Abstract

The dissertation reconstructs the central arguments of Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Chapter I, "Why We Cannot Say Of The Standard Meter In Paris That It Is One Meter Long," sketches the development of Wittgenstein's thought from the Philosophical Remarks through the Philosophical Investigations and on to On Certainty. The chapter provides a thematic framework wherein much of On Certainty can be seen as the working out of the epistemic correlaries of Wittgenstein's so-called "private language argument." That argument establishes the logical priority of communal agreement to critical appraisal. ;Chapter II, "It Goes Without Saying," offers a reconstruction of the Moore-Wittgenstein debate over empirical skepticism in terms of the more fundamental issue of assertion. Contemporary and classical speech-act theory is used to show that Moore's empirical certainties were, in the circumstances in which he uttered them, strictly unassertible. ;Chapter III, "Moore, Knowledge and the Logical Subject of Certainty, considers the Moore-Wittgenstein debate in its own terms, viz., as an issue of first-person knowledge claims. Elaborating on Wittgenstein's arguments, I conclude that, under the conditions he chose, Moore could no more rightfully claim first-person knowledge of what he took to be certain than could he assert it--and for much the same reasons. Moore's mistake is to confuse communal inerrancy with individual infallibility. ;Chapter IV, "Wittgenstein and Searle's Assertion Fallacy: A Second Pass," takes the lessons learned in Chapters II and III and applies them to the problem of first-person "knowledge" of pain. Specifically, these lessons are used to rebut Searles' charge that Wittgenstein commits the assertion fallacy in his treatment of the problem; to point out the failings of N. G. E. Harris' recent attempt to defend Wittgenstein against Searles' charge; and to present an accurate exegesis of Wittgenstein's discussion of this problem