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Mistakes and Mental Disturbances: Pleasants, Wittgenstein, and Basic Moral Certainty

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Abstract

In his article, “Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty,” Nigel Pleasants argues that killing an innocent, non-threatening person is wrong. It is, he argues, “a basic moral certainty.” He believes our basic moral certainties play the “same kind of foundational role as [our] basic empirical certaint[ies] do.” I believe this is mistaken. There is not “simply one kind of foundational role” that certainty plays. While I think Pleasants is right to affiliate his proposition with a Wittgensteinian form of certainty, he exposes himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty regarding how we acquire it: is certainty natural, is it social? In this paper, I present two ways in which we come to possess certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement by family and culture.

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Notes

  1. See Plato’s Theaetetus. Theaetetus’ definition of knowledge is that knowledge is “true belief combined with reason” St. 201c-d. That true belief is converted into knowledge when one gives an account (or reason) can be found in other places in Plato’s writing, e.g., Meno 98a, Symposium 202a.

  2. There is an enormous amount of literature on the “justification” condition. A brief list would include: Alston, William, Epistemic Justification. Essays in the Theory of Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. BonJour, Laurence, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985. Cohen, Stewart, “Justification and Truth,” Philosophical Studies, 46: 279–95, 1984. Gettier, Edmund, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Analysis, 23: 121–123, 1963. Goldman, Alvin, “What is Justified Belief?” in Justification and Knowledge, ed. George S. Pappas. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979. Plantinga, Alvin, Warrant: The Current Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Williamson, Timothy, Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  3. For more on Wittgenstein as a new kind of foundationalist, see Avrum Stroll’s Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s “Logic in Action: Wittgenstein’s Logical Pragmatism and the Impotence of Scepticism” in Philosophical Investigations 2003 (26:2), 125–148; Jose Medina’s “Wittgenstein’s Social Naturalism: The Idea of Second Nature After The Philosophical Investigations” in The Third Wittgenstein: Post-Investigations Works, Moyal-Sharrock, D. (ed.) Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2004; Robert Greenleaf Brice’s “Recognizing Targets: Wittgenstein’s Exploration of A New Kind Of Foundationalism in On Certainty,” in Philosophical Investigations 2009 (32:1), 1–22.

  4. There are other examples in popular fiction that question what it means to be a “person.” In Justin Leiber’s fictional dialogue, Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?, Washoe-Delta, a female chimpanzee, and AL, a state-of-the-art computer, are scheduled to be “terminated” when the space station they currently reside on, Finland station, is decommissioned. AL is a high-functioning computer whom we might attribute characteristics we normally apply to persons, e.g., he “calculates,” “reasons,” “deduces,” “predicts,” etc. While at the opposite extreme there is Washoe-Delta, who possesses other sorts of characteristics we typically attribute to persons, intentional states, e.g., she lives, senses, feels, and these are illustrated in her “wanting,” “meaning,” “crying,” “hating,” etc. But do Washoe-Delta and AL count as “persons?” And if so, what sort of moral responsibility do we have to them? (1985, 4).

  5. My thanks to an anonymous referee for providing me with the language used here in my objection.

  6. Indeed, at one point, Wilson even admits that altruism is “obviously more cultural than genetic.” “To anticipate a common objection raised by many social scientists and others,” says Wilson, “let me grant at once that the form and intensity of altruistic acts are to a large extent culturally determined. Human social evolution is obviously more cultural than genetic” (1978, 153).

  7. Apart from the non-reconciliation of the two approaches, there is a further problem still. According to the bottom-up approach, our certainty that the earth exists, for example, is borne out in our actions, the things we do upon it. But how would one’s certainty of P be exhibited in action? Would one simply not perform the deed? Is inaction to count as action? P is a negative rule that involves refraining from certain actions.

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Correspondence to Robert Greenleaf Brice.

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Brice, R.G. Mistakes and Mental Disturbances: Pleasants, Wittgenstein, and Basic Moral Certainty. Philosophia 41, 477–487 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-012-9385-2

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