Is Non-Dogmatic Philosophy Really Possible?
Philosophy without Presuppositions in Wittgenstein's "On Certainty"
Last week, I introduced a method of philosophy - non-dogmatic philosophy.
Rather than assuming some philosophical axioms or the presuppositions of a worldview in order to get argument started, non-dogmatic philosophy calls even these into question and subjects them to examination. Its arguments proceed piecemeal, step by step, making sure to rest content only with what is incontestable.
“But,” the objection comes, “Must we not start from somewhere?”
The objection comes (and came last week) in two forms:
Doesn’t demonstration, proof, and justification come to an end, on pain of infinite regress? We can’t prove everything from prior premises, for how are the first premises themselves proved?
The supposedly non-dogmatic claims of Wittgenstein and McDowell are themselves subject to doubt, are they not? There are seasoned philosophers who question the premises even of non-dogmatic philosophers.
To quote the author of the second objection: “Every argument has premises, and eventually one must end a chain of reasoning with a premise one does not choose to prove. But such a premise can always be doubted, hence it is a dogmatic premise, since it is possible to rationally reject said premise.” (Emphasis added.)
What else can there be but dogmatism, given the threat of infinite regress? And what can be the basis of this dogmatism, but a choice, an act of will to “plump” for one (set of) fundamental premise(s) or another?
In a way that cannot be improved upon, Wittgenstein answered these questions non-dogmatically in On Certainty, the final work of his life, the last entry of which was written on April 26, 1951, three days before his death. Wittgenstein argues that thought does indeed begin from beliefs that cannot be further justified, but that this starting point is not arbitrary or dogmatic, but inescapably human, even animal.
The starting points of human thought are not chosen; they are part and parcel of our form of life.
Wittgenstein’s Foundation
In On Certainty, Wittgenstein questions assumptions that underlie the apparent inescapability of choosing our foundational beliefs arbitrarily.
Rather, he assists us in discovering those beliefs of which it does not even make sense to ask for a justification, a deeper foundation. These are the beliefs “that stand fast for us.” We can’t prove them, but not because we merely assume them, but because to think that they require proof would itself be folly.
On Certainty was inspired by philosopher G. E. Moore’s paper, “Proof of an External World.”
G. E. Moore offers the following proof of an external world. He raises one hand, and pronounces, “Here is one hand,” and deduces, “Therefore, the external world exists.”
Wittgenstein thinks there is something fishy about Moore’s argument.
It is not that Wittgenstein suspects that the external world, or Moore’s hand for that matter, does not exist. He does not sympathize with the external-world skeptic.
If anything, between the skeptic and Moore, the realist, Wittgenstein sympathizes with Moore. The problem is that Wittgenstein thinks the two are mirror images of each other. The person who thinks he can doubt the existence of the external world and the one who thinks he can argue for it by pointing to his hand - they are in a symbiotic relationship, feeding off each other and off the framing they both share.
Now, don’t miss the parallels here. Philosophically, the following are all the same as Moore pointing to his hand:
Descartes arguing that because he has an idea of God that God must exist, and because God would not deceive us, there must be an external world.
An evangelical apologist pointing to 2 Timothy 3:16 (“All Scripture is inspired by God”) to prove the inspiration of Scripture.
The Presuppositionalist saying that we must presuppose the Triune God of the Bible in order to make sense of anything.
The naturalistic philosopher saying that our basic beliefs must be generally accurate because natural selection would not give us generally false beliefs, since those would not conduce to survival.
All have the same dogmatic structure, the assertion of some starting point for thought (often by assuming what they set out to prove).
Of these, Wittgenstein would be most sympathetic to Moore’s because the reality of our hands has a place in our thought that the existence of God or the theory of evolution does not. Indeed, the reality of our hands is something that only a philosopher would try to call into question.
This is a key marker, for Wittgenstein, that something is amiss. If we encounter a sentence that only a philosopher would say, or a doubt that would only be encountered in a classroom, then language, Wittgenstein suspects, is being misused.
“I know that this is a hand,” Moore says at one point.
“What an odd use of ‘I know’!” Wittgenstein muses.
Looking at a tree on a nature-walk, one might say, “I know that this is an elm.” Perfectly sensible.
But, “I know that this is a tree”? That would only be expected if one were speaking about something that looked ambiguous between being a shrub or a tree. In short, in our ordinary usage of language, “I know” is reserved for situations where one might not know.
Let’s try to construct a scenario in which a non-philosopher might say, “I know that this is a hand.” Imagine a soldier whose hands have been badly wounded. Right before being put to sleep for surgery, he hears the surgeon say, “We’ll do our best to salvage your hands, but if we can’t, we’ll have to amputate.”
Later that day, our soldier wakes up and realizes, all in a moment, that he doesn’t know whether he has hands. A nurse enters the room, sees him awake and alarmed, and asks, “Do you know whether you have hands?” He blinks and says, “No, I actually don’t know if I have hands. Do you?” The nurse responds, “Glad to report…” No more need be said - he bursts into tears of joy.
Fifteen minutes later, a second nurse enters and asks the same question. This time, the soldier responds, with a big smile on his face, and holding up one of his bandaged arms, “I know that this is a hand!”
In our language-game, Wittgenstein points out, it is only in such a context that the phrase, “I know that this is a hand,” has a place. Here, it answers to a doubt, in the ordinary sense - not the philosopher’s.
The philosopher’s doubt and the philosopher’s dictum, “I know that this is a hand,” are, by contrast, like spinning gears that connect to nothing. They have been removed from their place in language-game; they are idle.
Imagine a philosopher speaking with a car mechanic. The car mechanic asks to be handed a Phillips-head screwdriver. The philosopher holds up a screwdriver and says, “I don’t know if this is a Phillips-head screwdriver, but,” he continues, lifting his empty hand, “I do know that this is a hand!” The car mechanic is not amused.
There is a breach here with regard to our linguistic way of life.
After all, there is no doubt about the intactness of Moore’s hands; so there is no function, in our linguistic form of life, to Moore’s statement, “I know that this is a hand.” The preconditions of a meaningful utterance of the phrase are not met.
On Wittgenstein’s account, the philosopher’s doubt about the existence of the external world is idle. And so is the philosopher’s assertion, “The external world exists.” Each stretches language beyond the language-game in which it has its home. It attempts to assert something that is beyond the realm of what can be asserted, to combat a doubt that is beyond the realm of what is doubted.
“249. One gives oneself a false picture of doubt.”
This means that human thought does have its starting points, premises that do not require justification. These include the basic content of common sense and our empirical information about the world, “the deliverances of the senses.”
Non-Dogmatic and Dogmatic Realism
How is this different from the common-sense realism that Moore - or Thomas Reid, or Alvin Plantinga - asserts?
In short, Wittgenstein discovers rather than asserts the starting points. He puts it this way: “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions.” (248) He mines his own thinking and discovers the beliefs that cannot be justified or doubted; one can wonder whether they ought even to be called beliefs.
“At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.” (253) But this is not a failure in the foundational beliefs, as if it would be better if they had a foundation. To evaluate our foundational beliefs as if they would be more secure if they could be founded (grounded, justified) - that would be the same error as to look for a justification for them.
This means that we need to get rid of all sense that there is an arbitrary choice, or a limit here.
“343. Some propositions are exempt from doubt…the hinges on which doubt turns. But it’s not…we just can’t investigate everything, we are forced to rest content with assumptions.”
At the foundation of our beliefs lie beliefs that do not admit of foundation themselves. They are beyond the realm of justification.
By the same token, the fact that many metaphysicians are in print questioning these premises is unimpressive to Wittgenstein. The argument that we cannot justify these premises is, for Wittgenstein, as foolish as the argument that we can justify them. It is the very demand for justification that reflects a philosophical pathology on our part - an anxious desire for certainty.
Many have used Wittgenstein, especially in his later writings, as leading the way toward a postmodern, social theory of knowledge. We are all playing language-games that we cannot justify, and there is nothing more we can say about it. Well, actually, Wittgenstein would say that - but not in the same tone of voice.
By postmodernist standards, Wittgenstein is a naïve realist; he really thinks our common-sense beliefs are fine as they are, and that skeptical questioning is unwarranted and ill-grounded.
But he is also concerned, with the skeptics (and postmodernists), about the folly of dogmatic realism. “Reality exists,” is not an allowable move within our linguistic form of life.
“250. My having two hands is, in normal circumstances, as certain as anything that I could produce in evidence for it.
That is why I am not in a position to take the sight of my hand as evidence for it.”
Common Sense
Our foundational beliefs are, as Wittgenstein puts it, something animal. They are part of our way of life. Someone who seriously questions them is beyond the realm of reason.
What I want to point out here is that this is the realm of the common and human. As human beings, there is a lot we share in common - and this is logically prior to any and all worldviews or metaphysics - our common ground. Naturalists and theists, for example, share this knowledge as human beings.
“234. I believe that I have forebears, and that every human being has them. I believe that there are various cities, and quite generally, in the main facts of geography and history. I believe that the earth is a body on whose surface we move and that it no more suddenly disappears or the like than any other solid body: this table, this house, this tree, etc. If I wanted to doubt the existence of the earth long before my birth, I should have to doubt all sorts of things that stand fast for me.”
In the first place, this is contrary to the kind of naturalism that is grounded in scientism. According to scientism, the well-foundedness of belief requires that belief have the character of being a deliverance of empirical science. Common sense is more likely to be called into question than justified by scientism. If our common human means of knowledge-acquisition could not be trusted, we could never even arrive at scientific knowledge. Common sense is a hinge on which scientific knowledge turns.
In the second place, this is contrary to all worldview-ism or presuppositionalism according to which only a Christian or theistic worldview is sufficient to give us reason to trust our senses. Or according to which we all interpret the deliverances of the senses through a worldview. On the contrary, whatever worldview I might have is on much shakier ground than the deliverances of the senses. How many stomachs a cow has is something that can be determined by observation. Whether evolution, God, or theistic evolution best explains the coming-into-being of cows is much higher-order.
In fact, common sense and the natural sciences are all logically prior to questions of metaphysics and theology. We can answer questions of the current workings of the world in common together prior to addressing the metaphysical questions about their nature, and the historical questions about their origins.
But what about principles of empirical science and observation? For instance, that “What has happened before will continue to happen.” Wittgenstein argues that these are not premises in our arguments:
“The principle that what has always happened will happen again…Do we really introduce it into our reasoning? Or is it merely the natural law which our inferring apparently follows? This latter it may be. It is not an item in our considerations.” (135)
Many of the things that philosophers have considered as explicit principles of logic, whether deductive or inductive, Wittgenstein argues are rather something below the level of the rational, the rules by which reasoning proceeds. As with the starting points for thought, these are something we discover more than something we justify.
Man, and then Philosopher
Where does this leave the non-dogmatic philosopher?
The philosopher, it turns out is, first, a human. But the challenge is to stay that way.
The philosopher begins thinking where humans begin thinking. His starting-points of thought are the observable language-games and modes of thought and expression of which all human beings are capable.
The philosopher is tempted, however, to strike a pose as if from outside all human language-games, calling them all into question, wielding terms like “exist,” “is,” and “know,” outside their logical and linguistic home. His duty is to resist these temptations and to remain human.
To answer the original objections:
Doesn’t justification have to come to an end?
Yes, justification comes to an end. But the starting points of thought are not dogmatic. They do not differ from person to person.
Can’t skeptical philosophers doubt even Wittgenstein’s claims?
No, the claims on which the non-dogmatic philosopher rests argument are the ones that even skeptical philosophers take for granted inasmuch as they are human. Their philosophical doubts are idle.
Free of metaphysical dogma - whether naturalist or doctrinal - the non-dogmatic philosopher explores our use of language as it is. Content with ordinary language, the philosopher refrains from arguing for metaphysical conclusions that go beyond what the data require.
“661. How might I be mistaken in my assumption that I was never on the moon?”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, April 26, 1951, three days before his death
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Great post. Was especially cool to see you mention this –
> “I know that this is a hand,” Moore says at one point.
> “What an odd use of ‘I know’!” Wittgenstein muses.
> Looking at a tree on a nature-walk, one might say, “I know that this is an elm.” Perfectly sensible.
> But, “I know that this is a tree”? That would only be expected if one were speaking about something that looked ambiguous between being a shrub or a tree. In short, in our ordinary usage of language, “I know” is reserved for situations where one might not know.
This something I've been pondering for a while, but have not known how to articulate week. Namely, that by declaring some fact, you are somehow also admitting to the possibility of that fact not being true.
How does this intersect with the situation where people's base narratives of reality or so so different? Atheism and theism (and the varying origin stories that can go with them) can be abstract higher-level questions about how cow's got their 4 stomachs, but when an indigenous American (Christian or not) sees the deer as a cousin because it is given life by the same creator, I can begin to feel a little more presuppositionalist, because the common sense of the indigenous human is so different from the (detached) modern mindset.