Knowledge and justification
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Wittgenstein: On Certainty
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However, we have also seen that there is an alternative form of empiricism that questions correspondence as the ultimate basis of truth. This begins to emerge in the following quotations from Wittgenstein's On Certainty. "166. The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing 192. To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end. 205.If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, nor yet false." In these extracts Wittgenstein denies the axiomatic method. He objects to the idea present in rationalism and in some forms of empiricism that there is a self-evident foundation for knowledge. Truths cannot be justified in that way. For him truths are acquired through social interaction. As children we are inducted into a way of living. "140. We do not learn the practice of making empirical judgments by learning rules: we are taught judgments and their connexion with other judgments. A totality of judgments is made plausible to us. 141. When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)" We are taught a system of beliefs, and we are also taught how to connect these beliefs together. We are inducted as children into a way of living, and learn the rules whereby our parents and elders live. This makes a "totality of judgements plausible to us". 142. It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequence and premises give one another mutual support. 144. The child learns to believe a host of things. i.e. It learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it. 163. Does anyone ever test whether this table remains in existence when no one is paying attention to it?"
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Contents of
Knowledge and justification
1 The distinction between knowledge and belief
2 Unsound, invalid, possible world and fallacy
3 Counterexample, exposing a fallacy
4 Belief and doubt
5 Believing that and knowing that
6 Knowledge and certainty - the tripartite definition of knowledge
7 True, justified belief
8 Plato: The Theaetetus
9 Plato: Forms
10 The possibility of scepticism and categories of belief
11 Global scepticism
12 The Argument from Authority
13 Valid argument, inference and justification
14 Chain of deductive inferences, self-evident truths
15 Sense experience, empiricism
16 The dialectic method, thesis and antithesis
17 Rationalism and empiricism; the Discourse on the Method
18 The Cogito, Reason and Rational Insight
19 Bertrand Russell, Acquaintance
20 Universals, Forms
21 Scepticism, Existentialism and Faith
22 The evil genius argument
23 Existentialism
24 Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling - the Absurd
25 Foundation for Knowledge
26 Theory of Knowledge, Epistemology and Metaphysics
27 Rationalism, Mathematics and Logic, Innateness
28 Innate Ideas
29 The a priori
30 Truth by convention, Hume and the Method of Doubt
31 Hume and the distinction between belief and knowledge
32 Hume and the definition of belief
33 Truth as a logical operator on sentences
34 The correspondence theory of truth
35 Wittgenstein: On Certainty
36 Wittgenstein and the coherence theory of truth
37 William James and Pragmatism
38 W.V.O. Quine, pragmatism and the Two Dogmas of Empiricism
39 Postivism and pragmatism
40 Pragmatism and utilitarianism
41 Pragmatism and religiion
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