Hinges and doubt

Some things you never check, and you could not get through a single day if you tried. That you have two hands, that the floor will hold you, that the people around you are not cleverly built robots: these are not conclusions you reached after weighing the evidence. They are what your weighing of evidence stands on. In his last notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein argued that doubt only makes sense against a background of things that are not in doubt. Seeing this can loosen the grip of doubts that have no grounds and no end.

What Wittgenstein actually wrote

Between 1949 and his death in April 1951, Wittgenstein wrote around 670 remarks on knowledge and certainty. The trigger was his old Cambridge colleague G.E. Moore, who had answered the sceptic by holding up his hands and declaring that he knew they were hands. Talks about Moore with Norman Malcolm, whom he visited in America in 1949, set him going. Moore, he felt, had noticed something real but described it wrongly. “I know” belongs to claims that can be checked, defended and occasionally withdrawn. Moore’s examples are not like that. They are not so much known as stood on. The remarks were edited by Anscombe and von Wright and published in 1969 as On Certainty.

Wer an allem zweifeln wollte, der würde auch nicht bis zum Zweifel kommen. Das Spiel des Zweifelns selbst setzt schon die Gewißheit voraus.

Whoever wanted to doubt everything would not even get as far as doubting. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.

On Certainty §115

The point is logical, not psychological. A doubt is a move in a practice: you suspect a figure in a spreadsheet, so you check the source. That only works if much stays fixed meanwhile: what the numbers mean, that you can read. Wittgenstein’s image for those fixed points is the hinge.

D. h. die Fragen, die wir stellen, und unsre Zweifel beruhen darauf, daß gewisse Sätze vom Zweifel ausgenommen sind, gleichsam die Angeln, in welchen jene sich bewegen.

That is, the questions we ask and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, as it were the hinges on which those turn.

On Certainty §341

In §343 he refuses the gloomy reading: it is not that we would love to check everything and, lacking time, settle for assumptions. The fixity is what makes the movement possible.

Wenn ich will, daß die Türe sich drehe, müssen die Angeln feststehen.

If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.

On Certainty §343

Doubt needs grounds

A second thread runs through the book. “Doesn’t one need grounds for doubt?” he asks in §122, and later, more bluntly:

Man zweifelt aus bestimmten Gründen.

One doubts for particular reasons.

On Certainty §458

Right after that comes a shopkeeper who wants to examine every apple without any reason, just to be really sure. Why, Wittgenstein asks, should he not then examine his examination (§459)? A doubt without grounds has no stopping point, because nothing could count as settling it. The practical lesson: a doubt you cannot say how to settle is not deeper carefulness. It has quietly left the game in which doubting makes sense.

Where this shows up in ordinary life

• At work. You check the sent folder once to see that the email went out. Checking it a fifth time is not being more careful than the first time. It is a different activity.
• In relationships. “Does she really love me?” can be a real question with real grounds: something changed, something was said. Asked without any ground, every reassurance immediately becomes a fresh object of suspicion. Asking “what exactly is my reason?” separates the two.
• In online discussions. “But how can you know anything at all?” often appears just when an argument is being lost. Ask what the other person would accept as evidence. If the answer is “nothing”, you are no longer having a disagreement about facts.
• When studying. A good research question doubts one thing while holding many others fixed.

An exercise: find what you stand on

1. Write down a doubt that keeps coming back, as a single question.
2. Next to it, write the concrete ground for it: an event, a fact, a sign. If you cannot find one, note that too.
3. Ask what would settle it. If you can describe a check, do it once and write down the result.
4. If nothing you can imagine would ever settle it, notice that. This is a doubt without a game.
5. Finally, list a few things you are relying on while you doubt: that your memory of yesterday is roughly reliable, that words mean what they usually mean. You do not have to prove these. You are already using them.

Hinges can move, and they are no licence for dogma

Wittgenstein did not think hinges are eternal truths. He compares them to a riverbed that guides the flow of thought and can itself shift (§97). One of his own examples of something that stood fast was that nobody had ever been on the moon. Within twenty years that had changed. So calling your political opinion a hinge in order to end a discussion misuses the idea: hinges show themselves in what you do, not in what you insist on. Scholars also disagree about what hinges are, and whether they are propositions at all. The concept page on hinge propositions and the Stanford Encyclopedia give an overview, and the German text is freely available online.

What this can and cannot do

This is philosophy, not therapy. Wittgenstein was answering Moore and the sceptic, not writing about worry. Seeing the shape of a doubt sometimes helps you put it down. But persistent anxiety or compulsive checking is not cured by an argument, and it deserves the help of a doctor or psychologist.