Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty

by Avrum Stroll

Ludwig Wittgenstein's On Certainty was finished just before his death in 1951 and is a running commentary on three of G.E. Moore's greatest epistemological papers. In the early 1930s, Moore had written a lengthy commentary on Wittgenstein, anticipating some of the issues Wittgenstein would discuss in On Certainty . The philosophical relationship between these two great philosophers and their overlapping, but nevertheless differing, views is the subject of this book. Both defended the existence of certainty and thus opposed any form of skepticism. However, their defenses and conceptions of certainty differed widely, as did their understanding of the nature of skepticism and how best to combat it. Stroll's book contains a careful and critical analysis of their differing approaches to a set of fundamental epistemological problems.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Ali Reda · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I said at the beginning of this book that a persuasive case can be made for regarding Wittgenstein as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century and perhaps as the greatest Western philosopher since Kant. If he had not written On Certainty this assessment would still stand. But for anyone who has carefully worked through this work there can be little doubt about the support it adds to this evaluation. Both its critical and positive achievements are of the highest order. In the former respect we can say that one of Wittgenstein's greatest contributions to philosophy is to have shown the self-defeating nature of radical scepticism, why it cannot even get off the ground. In developing this insight his grasp of scepticism is palpably more profound than Moore's. Moore presupposes that the sceptic's doubts make sense and can be answered by asserting that he (Moore) knows this or that p with certainty. But Wittgenstein's understanding is deeper. He shows that what the sceptic wishes to say cannot be said without violating the constraints that would make the question sensible. No such answer as Moore wishes to provide is thus possible or needed. Scepticism is not merely mistaken, as Moore thinks; it is, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, conceptually aberrant. When to this achievement is added the development of a new method, the descriptions of the ways that conceptual models exercise their ineluctable grips upon thinkers, and accurate characterizations of our everyday linguistic uses, we are—and have been throughout this study—in the presence of genius".

[Rhiannon Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful contextualization of Moore and Wittgenstein's work on epistemology, especially certainty, the foundations of knowledge, and scepticism. Stroll provides a careful analysis which shows why Wittgenstein says that "a doubt without an end is not even a doubt" (On Certainty 625).