Originally posted by bbarr
There is some basic confusion in this conversation that I am having trouble pinning down. When I think I've diagnosed and addressed it, I get assurances that I'm being understood, but those assurances are then followed by the same confusions. What is going on here? Ideas?
Wittgenstein in
On Certainty? “I know that my name is N.” It seems strange to say “I know that” in, say the context of casual conversation—e.g., are you trying to reassure yourself? Nevertheless, if I cannot properly say—given, e.g., the context of philosophical discussion—“I
know that my name is N”, then what
can I properly say that I know?
Nevertheless, for reasons you pointed out above, I have no
logical certainty that my name is N (e.g., pace one of your examples, I might be hallucinating). No logical contradiction is involved by my conceding the possibility that I might be wrong, however improbable that is.
I’m going all from recall here, but it seems to me that W’s arguments were centered on what it means to say “I
know”—or, following the PI, what is the
use of that expression, and what language game are we playing. For example, I might be playing a language game of everyday practical discourse (wanting to know, as a matter of living my days, what I can know); T might be playing the language game of (describing the rule of) some applied mathematics (e.g., statistics); B might be playing the language game of formal epistemology. None of those language games are
a priori normative or privileged with regard to the word “know” or “knowledge”. Nor can one insist on a particular language game; one can say that, within the context of
this language game, “to know” is used to describe
this state of affairs with
these entailments, etc. If we cannot agree (or we are not all able) to speak in the same language game, then nothing more can be (usefully) said.*
My understanding of W’s point in OC is that there are certain statements—such as “My name is N” or “I did not lunch yesterday in Peking”—such that, stated with the explicit or implicit “I know”, they either properly count as knowledge (JTB), or [at least any practical?] epistemology is just undermined (in the face of, e.g., a Pyrrhonian skepticism). And yet, such statements do not meet the criteria of infallibility. (It is not impossible that I had lunch in Peking yesterday, perhaps under some weird "Manchurian Candidate" scenario.)
This is all, needless to say, a non-formal attempt to understand the arguments, and is not offered as an argument itself.
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* Someone asks: “How does one cook rice?”. Two chefs—one French and one Spanish—begin to quarrel over the answer (the French chef just
does not understand paella!!). Each presumes that her own “language game” with regard to the terms “how” and “cook” and “rice” are normative. Suppose one were to then ask them: “How do you
know?” The answer may well involve a good amount of rule-following within the context of this or that cooking game. I'm not sure that (the later) Wittgenstein would view formal epistemology as any less a game than the cooking game. The point is to describe the games, and their limits.
In the game of everday discourse, if someone says "I know", how much "fallibility" do I assume? If I assume that they might be wrong (with, say, some notion of probability), then I might well say: "Well, you can't really
know that!" What place does a discussion of JTB and fallibilism have in
that language game?
In another game, suppose someone claims to know the solution to a particular mathematical problem: in
that kind of game, is not certainty, in terms of a demonstrable proof, generally expected? (E.g., "I know the solution to Fermat's last theorem." )
belief
27 Sep '11 20:09
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