On Certainty Wittgenstein Summary

With this lesson, we begin a new unit on epistemology, which is the philosophical study of knowledge claims. In this first lesson on epistemology, we begin by examining the question “What do we mean when we say we know something?” What exactly is knowledge? We will begin with a presentation that introduces the traditional definition of knowledge. Wood then discusses some of the basic issues raised in the study of epistemology and then presents an approach to epistemology that focuses on obtaining the intellectual virtues, a point we will elaborate on in the next lesson.

The second argument, is the dream argument and provides better circumstances to doubt all that is reasonable to doubt than the

| The study of knowledge: What constitutes knowledge, the nature of knowledge, and whether knowledge is possible

I spy with my little eye something blue, or is it purple, maybe green? I Spy was one of my favorite games when I was a little girl. Almost everyone as a child that I know played this game, and if you did, and your experience was anything like mine, you got stuck on an object or two a couple of times. If you didn’t play, eye spy was a game where someone said a color of something they saw and you would have to guess what object it was or vice versa. Was it our own vision at fault or that of our friends that we couldn’t find what we were searching for? Doesn’t matter since someone saw something they didn’t actually see. Stephen Jay Gould, a teacher of several subjects at Harvard University, discusses how our brain can play tricks on us in his essay titled “Some Close Encounters of a Mental Kind.” Although our minds are powerful things, what we see, or remember seeing, can be wrong.

By chiefly drawing on part II of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI), I will advance the claim that his concepts of aspect perception and aspect dawning have ethical implications. These ethical implications are minimally worth considering, or maximally something that holds value. This paper is divided into three sections. Section one begins by defining aspect-perception and aspect-dawning, and then proceeds to distinguish ordinary perceptions of ‘seeing’ from visual perceptions of ‘seeing-as’. Section two starts by citing relevant passages where Wittgenstein alludes to possible examples of aspect perception and aspect dawning. By building on these

(p. 16). The author points out that regardless of the discipline being discussed, everyone formulates their belief system based on their own particular worldview.

when it comes to knowledge:" This indeed was a godlike science, and I ardently desired to

However, it was not the same story with the left hands of the patients (connected to the right hemisphere). They could match and point at the objects without problem; proving again the lack of speech ability that the right hemisphere has.

During the first few weeks of class we’ve gone through various texts in order to better our understanding of human knowledge. We have talked about Christianity St. Matthew “The Sermon on the Mount”, Plato and “The Allegory of the Cave”, “The Four Idols” of Sir Francis Bacon, Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”, and even Carl Jung and “The Structure of the Psyche”. All these texts may have been written in different eras and different places, but they have one thing in common, and that is their understandings of human nature and knowledge, and how they demonstrate to us epistemology (how we know) and metaphysics (what human beings know).

Even when someone tells us a story, no matter how much detail they include, we can never fully understand it, feel the emotions they felt, and so on. To this, I argue, much like Rene Descartes in his Meditations of the first philosophy, I believe that while we can call pretty much all things into doubt (Including testimony of others), it doesn’t necessarily make it practical. To question all testimony and information given to us by others is quite solipsistic and would make anyone’s life very

“These skeptics created a grassroots network of amateurs and succeeded in raising the first doubts about the official narrative. They helped to create a culture of suspicion that continues to the present day” (p.673)

Therefore one who believes in a certain miracle or religion must have disbelief in all others. This, he argues, reduces the credibility of any miracle or religion because there is no reason for one faith tradition to be correct and all the others false, when it is more likely that none are correct: “in destroying a rival system, it likewise destroys the credit of those miracles” (p.121, gp.98). And yet, in the context of this argument, while it is logical that not every miracle report can be true, this does not prove that all miracles are false either.

It has been a common assumption that “seeing” comes from the ability of one’s eye to

The Gettier Problem is a widely acknowledged philosophical question, named in honour of Edmund Gettier who discovered it in 1963, which questions whether a piece of information that someone believes for invalid reasons, but by mere happenstance is correct, counts as knowledge. Before the Gettier paper was published, it was widely believed that the Tripartite Theory of Knowledge- which states that Justified True Belief equaled knowledge- was fact. This means that with three conditions, one could know something. Firstly, if you believe something, secondly, if you have justification for believing, and thirdly, that your belief is in fact true. If all three of these conditions were met, then this amounted to knowledge. However, with the publication of Gettier’s paper, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, he attempted to prove, with the aid of a number of problems, that it was not sufficient to have only these three conditions in order for a belief to become knowledge.

The connections between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Soren Kierkegaard as philosophers are not at all immediately obvious. On the surface, Wittgenstein deals with matters concerning the incorrect use of philosophical language and Kierkegaard focuses almost exclusively on answering the question 'how to become a Christian'. But this account belies deeper structural similarities between these men's important works. Thus, this paper suggests that their methods, rather than exclusively content, contain a strong parallel on which a natural and hopefully fruitful examination of their work can be based.