Abstract
Contemporary epistemology has explored the notion of a hinge commitment as set out in Wittgenstein’s final notebooks, published as On Certainty. These are usually understood as essentially groundless certainties that provide the necessary framework within which rational evaluations can take place. John Greco has recently offered a striking account of hinge commitments as a distinctive kind of knowledge that he calls ‘common knowledge’. According to Greco, this is knowledge that members of the community get to have without incurring any epistemic burden, and as such is fundamentally different from other kinds of knowledge. I offer a critique of Greco’s proposal. While I agree that there is a variety of knowledge that counts as common knowledge, I contend that it is not to be understood as knowledge that one gets for free as Greco suggests. Moreover, I argue that our hinge commitments do not count as common knowledge—either in Greco’s sense of the term or in the alternative manner that I set out—because properly understood they are not in the market for knowledge at all. In defence of this claim, I suggest that Greco’s conception of a hinge commitment is both missing some crucial elements and also (relatedly) too broad in its extension, in that it encompasses both instances of common knowledge (in my sense of the term) and hinge commitments proper.
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Notes
I will be especially focusing on Greco (2016), which is a particularly clear statement of his position in this regard. See also Greco (2019), where he also engages with hinge epistemology, and Greco (2020, ch. 6), which is effectively an amalgam of these two earlier articles. As an anonymous referee for this journal has pointed out, Greco’s eventual position on the epistemology of our hinge commitments (as articulated in Greco (2020)) may be closer to the kind of constitutivist account offered by, for example, Coliva (2015), whereby our hinge commitments are epistemically rational even in the absence of direct supporting reasons because of the role they play in our rational practices (though unlike Coliva, who regards our hinge commitments as nonetheless unknown, Greco is treating them as known). Even if that is so, however, I think there is a clear rationale for focusing on the intriguing proposal that Greco (2016) explores, not least because, as we will see, it raises an important distinction between common knowledge and our hinge commitments that I don’t think has hitherto been sufficiently recognized.
Henceforth, ‘OC’. Like many commentators working on this topic, Greco describes this notion as a hinge proposition rather than a hinge commitment. In order to keep matters simple, I have opted for my own preferred terminology in this regard, as otherwise we will end up with distinct nomenclature in play when I present my own account of this notion later on. As I explain below, I think what is most important about this Wittgensteinian idea is the nature of the commitment in play, and hence it is important to have a name for it that puts the focus squarely on this feature, rather than on the proposition that the subject is committed to.
Interestingly, Greco doesn’t consider some of the epistemic accounts of hinge propositions that are found in the literature, especially given that his own view is effectively an epistemic account (albeit very different to the leading proposals in the contemporary literature). See, for example, Wright (2004), who argues that hinge commitments can be known in virtue of enjoying a kind of epistemic entitlement, and Coliva (2015), who presents what she calls an ‘extended epistemology’, whereby having hinge commitments can be epistemically rational even in the absence of supporting reasons (and even though such commitments are not known).
While I think Greco is right that there are these variable epistemic burdens that one has to meet in order to gain knowledge, I offer a different explanation of why this is so, one that appeals to anti-risk (/anti-luck) virtue epistemology and the associated notions of positive and negative epistemic dependence. See, for example, Pritchard (2016; 2020).
For a detailed defence of my version of hinge epistemology, see Pritchard (2015, part 2). Naturally, other versions of hinge epistemology are available. For some of the main texts in this regard, see Strawson (1985), McGinn (1989), Williams (1991), Moyal-Sharrock (2004), Wright (2004), Coliva (2015), and Schönbaumsfeld (2016). For a recent survey of this literature, see Pritchard (2017).
Consider, for example, these poignant remarks, which appear towards the end of the fourth and final notebook that makes up On Certainty:
“[Here there is still a big gap in my thinking. And I doubt whether it will be filled now.]
It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.” (OC, §§ 470 − 71).
“[I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys.]” (OC, § 532).
The first of these remarks is dated 5th April, 1951 and the second is dated 16th April ,1951. Wittgenstein died on April 29th, 1951.
There is a prevailing view in epistemology that ignorance is to be understood merely as a lack of knowledge—see, for example, Zimmerman (2008), Le Morvan (2011), and DeNicola (2018). The present discussion reveals the oddity of this kind of view, as it would entail that one was ignorant for failing to know what one could not know. More generally, as I argue in Pritchard (2021a; 2021b), we need to remember that ignorance is a normative standing, and not merely the absence of an epistemic state.
There is also a further issue in play here that Greco overlooks, which is the manner in which our hinge commitments are by their nature obscured from view in everyday life. That is, their very mundanity makes them ordinarily invisible to us (at least qua hinge commitments anyway), such that they are ‘hidden’ in plain sight. As Wittgenstein puts it at one point, they are such that they “lie apart from the route travelled by inquiry.” (OC, § 88). Given that this is so, it will inevitably be the case that assertions involving these claims, including denials that they are known, will be jarring.
Consider, for example, Cotard syndrome, where patients seem convinced that, for instance, they are dead. It’s actually not clear in these cases that the patient’s apparent conviction should be taken at face-value, but even if one does, it doesn’t follow on the account of hinge commitments under discussion that it is a hinge commitment, as it clearly doesn’t stand in the right kind of relationship to the subject’s über hinge commitment. For useful philosophical discussion of Cotard syndrome, and similar psychological disorders, see Bortolotti (2018). For specific critical discussion of how delusions might be understood in the context of a Wittgensteinian hinge epistemology, see Rhodes & Gipps (2008; 2011) and Bortolotti (2011). (I am grateful to an anonymous referee for alerting me to the Rhodes & Gipps papers).
I’m also inclined to regard the inductive proposition that Greco cites—“what has always happened will happen again (or something like it)”—as being a theoretical claim, and hence as not a hinge commitment for this reason, though this case is less clear-cut.
This seems to be a key conclusion of the first notebook that makes up OC, which is primarily concerned with Moore’s (1939) proof of an external world, and thus with idealism (a philosophical thesis). In contrast, the other three notebooks tend to focus on Moorean commonsense certainties, of a kind explored, for example, in Moore (1925). I defend this exegetical point in Pritchard (2015, part 2). See also Williams (2004).
See, especially, OC, § 454, where Wittgenstein makes this distinction explicitly. As he also notes there, the distinction (as we are expressing it) between common knowledge and our hinge commitments is not completely sharp (as distinctions of this kind rarely are).
As noted in endnote 8, there’s also a further conversational awkwardness involved in asserting one’s hinge commitments, which relates to the fact that they are ordinarily obscured from view in everyday life.
I am grateful to two anonymous referees for Synthese for detailed comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to John Greco and Nuno Venturinha.
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Pritchard, D. Hinge commitments and common knowledge. Synthese 200, 186 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03647-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03647-5