Home Issues IV-2 Symposia. Wittgenstein and Pragma A Pragmatist Conception of Certainty. The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developed and articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty.
The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as the arational presuppositions of beliefs and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way in which the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism.
I would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh for awarding me the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship that made possible the research for, and writing of, this paper between January and August If we have a doubt about whether something is the case, we may engage in the practice of checking or testing the object of the doubt.
We check the story of Napoleon, but not whether all the reports about him are based on sense-deception, forgery and the like. For whenever we test anything, we are already presupposing something that is not tested. The practice of testing certain propositions, the truth of which is not beyond doubt, presupposes that the truth of certain propositions is beyond doubt: that the documents about Napoleon are not forged, that the apparatus really exists and so on.
As he points out, for something to be a ground for doubt, it has to be more certain than the target proposition which one is calling into doubt.
