It’s been a pretty good week most things considered. I’ve kept plugging away at some of the Wittgenstein scholarship and have some ideas that I’d like to try out. They need to stew a little before they’ll be ready, though. The main piece of work that I tackled this week, fairly early on, was Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s Understanding Wittgenstein’s ‘On Certainty’. I’ve spent a bit of time working through my thoughts on it. It’s worth reading, if you’re interested in the later Wittgenstein, but there’s a tendency towards more systematic theorisation and clear categorisation that does run a bit against the Wittgenstein-vibe. Still, I do think that that sort of systematising has its place. Even when it’s misguided, or fundamentally wrong, the nature of our mistakes tells us something about the space we’re working in.

Moyal-Sharrock pretty consistently hammers the point that just a similar look doesn’t entail a similar use. That’s a fairly consistent Wittgenstein-ism, but it is useful to keep in mind explicitly when thinking about how we ought to read his work. At points, though, I think that this leads her to make some mistakes. It might actually be more accurate to say that Wittgenstein makes these mistakes. My concern is that the distinction between ‘real’ doubt and doubt-behaviour is a little spurious. I think that we ought to take people at their word and, as a result, I think that sceptical doubts of our basic commitments are real. I certainly feel some anxiety about them!

Another perspective on this is worked through by Duncan Pritchard, who takes their to be a difference between scepticism as a paradox and a position. That is, it’s either a tension in our ordinary conceptions of knowledge or a real position that people take. He argues that a difference between Hume and Wittgenstein is that Wittgenstein targets scepticism-as-paradox and Hume targets scepticism-as-position. The trick for Wittgenstein (and this maps the doubt/doubt-behaviour distinction) is that there is, in fact, no real tension in our ordinary conceptions of knowledge. Philosophers effectively invent that tension, by taking our practices out of context.

From what I can tell, Pritchard and Moyal-Sharrock are more-or-less in agreement on this particular question. I suppose that I think Hume has it right and Wittgenstein has it wrong. Sceptical ‘doubt’ is real and possible, it’s just unstable.

I’ve also been reading more Edmund White, again. I finished Jack Holmes and His Friend pretty quickly, it’s a fairly light read. It’s okay, I enjoyed it certainly, but there’s a bit of cruelty to it that surprised me. It’s just one of those minor paradoxes we live with, compassion and cruelty often seem to go together. There are also a few odd moments, particularly at the start of the novel, where the structure seems a little mixed up. I’m not sure that it was edited as closely as it perhaps should have been.