Abstract

Wittgenstein's On Certainty is a collection of notes whose general focus is on epistemological issues found in two papers by his friend and Cambridge colleague, G.E. Moore. Though the original catalyst for his reflections is the work of Moore, Wittgenstein's thoughts become strikingly broad and sweep across most major issues in epistemology. However, the remarks constituting On Certainty are discursive, enigmatic and often inconsistent, leaving a great burden on Wittgenstein scholarship to try to piece together coherent arguments he may be giving, and positions he may be taking, in epistemology. This thesis takes on part of that burden. In particular, it gives an affirmative answer to the question "Is there a response to skepticism in On Certainty"? Wittgenstein's response to skepticism has its roots, of course, in the philosophy of language. I will argue that the very view of language which Wittgenstein attacks in the rule-following considerations of Philosophical Investigations is presupposed by the skeptical problem. Hence, if Wittgenstein's repudiation of that view of language was successful in the former work, then we already have the materials sufficient for a defeat of skepticism. But this swift semantic maneuver is not all the criticism that Wittgenstein has to give of skepticism-or so I will argue. He offers us in On Certainty a rich diagnosis of the skeptical problem: the skeptic misunderstands the function of the sentences on which his arguments tend to fixate. To approach this diagnosis, I argue, Wittgenstein implicitly employs his notion of "meaning as use" together with a key epistemological principle found in On Certainty to force on us an acceptance of his view of how those sentences function, and to show us how they couldn't function in the way that the skeptical arguments assume. One of the obligations that this thesis must discharge, of course, is to corroborate these claims with remarks from On Certainty and the Investigations. One upshot of discharging such an obligation is to glean some of the continuity between those two works, which, I think, is essential for a solid understanding of last century's greatest philosopher