Certainty as Trust: Belief as a Nonpropositional Attitude

Abstract

Wittgenstein not only rejects knowing as the ultimate empowering assurance underlying our acts and thoughts, he also fills the resulting gap: we do not know that ‘Here is a hand’, ‘I have a body’, ‘There exist people other than myself’, ‘I speak French’; we are certain of these things — objectively certain. If this certainty is a belief, it is a belief that does not have a proposition as its object, and it is a belief that eludes doubt altogether. So, asks Wittgenstein, can one speak of ‘belief’ at all here?

If the shopkeeper wanted to investigate each of his apples without any reason, for the sake of being certain about everything, why doesn’t he have to investigate the investigation? And can one talk of belief here (I mean belief as in ‘religious belief’, not surmise)? All psychological terms merely distract us from the thing that really matters. (OC 459)

Here Wittgenstein has already ruled out that the kind of belief which characterizes the shopkeeper’s unquestioning attitude to his investigation is a propositional belief (it is ‘not surmise’), but he wonders if one can even call it a belief ‘as in “religious belief” ’ — in other words, a kind of faith or belief in? The question is: can hinge certainty be called a belief at all? All psycho-logical terms, worries Wittgenstein, seem to lead us away from the kind of assurance in question here. And yet, he does not give up talk of belief.

To impart propositions without giving their justification is to try to persuade, not to try to teach; and to have accepted such propositions is to believe, not to know.

Gilbert Ryle, ‘A Rational Animal’ (CP II, 428)