Wittgenstein, Global Scepticism and the Primacy of Practice

Abstract

It is sometimes supposed that Wittgenstein’s On Certainty provides a solution to – or better, a dissolution of – the traditional problem of philosophical scepticism. I will argue here that this is at best a misleading way of seeing things. Wittgenstein has important and interesting things to say about scepticism, but they do not by themselves justify a straightforward dismissal of scepticism in its more philosophically challenging forms. I shall also argue that his anti-sceptical argument depends on a commitment to an essentially Kantian transcendentalism which Wittgenstein is unwilling to do more than hint at, but which needs to be more fully articulated before we can come to a conclusion about the success of his case against scepticism. I shall suggest finally that a detailed articulation of the kind of position which Wittgenstein presupposes can be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time.