Abstract

On the standard reading of On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s fundamental idea is that primitive certainty is categorially distinct from knowledge. Since primitive certainties shape our understanding of doubt or justification, our relation to such certainties is necessarily non-epistemic: they cannot be things we know. This ‘Wittgensteinian’ perspective on knowledge and certainty has come to be known as “hinge epistemology, after one of Wittgenstein’s striking metaphors: “The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are not doubted, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.” Wittgenstein is not a hinge epistemologist. Far from being arational commitments, basic certainties are basic knowledge, on an “infallibilist” conception of knowledge. To see how these ideas can be made to work, we must recognize that knowledge and doubt are deeply circumstance-dependent.