“Incertitude” is a profound philosophical work, a work pulsating with life and the colors it implies. Words intertwined with suffering, illness and death, certitude, despair and hope and waiting, confusion and hesitation and contradiction, and the passion and joy one feels in his words when he grasps an idea. His day begins with thinking and all of it is hope, and it ends in the night with despair and the contemplation of suicidal thoughts. He wakes up with a great thirst for thinking about the world, as if it had never been thought about before. Masked with his pen, he thinks and writes until the last moments of his life, in a way that is difficult for any human to follow. It is harsh and there is no skill in it. It makes you feel tired during your reading of it, and it conveys to you, with his clumsy style of writing, his deep anxiety and his sufferings in a blatant way like an artist with his exhibition, his encounters and his dialogues, his mood and his anger. He departs from life in the height of his excitement. He is excited, in the grip of illness, realizing that death is approaching little by little and will not be extinguished. He is in a state of a fierce war with himself. You can feel that silent war by looking into his eyes. He is constantly striving for authenticity and truth with himself, a war to know, to get rid of his lies and his flaws. It has been difficult for him with himself and his high standards that he expects. Wittgenstein is erratic, a human being before he is a philosopher. He puts you in a state of dissatisfaction with yourself, a state of constant hesitation, and he forces you to move towards what is unknown. What Wittgenstein tells us through all that he has gone through and endured is that we must respect life. We must respect life, take it seriously, and work until the last moment. We must strive until we are worthy of it, worthy of our minds and hearts that we possess. We must take our place and earn it in the magnificent scene of life, to be a path for illness and love and death and poverty and sorrow and breakdown and weakness and despair and hope and war and word and melody and painting and tree and sea and mountain and sun and air and rain and cloud and even emptiness. Everything that exists on earth and in man and in life, so that this scene and this canvas may be completed through us and we and our images may be formed through all of that. That we persevere and be tough in work and thought and life and take on courage and lose ourselves in that until the horizons open up to us.

“Tell them that I have had a wonderful life!”

He said this to his doctor's wife, Eduard Biefang, as he was lying in his bed. These were Wittgenstein's last words to her and to us before his departure.

"Über Gewißheit" concludes.

Zettel, regarding colors, and miscellaneous remarks will follow at some point.

I deliberately do not evaluate this because I have no real access to the problematique that Wittgenstein is attempting to circumscribe. The questions and problematics of language games do not present themselves to me in this form.

I clearly see him here sitting between the stools (Hegel, Plato) and somewhat helplessly stumbling over doubt, certainty, and what can be known through our language games.

This fragmentary writing style in aphoristic form works quite well to not present a linear argumentation. The diversity of perspectives and interpretations comes through beautifully. Whoever hopes for some fixed point of view here will be disappointed. Wittgenstein struggles hard to find the conditions or starting points under which one can know, the concept of knowledge has no application, doubt is founded or appears senseless, and when doubt must come to an end. The role of the essence of doubt and certainty is put under the microscope by him in our language games. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite get it right. In my opinion, this is due to the "stuttering dynamics" (my own creation) that he imposes on the bed of the river of language games. A hybrid of dynamics and rigid matter, with which he misses the understanding of reality in which spirit and language act. Then too much knowledge is hanging in the external world that exists independently of our thinking.

Core idea:

Wittgenstein rejects the idea of an objective certainty that exists independently of our language use and our forms of life. A universal doubt also does not exist. The absence of doubt is not equivalent to positive certainty.

For him, mathematical sentences are not necessarily depictions of realities or superhuman truths, but rather expressions of rules within a particular language game (words, sentences, activities, practices, forms of life in which language is used).

The most important statements for me:

• Beliefs form a system/structure

• Empirical sentences are not a homogeneous mass. The idea of correspondence with reality has no clear application

• What is reasonable changes. As if my mind could not adjust to any meaning because I do not look for the adjustment in the area where it is. Certain words only make sense in a certain context - meaning is determined by the situation

• Only in a system does the individual have the value that we assign to it.

• A kind of worldview gets in my way

An interesting thought is that certainties are expressed through our actions. Knowledge is shaped around our deeds and actions. These can neither be simply laid aside nor sensibly doubted.

Wittgenstein makes it clear in the text what is so strange about Moore's statement "I know that this is a tree" and why language plays a significant role. That he puts "I know" in front of it gives the statement such a bizarre self-evidence that almost begs for skeptical doubt.

I read that contrastivism is suitable here. Knowledge attributions that can be true provided the inherent contrast does not have skeptical hypotheses, which happens, among other things, when a person combines their claims with an emphatically anti-skeptical claim. So Moore's sentence would then have to read: "I know that this is a tree, rather than it being a flagpole."

3. If, for example, someone says "I don't know if there's a hand here", he might be told "Look closer". - This possibility of satisfying oneself is part of the language-game. It is one of its essential features.

10. "2x2 = 4" is a true proposition of arithmetic - not "on particular occasions" nor "always". And "I know that there's a sick man lying here", used in an unsuitable situation, seems not to be nonsense but rather seems matter-of-course, only because one can fairly easily imagine a situation to fit it, and one thinks that the words "I know that..." are always in place where there is no doubt, and hence even where the expression of doubt would be unintelligible.

11. We just do not see how very specialized the use of "I know" is.

30. When someone has made sure of something, he says: "Yes, the calculation is right", but he did not infer that from his condition of certainty. One does not infer how things are from one's own certainty. Certainty is as it were a tone of voice in which one declares how things are, but one does not infer from the tone of voice that one is justified.

36. "A is a physical object" is a piece of instruction which we give only to someone who doesn't yet understand either what "A" means, or what "physical object" means. Thus it is instruction about the use of words, and "physical object" is a logical concept. (Like colour, quantity,...) And that is why no such proposition as: "There are physical objects" can be formulated. Yet we encounter such unsuccessful shots at every turn.

41. "I know where I am feeling pain", "I know that I feel it here" is as wrong as "I know that I am in pain". But "I know where you touched my arm" is right.

92. However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says something like: "That's how it must be."

93. The propositions presenting what Moore 'knows' are all of such a kind that it is difficult to imagine why anyone should believe the contrary. E.g. the proposition that Moore has spent his whole life in close proximity to the earth. - Once more I can speak of myself here instead of speaking of Moore. What could induce me to believe the opposite? Either a memory, or having been told. - Everything that I have seen or heard gives me the conviction that no man has ever been far from the earth. Nothing in my picture of the world speaks in favour of the opposite.

94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.

108. "We don't know how one gets to the moon, but those who get there know at once that they are there; and even you can't explain everything." We should feel ourselves intellectually very distant from someone who said this.

131. No, experience is not the ground for our game of judging. Nor is its outstanding success.

138. We don't, for example, arrive at any of them [Add: The propositions which Moore retails as examples of such known truths] as a result of investigation. There are e.g. historical investigations and investigations into the shape and also the age of the earth, but not into whether the earth has existed during the last hundred years. Of course many of us have information about this period from our parents and grandparents; but mayn't they be wrong? - "Nonsense!" one will say. "How should all these people be wrong?" - But is that an argument? Is it not simply the rejection of an idea? And perhaps the determination of a concept? For if I speak of a possible mistake here, this changes the role of "mistake" and "truth" in our lives.

142. It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.

143. I am told, for example, that someone climbed this mountain many years ago. Do I always enquire into the reliability of the teller of this story, and whether the mountain did exist years ago? A child learns there are reliable and unreliable informants much later than it learns facts which are told it. It doesn't learn at all that that mountain has existed for a long time: that is, the question whether it is so doesn't arise at all. It swallows this consequence down, so to speak, together with what it learns.

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 unshakeably 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.

145. One wants to say "All my experiences show that it is so". But how do they do that? For that proposition to which they point itself belongs to a particular interpretation of them. "That I regard this proposition as certainly true also characterizes my interpretation of experience."

152. I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.

163.... For whenever we test anything, we are already presupposing something that is not tested....

186. "I might suppose that Napoleon never existed and is a fable, but not that the earth did not exist 150 years ago."

188. It strikes me as if someone who doubts the existence of the earth at that time is impugning the nature of all historical evidence. And I cannot say of this latter that it is definitely correct.

189. At some point one has to pass from explanation to mere description.

191. Well, if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it - is it then certainly true? One may designate it as such. - But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts? - With this question you are already going round in a circle.

206. If someone asked us "but is that true?" we might say "yes" to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say "I can't give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same." If this didn't come about, that would mean that he couldn't for example learn history.

237. If I say "an hour ago this table didn't exist", I probably mean that it was only made later on. If I say "this mountain didn't exist then", I presumably mean that it was only formed later on - perhaps by a volcano. If I say "this mountain didn't exist an hour ago", that is such a strange statement that it is not clear what I mean. Whether for example I mean something untrue but scientific. Perhaps you think that the statement that the mountain didn't exist then is quite clear, however one conceives the context. But suppose someone said "This mountain didn't exist a minute ago, but an exactly similar one did instead." Only the accustomed context allows what is meant to come through clearly.

257. If someone said to me that he doubted whether he had a body I should take him to be a halfwit. But I shouldn't know what it would mean to try to convince him that he had one. And if I had said something, and that had removed his doubt, I should not know how or why.

258. I do not know how the sentence "I have a body" is to be used. That doesn't unconditionally apply to the proposition that I have always been on or near the surface of the earth.

282. I cannot say that I have good grounds for the opinion that cats do not grow on trees or that I had a father and a mother. If someone has doubts about it - how is that supposed to have come about? By his never, from the beginning, having believed that he had parents? But then, is that conceivable, unless he has been taught it?

283. For how can a child immediately doubt what it is taught? That could mean only that he was incapable of learning certain language games.

314. Imagine that the schoolboy really did ask "and is there a table there even when I turn around, and even when no one is there to see it?" Is the teacher to reassure him - and say "of course there is!"? Perhaps the teacher will get a bit impatient, but think that the boy will grow out of asking such questions.

315. That is to say, the teacher will feel that this is not really a legitimate question at all. And it would be just the same if the pupil cast doubt on the uniformity of nature, that is to say on the justification of inductive arguments. - The teacher would feel that this was only holding them up, that this way the pupil would only get stuck and make no progress. - And he would be right. It would be as if someone were looking for some object in a room; he opens a drawer and doesn't see it there; then he closes it again, waits, and opens it once more to see if perhaps it isn't there now, and keeps on like that. He has not learned to look for things. And in the same way this pupil has not learned how to ask questions. He has not learned the game that we are trying to teach him.

344. My life consists in my being content to accept many things.

370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings - shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know..." drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.

374. We teach a child "that is your hand", not "that is perhaps (or "probably") your hand". That is how a child learns the innumerable language-games that are concerned with his hand. An investigation or question, 'whether this is really a hand' never occurs to him. Nor, on the other hand, does he learn that he knows that this is a hand.

375. Here one must realize that complete absence of doubt at some point, even where we would say that 'legitimate' doubt can exist, need not falsify a language-game. For there is also something like another arithmetic. I believe that this admission must underlie any understanding of logic.

383. The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well - and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

423. Then why don't I simply say with Moore "I know that I am in England?" Saying this is meaningful in particular circumstances, which I can imagine. But when I utter the sentence outside these circumstances, as an example to show that I can know truths of this kind with certainty, then it at once strikes me as fishy. - Ought it to?

499. I might also put it like this: the 'law of induction' can no more be grounded than certain particular propositions concerning the material of experience.

500. But it would also strike me as nonsense to say "I know that the law of induction is true". Imagine such a statement made in a court of law! It would be more correct to say "I believe in the law of..." where 'believe' has nothing to do with surmising.

501. Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will see it.

524. Is it essential for our language-games ('ordering and obeying' for example) that no doubt appears at certain points, or is it enough if there is the feeling of being sure, admittedly with a slight breath of doubt? That is, is it enough if I do not, as I do now, call something 'black', 'green', 'red', straight off, without any doubt at all interposing itself - but do instead say "I am sure that is red", as one may say "I am sure that he will come today" (in other words with the 'feeling of being sure')? The accompanying feeling is of course a matter of indifference to us, and equally we have no need to bother about the words "I am sure that" either. - What is important is whether they go with a difference in the practice of the language. One might ask whether a person who spoke like this would always say "I am sure" on occasions where (for example) there is sureness in the reports we make ( in an experiment, for example, we look through a tube and report the colour we see through it). If he does, our immediate inclination will be to check what he says. But if he proves to be perfectly reliable, one will say that his way of talking is merely a bit perverse, and does not affect the issue. One might for example suppose that he has read sceptical philosophers, become convinced that one can know nothing, and that is why he has adopted this way of speaking. Once we are used to it, it does not infect practice.

599. For example one could describe the certainty of the proposition that water boils at circa 100C. That isn't e.g. a proposition I have once heard (like this or that, which I could mention). I made the experiment myself at school. The proposition is a very elementary one in our text-books, which are to be trusted in matters like this because... - Now one can offer counter-examples to all this, which show that human beings have held this and that to be certain which later, according to our opinion, proved false. But the argument is worthless. [May it not also happen that we believe we recognize a mistake of earlier times and later come to the conclusion that the first opinion was the right one? etc.] To say: in the end we can only adduce such grounds as we hold to be grounds, is to say nothing at all. I believe that at the bottom of this is a misunderstanding of the nature of our language-games.

617. Certain events would me into a position in which I could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which I was torn away from the sureness of the game. Indeed, doesn't it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?

618. In that case it would seem as if the language-game must 'show' the facts that make it possible. (But that's not how it is.) Then can one say that only a certain regularity in occurrences makes induction possible? The 'possible' would of course have to be 'logically possible'.

622. But now it is also correct to use "I know" in the contexts which Moore mentioned, at least in particular circumstances. (Indeed, I do not know what "I know that I am a human being" means. But even that might be given a sense.) For each one of these sentences I can imagine circumstances that turn it into a move in one of our language-games, and by that it loses everything that is philosophically astonishing.

623. What is odd is that in such a case I always feel like saying (although it is wrong): "I know that - so far as one can know such a thing." That is incorrect, but something right is hidden behind it.

653. If the proposition 12x12 = 144 is exempt from doubt, then so too must non-mathematical propositions be.

654. But against this there are plenty of objections. - In the first place there is the fact that "12x12 etc." is a mathematical proposition, and from this one may infer that only mathematical propositions are in this situation. And if this inference is not justified, then there ought to be a proposition that is just as certain, and deals with the process of this calculation, but isn't itself mathematical. I am thinking of such a proposition as: "The multiplication '12x12', when carried out by people who know how to calculate, will in the great majority of cases give the result '144'." Nobody will contest this proposition, and naturally it is not a mathematical one. But has it got the certainty of the mathematical proposition?

114. He is not certain of a single fact, nor can he be certain of the meaning of his words.

115. Whoever would like to doubt everything would not even have arrived at doubt. The very game of doubt already presupposes a certain certainty. (25)

Malicious tongues might say that it is because I am in a particularly good mood today that I find humor* and poetry** in Wittgenstein's writing. What first comes to mind is, perhaps, the catalog-like, unyielding dryness, like the application of a technique to language. However, in his intellectual bravuras, epistemology shines like few other things and touches on the foundations of the concept of the world: Is there something that cannot be put into question, what are the limits of knowledge, what do I know when I say 'I know'? The big questions are answered with new questions, in a spectacularly unresolved form – without ornaments, but with irony and astonishing intellectual acuity.

Bonus: I learned that Wittgenstein, when mentioning that he had not traveled to Bulgaria, had never been to the Balkans (entry no. 269).

* [I am now philosophizing like an old woman who constantly misplaces things and then has to look for them again; one moment the glasses, the next the keys.] (87)

[Pretensions are a hypothesis that burdens the philosopher's ability to think.] (88)

** Whoever, while dreaming, says 'I am dreaming', even if he is speaking audibly at that moment, is no more right than when he says 'It is raining' in a dream while it is actually raining. Even if his dream is indeed related to the sound of the rain. (109)

I read Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and On Certainty one after another. I must say that On Certainty is much more enjoyable to read than TLP, especially if you don't have any previous knowledge about philosophy.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book wasn't overly difficult to understand and it gave the reader the opportunity to form their own opinions. In fact, at one point, I even noticed a flaw in Wittgenstein's thinking.

If you have little or no prior knowledge of philosophy and want to read Wittgenstein, I would highly recommend starting with On Certainty rather than TLP. It provides a more accessible entry point into Wittgenstein's ideas and allows you to engage with his work on a more intuitive level.

You'll be able to explore his thoughts on certainty, knowledge, and belief without getting bogged down in the more technical and abstract arguments of the Tractatus.

So, if you're looking to dip your toes into the world of Wittgenstein, give On Certainty a try. You might be surprised at how much you enjoy it.

Wittgenstein’s On Certainty was written as a response to G. E. Moore's 1939 paper, “Proof of an External World.” In this paper, Moore ingeniously applied the Moorean shift from modus ponens to modus tollens. Specifically, he held up his hand and declared “here is a hand” to prove the existence of a world external to our senses. Wittgenstein was clearly impressed by Moore's bold approach, which implicitly questioned the reasonableness of doubting such a claim. However, he also pointed out a weakness in Moore's claim as it automatically invited the question of how he knew.

Wittgenstein acknowledged that philosophical skepticism gains traction from the fact that any knowledge claim can be doubted, and every attempt at justifying a knowledge claim can also be doubted. But he argued that such doubts about existence only work within a language-game.

Although the language-game engaged in by the philosophical skeptic may seem appealing, once we give these propositions a specific context, Wittgenstein asserted that the doubts lack the generality needed to throw the very existence of the external world into doubt. Only by removing language from all possible contexts, rendering it useless, can philosophical skepticism function. Thus, Moore's “here is a hand” does rebut the skeptic by placing skepticism in the context of anatomy.

Wittgenstein made the important naturalistic observation that “doubt comes after belief.” No one starts from scratch with a position of philosophical skepticism; rather, it is adopted as part of a set of philosophical beliefs. Doubt must occur within the context of things undoubted. If something is doubted, something else must be held fast as doubt presupposes means of removing it. Ordinary incredulity occurs against a background of sequestered beliefs. The genuine skeptic does not doubt that we have knowledge of the world; in fact, they presuppose it. As he said, “a doubt without an end is not even a doubt.”

Communication and rational thought are only possible when there is common ground. When fundamental propositions like “here is a hand” are doubted, that common ground shrinks. Advocates of philosophical skepticism claim to express doubts within a rational framework, but Wittgenstein suggested that by doubting too much, they undermine rationality and the basis for doubt.

In many ways, it can be argued that in On Certainty, Wittgenstein does not so much refute skeptical doubts about the existence of an external world as sidestep them. If two people disagree over whether one has a hand, it's doubtful they could find common ground to debate. Certainty, according to Wittgenstein, is not a philosophical position but a natural result of living and acting in the world. He supported this with the observation of how children form firm beliefs, stating that “what stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.” The same, he seemed to suggest, holds for philosophers and their certain principles.

Do we become more or less certain as we approach death? In Wittgenstein's instance, based on his notes from his final days, he was willing to question even the most blatant and insignificant facts.

The book was published after his death, sourced from the notes he compiled in the early 1950s, during the last two years of his life. It didn't reach a wider audience until nearly 20 years after his passing.

The text was predominantly, but not entirely, written in German. I found it beneficial to have the German and English presented side by side in the edition I read. Clearly, it is a work in progress and not finished. The final entry, two days before his death, makes reference to the dream time of the other side.

Although the text is repetitive and meandering, the subject it raises is highly thought-provoking. Wittgenstein's capacity to challenge facts and beliefs remains pertinent in the domains of ethics and epistemology.

The editors could have eliminated some of the repetition and digressions with little detriment to the text's meaning. However, the text is very dense and weighty. For every trivial observation or repeated assertion, there is a sentence worthy of deep consideration.

١١٥ - If you try to doubt everything, you will not doubt anything, for the game of doubt itself presupposes a prior certainty.

This statement presents an interesting perspective on the nature of doubt. Doubt is often seen as a tool for questioning and seeking truth, but it seems that there must be some foundation of certainty upon which it can operate. Without this prior certainty, doubt becomes meaningless.

The great translation and the brilliant introduction by the translator are also worthy of mention. They play an important role in helping readers understand the points and ideas of the book briefly before delving into the actual reading. This can enhance the reading experience and make it easier for readers to engage with the text.

Overall, this passage highlights the importance of both doubt and certainty in our intellectual pursuits, as well as the value of a good translation and introduction in facilitating our understanding of a book.

On Certainty was not published until 1969, a full 18 years after Wittgenstein’s death. Only recently has it begun to draw serious attention. I can't recall a single reference to it in all of Searle's works, and one can see whole books on Wittgenstein with barely a mention. However, there are excellent books on it by Stroll, Svensson, McGinn, and others, as well as parts of many other books and articles. But hands down, the best is that of Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (DMS). Her 2004 volume “Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty” is essential for every educated person and perhaps the best starting point for understanding Wittgenstein, psychology, philosophy, and life.

Wittgenstein (W) is, for me, easily the most brilliant thinker on human behavior of all time. This is his last work and crowning achievement. It belongs to his third and final period, yet it is not only his most basic work (since it shows that all behavior is an extension of innate true-only axioms), but also the foundation for all description of animal behavior, revealing how the mind works and indeed must work. The “must” is entailed by the fact that all brains share a common ancestry and common genes, so there is only one basic way they work, which necessarily has an axiomatic structure. All higher animals share the same evolved psychology based on inclusive fitness, and in humans, this is extended into a personality based on throat muscle contractions (language) that evolved to manipulate others (with variations that can be regarded as trivial). This book, and arguably all of Wittgenstein’s work and all discussion of behavior, is a development or variation on this idea.

Over the years, as I have read extensively in Wittgenstein, other philosophers, and psychology, it has become clear that what he laid out in his final period (and throughout his earlier work in a less clear way) are the foundations of what is now known as evolutionary psychology (EP), or if you prefer, psychology, cognitive linguistics, intentionality, higher order thought, or just animal behavior. Sadly, nobody seems to realize that his works are a vast and unique textbook of descriptive psychology that is as relevant now as the day it was written. He is almost universally ignored by psychology and other behavioral sciences and humanities, and even those few in philosophy who have more or less understood him have not carried the analysis to its logical (psychological) conclusion. His heir apparent, John Searle, refers to him periodically, and his work can be seen as a straightforward extension of Wittgenstein’s, but he does not really get that this is what he is doing. I eventually came to understand much of Wittgenstein by regarding his corpus as the pioneering effort in EP and by starting from his 3rd period works and reading backwards to the proto-Tractatus. It has been extremely revealing to alternate reading Wittgenstein with the writings of hundreds of other philosophers and evolutionary psychologists (as I regard all psychologists and in fact all behavioral scientists, cognitive linguists, and others).

He can be regarded as the pioneer of evolutionary cognitive linguistics - the Top Down analysis of the mind and its evolution via the careful analysis of examples of language use in context to expose the many varieties of language games and the relationships between the primary games of the true-only axiomatic fast thinking of perception and memory and reflexive emotions and acts, and the later evolved dispositional abilities of believing, knowing, thinking, etc., that constitute the true or false propositional secondary language games of slow thinking. With this evolutionary perspective, his works are a breathtaking revelation of human nature that has never been equaled.

The failure (in my view) of even the best thinkers to fully grasp Wittgenstein’s significance is partly due to the limited attention On Certainty (0C) and his other 3rd period works have received, but even more to the inability of philosophers and others to understand how profoundly our view of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, politics, law, morals, ethics, religion, aesthetics, literature (all of them being descriptive psychology), alters once we accept the evolutionary point of view. The dead hand of the blank slate view of behavior still rests heavily on most people, professional or amateur. Steven Pinker’s brilliant ‘The Blank Slate: the modern denial of human nature’ is highly recommended, even though he has no clue about Wittgenstein and hence of what can be regarded as the first really deep investigation into the foundations of human nature.

To say that Searle has carried on Wittgenstein’s work is not to imply that it is a direct result of Wittgenstein study, but rather that because there is only ONE human psychology (for the same reason there is only ONE human cardiology), anyone accurately describing behavior must be saying some variant or extension of what Wittgenstein said. I find most of Searle foreshadowed in Wittgenstein, including versions of the famous Chinese room argument against Strong AI. Incidentally, if the Chinese Room interests you, then you should read Victor Rodych’s excellent, but virtually unknown, supplement on the CR - “Searle Freed of Every Flaw”). Rodych has also written a series of superb papers on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics (i.e., the EP of the axiomatic Primary Language Games (PLG’s) of counting as extended into the endless LG’s of math).

The common ideas (e.g., the subtitle of one of Pinker’s books “The Stuff of Thought: language as a window into human nature”) that language is a window on or some sort of translation of our thinking or even (Fodor) that there must be some other “Language of Thought” of which it is a translation, were rejected by Wittgenstein. He tried to show, with hundreds of continually reanalyzed perspicacious examples of language in action, that language is the best picture we can ever get of thinking, the mind, and human nature, and his whole corpus can be regarded as the development of this idea. He rejected the idea that the Bottom Up approaches of physiology, psychology, and computation could reveal what his Top Down deconstructions of Language Games (LG’s) did. The difficulties he noted are to understand what is always in front of our eyes and to capture vagueness. And so, speech (i.e., oral muscle contractions, the principal way we can interact) is not a window into the mind but is the mind itself, which is expressed by acoustic blasts about past, present, and future acts (i.e., our speech using the later evolved Secondary Language Games (SLG’s) of dispositions - imagining, knowing, meaning, believing, intending, etc.). Some of Wittgenstein’s favorite topics in his later second and his third periods are the different LG’s of the Inner and the Outer - the epiphenomenality of our mental life and the impossibility of private language. The PLG’s are descriptions of our involuntary, system 1, fast thinking, true only, untestable mental states - our perceptions and memories and involuntary acts, while the evolutionarily later SLG’s are descriptions of voluntary, system 2, slow thinking, testable true or false dispositional (and often counterfactual) imagining, supposing, intending, thinking, knowing, believing, etc. He recognized that ‘Nothing is Hidden’ - i.e., our whole psychology and all the answers to all philosophical questions are here in our language (our life), and that the difficulty is not to find the answers but to recognize them as always here in front of us - we just have to stop trying to look deeper.

Wittgenstein makes this point throughout his works in countless examples, and again his whole corpus can be regarded as the effort to make this clear. After all, what exactly is the alternative? Wittgenstein showed over and over that standard ways of describing behavior (i.e., most of philosophy, and much of descriptive psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc.) are either demonstrably false or incoherent. Once we understand Wittgenstein, we realize the absurdity of regarding “language philosophy” as a separate study apart from other areas of behavior, since language is just another name for the mind. And, when Wittgenstein says (as he does many times) that understanding behavior is in no way dependent on the progress of psychology (e.g., “The sterility and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a young science”), he is not legislating the boundaries of science but pointing out the fact that our behavior (mostly speech) is the clearest picture possible of our psychology. FMRI, PET, TCMS, iRNA, computational analogs, AI, and all the rest are fascinating and powerful ways to extend our innate axiomatic psychology, but all they can do is provide the physical basis for our behavior and extend our EP, which remains unchanged (unless genetic engineering is unleashed to change our EP - but then it won’t be us anymore). The true-only axioms of ‘’On Certainty’’ are Wittgenstein’s (and later Searles) “bedrock” or “background”, which we now call evolutionary psychology (EP), and which is traceable to the automated true-only reactions of bacteria, which evolved and operates by the mechanism of inclusive fitness (IF). See the recent works of Trivers and others for a popular intro to IF or Bourke’s superb “Principles of Social Evolution” for a professional intro.

Beginning with their innate true-only, nonempirical (nontestable) responses to the world, animals extend their axiomatic understanding via deductions into further true only understandings (“theorems” as we might call them, but of course like many words, this is a complex language game even in the context of mathematics). Tyrannosaurs and mesons become as unchallengable as the existence of our two hands or our breathing. This totally changes one's view of human nature. Theory of Mind (TOM) is not a theory at all but a group of true-only Understandings of Agency (UOA, a term I devised 10 years ago) which newborn animals (including flies and worms if UOA is suitably defined) have and subsequently extend greatly (in higher eukaryotes). Likewise, the Theory of Evolution ceased to be a theory for any normal, rational, intelligent person before the end of the 19th century and for Darwin at least half a century earlier. One CANNOT help but incorporate T. rex and all that is relevant to it into our innate background via the inexorable workings of EP. Once one gets the logical (psychological) necessity of this, it is truly stupefying that even the brightest and the best seem not to grasp this most basic fact of human life (with a tip of the hat to Kant, Searle, and a few others). And incidentally, the equation of logic and our axiomatic psychology is essential to understanding Wittgenstein and human nature (as DMS, but as far as I know nobody else, points out).

So, most of our shared public experience (culture) becomes a true-only extension of our axiomatic EP and cannot be found mistaken without threatening our sanity. A corollary, nicely explained by DMS and elucidated in his own unique manner by Searle, is that the skeptical view of the world and other minds (and a mountain of other nonsense) cannot really get a foothold, as “reality” is the result of involuntary fast thinking axioms and not testable propositional attitudes.

It became clear to me recently that the innate true-only axioms Wittgenstein is occupied with throughout his work, and almost exclusively in OC, are equivalent to the fast thinking or System One of Tversky and Kahneman (see his “Thinking Fast and Slow”), which is involuntary and unconscious and which corresponds to the mental states of perception and memory, as Wittgenstein notes over and over in endless examples. One might call these “intracerebral reflexes” (maybe 99% of all our cerebration if measured by energy use in the brain). Our slow or reflective, more or less “conscious” (beware another network of language games!) brain activity corresponds to what Wittgenstein characterized as “dispositions” or “inclinations”, which refer to abilities or possible actions, are not mental states, and do not have any definite time of occurrence. But disposition words like “knowing”, “understanding”, “thinking”, “believing”, which Wittgenstein discussed extensively, have at least two basic uses or language games - a peculiar philosophical use by Moore (whose papers inspired Wittgenstein to write OC) which refers to the true-only sentences based on direct perceptions and memory, i.e., our innate axiomatic psychology (‘I know these are my hands’), and their normal use as dispositions, which are acted out and which can become true or false (‘I know my way home’).

The investigation of involuntary fast thinking has revolutionized psychology, economics (e.g., Kahneman’s Nobel prize), and other disciplines under names like “priming”, “framing”, “heuristics”, and “biases”. Of course, these too are language games, so there will be more and less useful ways to use these words, and studies and discussions will vary from “pure” System One to combinations of One and Two, but presumably not ever of slow System Two dispositional thinking only, since any thought or intentional action cannot occur without involving much of the intricate network of the “cognitive modules”, “inference engines”, “intracerebral reflexes”, “automatisms”, “cognitive axioms” or “background” or “bedrock” (as Wittgenstein and later Searle call our EP).

Dispositions were (and still commonly are) called “propositional attitudes”, but this can be quite misleading, as Wittgenstein and DMS point out. Here, as throughout his works, understanding is bedeviled by possible alternative and consequently often infelicitous translations from Wittgenstein’s often unedited handwritten German notes, with “Satz” being often incorrectly rendered as “proposition” (which in this context is a testable or falsifiable statement) when referring to our psychological axioms, as opposed to “sentence”, which can be applied to our axiomatic true-only statements such as “these are my hands” or “Tyrannosaurs were large carnivorous dinosaurs that lived about 50 million years ago” (and since this is an unavoidable extension of our psychology, what does this imply about creationists?).

Incidentally, regarding the view of Wittgenstein as the major pioneer in EP, it seems nobody has noticed that he very clearly explained several times specifically and many times in passing, the psychology behind what later became known as the Wason Test - now a mainstay of EP research.

The view that even the brightest philosophers do not really grasp the context in which they are operating is perhaps most strikingly supported when they attempt to define philosophy. In recent years, I have seen such definitions by two of those I hold in highest regard - Graham Priest and John Searle, and of course they mention truth, language, reality, etc., but not a word to suggest it is a description of our innate universal axiomatic psychology. Priest, by the way, has noted that Wittgenstein was the first to predict the emergence of paraconsistent logic.

Über Gewissheit = On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein

On Certainty is a significant philosophical work. It consists of notes penned by Ludwig Wittgenstein during four distinct periods within the eighteen months prior to his death on 29 April 1951.

The book predominantly delves into epistemological concerns. A recurring theme is that there are certain things that must be beyond doubt for human practices to be feasible, even including the very act of raising doubts. As Wittgenstein put it, "A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt."

This book has been translated into Persian under different titles. For instance, "در ب‍اب‌ ی‍ق‍ی‍ن" (On Certainty) was translated by Malik Hosseini, and "دربارهٔ یقین" (About Certainty) was translated by Mosi Dibaj. It was published in various editions in Tehran by different publishers.

Interestingly, the book originally included a section on "the color problem," but this part was published separately. The book was finally published in 1969, several years after Wittgenstein's passing.

The date of dissemination in the Persian context was 31/04/1399 Hijri Shamsi. It has had a profound impact on the field of philosophy and continues to be studied and debated by scholars worldwide.

Wittgenstein is like a shining piece of paper for the scalpel of rationality to cut.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a renowned philosopher, had a profound impact on the field of philosophy. His works were filled with unique insights and innovative ideas.

He was not afraid to challenge the traditional ways of thinking and used his sharp intellect to dissect complex philosophical problems.

Wittgenstein's approach was like using a scalpel to carefully cut through the layers of confusion and reach the core of the matter.

His ideas were as bright as a shining piece of paper, attracting the attention of many scholars and inspiring them to explore new avenues of thought.

Wittgenstein's contributions to philosophy continue to be studied and debated to this day, leaving a lasting imprint on the intellectual landscape.

I read Wittgenstein in Qom. That is, during all the time when I was moving (by bus) from the darkness of night towards the dawn.

In Qom, I was more amazed by Wittgenstein regarding certainty.

Wittgenstein was not what I had imagined. Later, I read three of his books.

Regarding certainty, it is the result of the last two or three years of his life, which was later apparently collected and published.

I have drawn two different aspects of him.

One. Wittgenstein in the service of renewal.

Two. Wittgenstein in betrayal of renewal.

My friends believe in the second option. But I have understood Wittgenstein as the continuation of modernity and in the service of the renewed world. Of course, for now. Let it be that it is not so.