ordinary epistemic practices. Relatedly, if
one is truly showing that the radical sceptical paradox is illusory, then it ought to
be possible to dissolve the appearance of paradox without making any major
concessions, for otherwise that would be to concede that there is a genuine
tension in play here (and hence would imply that the paradox is real after all).
If one takes seriously what Wittgenstein says about the nature of the propos-
itional attitude involved in our hinge commitments, however, then there is no
need to deny competent deduction closure, even though our hinge commitments
are unknown. Recall that competent deduction closure is a diachronic principle
concerned with the formation of belief on the basis of a competent deduction
from one’s knowledge. Moreover, we also noted that it was crucial that closure
is formulated in this way if it is to serve its intended role in the formulation of
the radical sceptical paradox, as alternative formulations are open to independ-
ent problems. I noted earlier that on my view our hinge commitments to speciﬁc
propositions are usually utterly mundane everyday propositions, such as con-
cerning one’s hands or what one’s name is. There is, however, a class of non-
everyday propositions that are also hinge commitments on this view, and that
is the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses. After all, such hypotheses are
designed to call one’s beliefs into question en masse, and hence are a direct
challenge to one’s über hinge commitment. Accordingly, one’s groundless über
hinge certainty transfers to a groundless hinge certainty in the denials of these
hypotheses. The problem posed by competent deduction closure is that it seems
we ought to be able to come to know the denials of these hypotheses by
undertaking competent deductions from the myriad quotidian propositions
that we know. Conversely, if we deny that our hinge commitments are known,
then doesn’t that entail that competent deduction closure has to go?
In order for there to be this tension between our lack of knowledge of the
denials of radical sceptical hypotheses and competent deduction closure, how-
ever, it is important that one’s hinge commitments can be a belief that one can
acquire via a paradigmatically rational process like competent deduction. On
both counts, however, Wittgenstein shows us that our hinge commitments are
just not the sort of propositional attitude that could play this role. That one can’t
acquire one’s hinge commitments via rational processes ought to be clear from

how we have characterised them. But what about the idea that our hinge
commitments cannot be beliefs?
The folk notion of belief is highly permissive in that it encompasses a range
of propositional attitudes, including such diverse propositional attitudes as
those involved in religious faith, scientific acceptance, educated guesses and
so on.74 Indeed, it is sufficient to count as believing that p in the folk sense that
one sincerely endorses p. In the folk sense of belief, hinge commitments are
beliefs. But it is not the folk sense of belief that is at issue in competent
deduction closure, as this needs to be belief in the sense of that propositional
attitude that is a constituent part of knowledge, given that we are meant to come
to know what we come to believe via the target competent deduction. Elsewhere
I have called this propositional attitude K-apt belief.75 We noted earlier that
Wright was wary about thinking of our hinge commitments as beliefs, but
I think that this concern, properly understood, relates to thinking of them
specifically as K-apt beliefs, which is the relevant propositional attitude in our
discussion of radical scepticism. K-apt beliefs bear certain basic conceptual
connections to reasons and truth. In particular, we noted earlier that one feature
of K-apt belief is that one cannot K-apt believe that p while being aware that one
has no rational basis for the truth of p. Crucially, however, our hinge commit-
ments fail such a condition, as becoming aware of the groundlessness of our
hinge commitments doesn’t undermine our certainty in them at all, as we
continue to act with complete conviction just as before.76
The upshot is that while our hinge commitments might be beliefs in the folk
sense, they are not K-apt beliefs. If that’s right, then the putative radical
sceptical paradox never materialises as competent deduction closure is simply
inapplicable to our hinge commitments. In particular, the fact that one cannot
know one’s hinge commitments cannot pose a problem for competent deduction
closure given that it is impossible to acquire a K-apt belief in them via the target
deduction. This means that the radical sceptical paradox is shown to be illusory

74
It is thus a ‘suitcase’ term, to borrow Minsky’s (2007) terminology. Indeed, as a number of
commentators have noted, the folk notion of belief is often used to describe the propositional
attitudes involves in delusions too, even when the delusions are quite profound. See Pritchard
(2024a, 2024c) for discussion of this point. For a helpful survey of a range of different ways in
which the folk notion of belief is employed, see Stevenson (2002).
75
For further discussion of this notion, see Pritchard (2015b, part 2, 2018a, 2024c).
76
This is not to suggest that becoming aware of the groundlessness of our hinge commitments
doesn’t generate any kind of intellectual anxiety, only that it is not an anxiety that could manifests
itself in an actual doubt. Drawing on the work of Cavell (especially 1979), who unfortunately
never seriously engaged with On Certainty, I have argued that recognizing one’s hinge commit-
ments as hinge commitments can lead to a phenomenon that I call epistemic vertigo. See
Pritchard (2015a, part 4, 2019b, 2020). For the relevance of Cavell’s work on the later
Wittgenstein (albeit not with regard to On Certainty) in this regard, see Pritchard (2021a, 2024b).

in that the three elements that make up this paradox – our widespread know-
ledge, our inability to know the denials of radical sceptical hypotheses and
competent deduction closure – turn out to be compatible with one another.
Taking Wittgenstein’s remarks about the visceral nature of our hinge commit-
ments seriously is thus important to unpacking the diagnostic aspect of his anti-
scepticism and thereby showing that the putative radical sceptical paradox is in
fact illusory. Radical scepticism is shown to be the product of faulty philosoph-
ical theory rather than arising out of fundamental tensions within our own
ordinary epistemic practices.77

2.8 Concluding Remarks: New Directions

I have focussed on different conceptions of hinge commitments in contempor-
ary epistemology and their supposed relevance to the problem of radical
scepticism. I want to close by considering some of the ways in which the
contemporary epistemological debate about hinge commitments has begun to
spread to other topics. I will mention two in particular: epistemic relativism and
religious hinges.
There is an obvious route from discussions of hinge commitments to the topic of
epistemic relativism. If our hinge commitments provide the framework for our
rational evaluations, and if we can have variable hinge commitments, then the
concern naturally arises that there might different epistemic frameworks. On the
positive side, such a conclusion looks like it might allow us to use hinge commit-
ments to make sense of what are known as deep disagreements – that is, disagree-
ments that seem to be particularly intractable in that they concern diverging
fundamental commitments that each party holds with great enthusiasm. Could it
be that such deep disagreements are to be understood as clashes of hinge commit-
ments by subjects employing distinct epistemic frameworks (on account of the fact
that they have distinct hinge commitments)?

77
I develop my reading of On Certainty in a number of places, but see especially Pritchard (2015a,
passim). See also Pritchard (2012b, 2018b). One topic regarding On Certainty and contemporary
responses to radical scepticism that I didn’t have space to cover here is the question of whether
Wittgenstein is answering not only closure-based radical scepticism but also a different kind of
radical sceptical argument that turns on an epistemic principle known as the underdetermination
principle (roughly, that one’s rational support in paradigm cases is no better than it would be in
corresponding cases where one is the victim of a radical sceptical hypothesis). See Pritchard
(2015a, passim) for a detailed discussion of this distinction and an argument to the effect that
Wittgenstein’s hinge commitment line only applies to closure-based scepticism. Williams (1991)
effectively treats these two forms of radical scepticism as co-extensive, and applies his hinge
commitment line to both – see Pritchard (2018d) for a critical discussion. Interestingly,
Schönbaumsfeld (2016) argues that the underdetermination-based sceptical argument is funda-
mental in this regard and that Wittgenstein is primarily answering this challenge. See also
Schönbaumsfeld (2019).

On the negative side, there is the concern that taking hinge commitments
seriously and allowing for there to be significant divergences in our hinge
commitments can lead to not just distinct epistemic systems but epistemically
incommensurate epistemic systems. That is, if the divergence in hinge commit-
ments is significant enough, then perhaps there can be deep hinge disagreements
that are even in principle unresolvable by rational means due to the lack of
sufficient overlap in the competing epistemic systems. Accordingly, one issue
that is very important in this regard is understanding just how extensive diver-
gences of hinge commitments can be, something that obviously depends on how
one understands this notion.78
The second topic is related to the first. Following Wittgenstein’s lead, the
usual examples of hinge commitments, as we have seen, tend to be mostly
ordinary empirical commitments. It is natural to wonder, however, whether this
notion could be extended to a broader range of propositions that capture what
we might term our axiological commitments. Could there, for example, be
moral, political, or religious hinge commitments? The specific question of
religious hinge commitments has generated the most discussion in this respect
(though there is now a nascent literature on moral hinge commitments).79 One
can see the attraction, given that fundamental religious commitments seem to
have much in common with hinge commitments, such as their resistance to
evidence, their high levels of conviction, the way that they are absorbed as part
of being taught a worldview and so on. Allowing that there can be religious
hinge commitments (or, for that matter, axiological hinge commitments more
generally) relates to the topic of epistemic relativism in that it can potentially
exacerbate the worry we noted earlier about epistemic incommensurability.
This is because of the wide divergence found in fundamental religious commit-
ments and how this entails quite radical differences in one’s worldview.
I have described the epistemology of religious belief that turns on religious
hinge commitments as quasi-fideism.80 The view is fideistic to the extent that it
treats fundamental religious commitments as arational. It also departs from
traditional forms of fideism, however, in that it doesn’t treat religious belief as
being in general a matter of faith nor does it treat the epistemology of religious

78
For some of the recent literature devoted to this topic, see Coliva (2010b, 2019), Pritchard
(2010a, 2018e, 2023b), Kusch (2016), Carter (2017), Moyal-Sharrock (2017), Coliva & Palmira
(2020), Ranalli (2020), and Siegel (2021).
79
See, for example, Johnson (2019) and Ranalli (2021b).
80
I discuss quasi-ﬁdeism and its implications in Pritchard (2011b, 2015b, 2017a, 2018c, 2021d,
2022a, 2022d, 2024a, forthcominga; forthcomingc). For some recent critical discussions of the
proposal, see di Ceglie (2017), Ljiljanaa & Slavišab (2017), Bennett-Hunter (2019), de Ridder
(2019), Gascoigne (2019, passim), Gomez-Alonso (2021), Smith (2021), Boncompagni (2022),
Vinten (2022), Aquino & Gage (2023), Coliva (2024) and Williams (forthcoming).

belief differently from the epistemology of non-religious belief. Quasi-ﬁdeism

is thus a very different position to the usual ﬁdeism that is often attributed (with
good cause) to the later Wittgenstein.81 The proposal is also signiﬁcant in that it
sets out a position in the epistemology of religion literature that has hitherto
been unexplored.82

81
This is usually attributed on the basis of the remarks in Wittgenstein (1966). For some discus-
sions of Wittgensteinian ﬁdeism, see Nielsen (1967) and Philips (1976). See also Bell (1995).
82
DMS: Thanks to Brendan Larvor, Duncan Pritchard. Work on this monograph was completed
thanks to a research leave granted by the University of Hertfordshire. DHP: Thanks to Annalisa
Coliva, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, and Genia Schönbaumsfeld. Work on this monograph was
completed while a Senior Research Associate of the African Centre for Epistemology and
Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg. We are both grateful to David Stern
and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works
AWL Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, from the notes of
A. Ambrose & M. MacDonald, ed. A. Ambrose (Oxford: Blackwell,
1979).
BT The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. & trans. by C. Grant Luckhardt &
Maximilian A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
CE ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’, in PO, 371–426.
LE ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, in Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951,
eds. J. C. Klagge & A. Nordman, 37–44 (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1993).
LPE ‘Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’, in PO, 202–
367.
LW I Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology [1948–1949], vol I, eds.
G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt & M. A. E. Aue
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).
LW II Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology [1949–1951], vol II, eds.
G. H. von Wright & H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt & M. A. E. Aue
(Oxford: Blackwell,1992).
OC On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul
& G. E. M. Anscombe, amended 1st ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
PG Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1974).
PI Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
PO Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951, eds. J. C. Klagge & A. Nordman
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).
PR Philosophical Remarks, ed. R. Rhees, trans. R. Hargreaves & R. White
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1975).
RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. [1937–1944] Third
Edition. Edited by G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe.
Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).
RPP I Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology [1945–1947], vol I, eds.
G. E. M. Anscombe & G.H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
RPP II Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology [1948], vol II, eds. G. H. von
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TLP Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears & B. F. McGuinness

(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
WVC Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, shorthand notes
recorded by F. Waismann, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1979).

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David G. Stern
University of Iowa
David G. Stern is a Professor of Philosophy and a Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. His research interests include history of
analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of
science. He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction
(Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (Oxford
University Press, 1995), as well as more than 50 journal articles and book chapters. He is
the editor of Wittgenstein in the 1930s: Between the ‘Tractatus’ and the ‘Investigations’
(Cambridge University Press, 2018) and is also a co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to
Wittgenstein (Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2018), Wittgenstein: Lectures,
Cambridge 1930–1933, from the Notes of G. E. Moore (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
and Wittgenstein Reads Weininger (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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wittgenstein-on-knowledge-and-certainty

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wittgenstein-on-knowledge-and-certainty

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Moyal-Sharrock and Pritchard

An overview is offered of Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking

Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty

Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of

Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,

Elements in the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Abstract: An overview is oﬀered of Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking

Keywords: Ludwig Wittgenstein, knowledge, certainty, epistemology,

© Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Duncan Pritchard 2024

1 Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty 2

2 Hinge Commitments in Contemporary Epistemology 33

List of Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Works 65

from On Certainty have impacted contemporary epistemology, especially with

1 Wittgenstein on Knowledge and Certainty

On Certainty is a brilliant illustration of the novelty of Wittgenstein’s think-

Wittgenstein’s treatise on certainty can be said to summarize some of the

1.1 The Tractatus as Precursor to On Certainty

1.2 Nonsense, Ineﬀability and Grammar

that is not a proposition of natural science (§6.53). The nonsensical included

1.3 Knowledge Is Not Foundational

if any proposition whatever is ever known by us mediately, or because some

. . . how do I know that it is my hand? Do I even here know exactly what it

Only in very special circumstances, such as after an accident, is it possible for

What I am aiming at is also found in the difference between the casual

ratiocinative process. The philosopher must be aware that, in default

It should be clear, then, that Wittgenstein‘s conception of knowledge is the

Wittgenstein, as we know, encouraged us to ‘show differences’. Instead, we

1.4 Hinge Certainty: Logical, Not Epistemic

Subjective certainty is not what Wittgenstein is after. For, although the

It needs to be shewn that no mistake was possible. Giving the assurance ‘I

But when is something objectively certain? When a mistake is not possible.

Only an ‘objective certainty’ that is groundless and logically indubitable – that

The ﬁre will burn me if I stick my hand in it: that is certainty.

In spite of the numerous references to ‘certainty’ throughout On Certainty,

1.5 No Grounds, No Doubt, No Scepticism

Interestingly, the germ of Wittgenstein’s recognition that the sceptic’s afﬁrm-

Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise

A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt. (OC §450)

Certainty is not optional or merely desirable: it is conceptually necessary for

Premise 1: We are unable to know the denials of sceptical hypotheses.

It is the prerogative of an unsound argument to have a valid paradoxical

Sceptical discourse is not empowered by any social practices. Outside its

1.6 The Non-Empirical and Non-Propositional Nature of Hinges

‘I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment.’

By ‘rule’, Wittgenstein means a norm of description; a grammatical or logical

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein further contemplates the possibility of

As Malcolm writes: ‘Ludwig Wittgenstein, in discussion, gave me the principal

Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking account of hinge certainty – the account which, in

Ask, not: ‘What goes on in us when we are certain that . . . ?’ – but:

1.7 Certainty as Enactive

what we would today call ‘enactivist’. Malcolm writes:

Having quoted OC §253: ‘At the foundation of well-founded belief lies

In our present example, the ‘unfounded belief’ would be our belief, or we

This ‘certainty in behavior’ is instinctive or ‘animal’ (OC §475) in the

Considering the way language is taught and learned, the fragments of

Avrum Stroll similarly acknowledged that, for Wittgenstein,

[B]elief at that level is not a matter of knowing various propositions to be true

Marie McGinn speaks of a practical mastery of a system of judgements:

The idea of a foundation in certain knowledge is replaced by the idea of

In Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Wittgenstein notes: ‘Don’t

Might we not do arithmetic without having the idea of uttering arithmetical

subject when uttered in non-heuristic discourse.34 Hinge certainties can be

Schönbaumsfeld’s objection that hinges cannot be seen as both expressing rules

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one

And in order to do this – to regard man as an animal – Wittgenstein had to

1.8 Hinge Certainties: A ‘Reality-Soaked’ Grammar

but rules of grammar. That is, in Wittgenstein’s sense, the reality-soaked37

1.9 Psychological Certainty

to uncertainty: ‘[The] characteristic [of psychological verbs] is this, that their

The uncertainty of the ascription ‘He’s got a pain’ might be called

The uncertainty whether someone else . . . is an (essential) trait of all these

Subjective and objective certainty.

– Wittgenstein qualiﬁes this asymmetry by challenging the constitutional

2 Hinge Commitments in Contemporary Epistemology

2.2 Strawson’s Naturalism

The following passage is worth quoting (almost) in its entirety, as it usefully

Cover image: Adapted from a portrait of