Nuno Venturinha

Sixty years after its first edition, there is an increasing consensus among scholars that the work posthumously published as _Philosophical Investigations _represents something that is far from a complete picture of Wittgenstein’s second book project. G.H. von Wright’s seminal research on the _Nachlass_ was an important contribution in this direction, showing that the Wittgenstein papers can reveal much more than the source of specific remarks. This book specifically explores Wittgenstein’s _Philosophical_ _Investigations_ from the different angles of its originary conceptions, including the mathematical texts, shedding new light on fundamental issues in twentieth century and contemporary philosophy. Leading authorities in the field focus on newly published or hitherto unpublished sources for the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work and a Wittgenstein typescript, translated for the first time into English, is included as an appendix.

In recent years, by virtue of significant developments in general epistemology, there have been growing attempts to establish moral epistemology as a subject matter in its own right. The idea is to apply traditional epistemic concepts to moral issues in order to determine the kind of knowledge involved in propositions dealing with morality. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons’ volume Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology was an im-portant contribution to this field, exploring stances like coherentism, contextualism, foundationalism and intuitionism as possible answers to moral justification or moral scepticism. Aaron Zimmerman’s Moral Epistemology has also been influential in its treatment of themes such as moral disagreement and nihilism. In his attempt to throw light on “an epistemologically valuable moral deduction”, Zimmerman notes that “there are theorists who deny the very existence of beliefs with distinctively moral content”.

4.1 Bolzano and Frege—The rejection of psychologism in logic—Can there be just “signs of signs”?—Frege’s notions of “sense”, “reference” and “representation”—Our images of things as psychological—Relativity of any representations: their problematic subjectivity. 4.2 The objectivity of Frege’s “thoughts”—Importance of context—Truth-values and verification as conditions of knowledge—True and false judgments. 4.3 Cases of “indirect reference”: truth and falsity of our beliefs—Frege on intersubjectivity—The social nature of language—The intrinsic non-truth of our thoughts—Inevitability of admitting a reality in itself that is independent from subjective perspectives—Frege’s “third realm”: objectivity as non-actual—The bankruptcy of correspondism—Popper, Dummett and Soames on the dangers of metaphysical realism or Platonism—Analytic and synthetic truths: the timelessness of both timeless and temporal thoughts—Pursuing solid epistemic standards not only for context-independent but also for context-dependent knowledge.

2.1 The external and the internal world—There is more in the universe than objects and states of consciousness—Animal and human certitudes—Sosa on “animal knowledge” and “reflective knowledge”—What is peculiar to man: cultural historicity as a meta-competence. 2.2 History as science versus history as worldview—Unreliability of our information sources—Distinction between strong and weak knowledge: how the immediacy or scientificity of strong knowledge contrasts with the testimonial character of weak knowledge—Differences to Malcolm’s view—Russell on the acquaintance with “historical knowledge” and the case of scientific testimony—Epistemological precision: Quine’s radical empiricism—Immediate, mediate and scientific knowledge as interconnected: their problematic heterogeneity—Personal perspectives and interpersonal praxis—The world primarily consists of states of affairs, which are independent of our subjectivity. 2.3 Relevance of the ontological intertwinedness suggested by the early Wittgenstein : the concepts of “case”, “fact” and “state of affairs”—Lewis’ understanding of what facts are—The difficulties posed by the Tractarian solipsistic-realistic representation—Looking for a halfway between extreme internalism and naïve materialism—Each event in the world necessarily exceeds the many possible representations (true or false) that construe it so-and-so—The world as depository of what exists or has existed—DeRose and the variable truth-conditionality that seems specific to a contextualist approach.

1.1 Interrelatedness of words—The pronoun “I”: its systematicity—Personal identity and otherness as proto-beliefs. 1.2 Affirmative and negative sentences—The infinity that is abstractly excluded when we affirm something—Impossibility of a representational vacuum—What context allows us to conceive as meaningful—Generalization of descriptions: our multilevel interpretative schemes. 1.3 The prepositions of place, with their cross-referentiality, as illustrative of what the logic of thought consents and rules out—Lewis’ “rules of accommodation”: what is permissible and comparatively near-permissible. 1.4 Definites and indefinites: how the latter have a representative dependence on the former—Kripke on “indefinite” definite descriptions—We do not always need to deictically specify the characteristics of objects. 1.5 Kinds of beings: natural and technical—The presuppositions that our picture of the world requires—Dretske’s “relevant alternatives” theory—Cohen on defeasibility: intersubjective and subjective evidence and opacity—Integration of beliefs—Acknowledging context-sensitivity in our knowledge attributions should not mean rejecting an unambiguous conception of knowledge—Ontological stratifications and the role of contextualization. 1.6 Language as opposed to langue—The priority of linguistic rules over word coining—Discourse as involving language and reason—Why there cannot be non-conceptual thoughts: the linguistic basis of sensation-thoughts—Davidson’s emphasis on the correlation between language and thinking—Our awareness of reality as primordially contextual—Rejection of Baumann’s view according to which there can be “non-linguistic attributions of knowledge”.

7.1 Theoretical fragility and natural solidity of our situation—Evidence as immediate—Does it make sense to seek for a justification of evidence?—Wittgenstein and the indefeasibility of our “system of evidence”—Two kinds of doubt: their local and global epistemological effects—Certainty and security—Greco on the epistemic status of “contextually basic beliefs” in Wittgenstein’s later writings—Hinge propositions: what they are and what they are for—Idea of natural ontology—Wittgensteinian contextualism and the thereness of our evidence. 7.2 Gil on common and scientific evidence—The non-discursiveness of what presents itself to us as evident: idea of “hallucination”—Evidence as transpositional in regard to all perceptive content: the status of this primordial modality—Why evidence is groundless. 7.3 Primary and secondary evidence—Gil on assent: reminiscences of Zeno —The difficulty of invalidating the feeling of reality prompted by our acts of assent. 7.4 Gil’s effort to avoid a transcendental deduction: an evidence that does not depend on us—The phantasm of a modal categorization—Similarities between Husserl and Gil apropos of the genesis of evidence—Pritchard on “epistemic angst” and “epistemic vertigo”: the phenomenological basis of the latter—Williams’ dismissal of “knowledge-specific scepticism”: beyond the sceptical problems of typical contextualist analyses.

11.1 The outer world as an ingredient of the inner world—Reconsideration of what must be naturally assumed: levels of belief—Husserl’s retrieval of Leibniz’s concept of “monad”—A plain admission: monadic otherness—Influence of Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology—Limitations of the Husserlian idea of an “open community of monads” for a social epistemology. 11.2 Wittgenstein ’s “language games” and the acquisition of language—Learning a word implies mastering epistemic fundamentals that are needed for disambiguation according to the context in question—Wittgenstein and contextualism—Contextual and extra-contextual standards: a pragmatic view of knowledge requires that we relax our epistemic demands—Cohen on social groups and reasoning abilities—Objectivity reconsidered—The relativistic character of a contextualist view and Wittgenstein’s notion of “inherited background”—Epistemic fundamentals are not socially determined—Distinguishing between ontological and social dependency as a form of conciliating objectivity and context-sensitivity. 11.3 Wittgenstein on certainty and Moore’s misinterpretation of the sociability of language—The grammar of “to doubt” and “to know”—How the bipolarity of propositions including these verbs works in some contexts but not in others—Ontological suspicions as illusive: they constitute merely violations of logical grammar—Radicalizing the scenario: a closer look at radical scepticism—Pritchard and the Wittgensteinian “groundlessness of our believing”—Why an “epistemic angst” only makes sense at a second-order level of consideration, which presupposes a first-order assimilation of the world: our “arational hinge commitments”—Accessing Pritchard’s problem of the “epistemic vertigo”: Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation—A moral-epistemological way-out?

8.1 Cartesian foundations: the role of doubt—The assumption of the ego cogito as minimal evidence—Why our faculties, including the sensitive one, can be reduced to mental faculties—Descartes’ goal: justifying the internal experience through an external order—God’s qualities: significance of existence—Difference between “formal reality” and “objective reality”. 8.2 Descartes on essentiality and existentiality—The scholastic tradition: in what way can there be in generated beings a “metaphysical distinction and composition between essence and existence”?—Beyond the mere impossibility of self-generation: actuality as non-essential—Two ways of looking at compositionality—Heidegger’s view of the problem. 8.3 Ontic and ontological statuses—The kind of existence we attribute—Physical and metaphysical worlds: why the seeming materiality of things is not enough to objectify them—Descartes on dreaming: its context-saturation—Modal uncertainty as unrestricted: analogy with astrophysical black holes—Imagination and necessitation—Flaws of Descartes’ conclusions—Sosa’s understanding of dreaming—Greco and Williams on Cartesian contextualism—The trouble with bringing formality and objectivity back together.

This discussion note surveys the main themes explored in Mona Simion’s Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context, paying particular attention to her treatment of kk compatibilism. I argue that in her attempt to establish “epistemic independence”—the disentanglement of epistemic evaluation from pragmatic considerations—Simion overemphasizes the role of context-dependence in Timothy Williamson’s work. I show that if we are to take Williamson at his word, we must appreciate the distinctive anti-sceptical insensitive invariantism at the core of his epistemology—an approach that stands in contrast to both contextualism and subject-sensitive invariantism.

This paper focuses on Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s concept of “hinges”, as presented in her recent book Certainty in Action: Wittgenstein on Language, Mind and Epistemology. Moyal-Sharrock’s “Hinge Epistemology” proposes that basic certainties, or hinges, resist the regress problem of epistemic justification, serving as ungrounded and nonpropositional foundations of knowledge. This aligns with her “Kink-free Enactivism”, which responds to Hutto and Myin’s perspective on the kinky emergence of higher forms of cognition. While Moyal-Sharrock rejects the idea that intrinsic biological structures determine noncognitive certainties, I suggest that we explore the possibility of integrating a biological dimension into her framework to better address the challenge of external world scepticism.

Este artigo aborda a reação de Frege a Kant e questiona uma influente interpretação, defendida por Jim Conant, de acordo com a qual Frege subscreve os princípios essenciais da filosofia de Kant, nomeadamente a sua conceção antipsicologista avant la lettre da lógica pura. Eu defendo que existem diferenças profundas de ponto de vista entre eles, as quais alimentam o seu bem conhecido desacordo acerca da natureza da aritmética, e que a rejeição de Frege de algumas das premissas fundamentais da epistemologia kantiana levou-o a uma forma bastante distinta de antipsicologismo. No centro da disputa Frege-Kant está um entendimento completamente diferente da objetividade, a qual aos olhos de Frege não pode ser concebida como uma expressão do nosso considerar algo verdadeiro, como resulta do enquadramento de Kant.