Tool 7 is pictures that hold us captive. This is Wittgenstein at his most diagnostic. Most philosophical problems don’t start with bad logic, they start with a certain picture, a model that takes over and makes certain questions feel unavoidable. Once the picture is in place, we demand answers that only makes sense within the picture, and then we’re surprised that nothing satisfies.

What it looks like in practice is simple. We say meaning must be the thing that accompanies a word, a rule must be soemthing that forces the next step, an inner feeling must be an object that guarantees the correct label, the mind must be a private theatre, certainty must be absolute, knowledge must be proof. None of these are argued for at first. They feel obvious because the picture is doing the work.

Wittgenstein’s move isn’t to refute the picture with a counter theory. He puts it on the table, then asks: how does this picture fit with our actual language games? What do we count as understanding here, what counts as a mistake, what counts as correction, what would it look like to apply this picture across cases? Often the picture collapses under that pressure, not because it’s false, but because it isn’t actually guiding our use, it’s distorting our use.

A quick example is the picture of an inner label. The temptation is, I have a private inner thing, I inspect it, and that inspection fixes the meaning. Wittgenstein’s reply is to show that the picture can’t supply standards of correctness, because any “inner pointing” still needs a rule for what counts as the same again. Once you see that, the urge to treat meaning as a private object loses its grip. The word’s meaning doesn’t float behind the scenes, it shows itself in the role the word plays in a practice.

So, find the picture, name it, and then test it by returning to ordinary use and to the differences between cases. When the picture stops looking compulsory, the philosophical pressure often disappears with it.

The “captive picture”

People think: “Meaning is a thing in my head. I understand a word because I’m focusing on that inner thing.”

Wittgenstein’s move

He says: stop guessing. Look at what we call “understanding” in real life.

Put 5 everyday cases side by side

Ask: what shows that someone understands?

Instruction: “Bring me a red book.”
They bring a red book. If they bring a blue one, we say they didn’t understand.

Word use: “Use the word ‘promise’ in a sentence.”
They use it correctly. They can explain the difference between a promise and a prediction.

Joke: “Get this joke.”
They laugh at the right spot, or can explain why it’s funny.

Directions: “Do you understand how to get to the station?”
They can get there, or give the route to someone else.

Math rule: “Continue: 2, 4, 6, 8…”
They write 10, 12, 14… If they write 2, 4, 6, 8, 16… we correct them.

What you notice

In all these cases, we don’t check for an inner object. We look at what they do, how they go on, and whether they can be corrected.

The point

Once you see these cases together, the “meaning is a thing in the head” picture stops feeling necessary. Meaning shows up in the use and the standards of the practice, not in a private inner item.

That’s what an overview is: you line up the examples until the tempting picture loses its grip on you.

Wittgenstein’s focus was on how we understand each other through language , and how we then use that language when we are alone with our thoughts. Phenomenologists focus on how perception is felt bodily. For both Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, feelings are not inner data but world-directed engagements. — Joshs

Wittgenstein isn’t mainly explaining “how we understand each other,” and he isn’t doing an inside to outside story from public talk to private thought. He’s doing grammar, how our words for feeling, meaning, and understanding actually function, what counts as correct use, and what pictures mislead us. And while some phenomenologists do emphasize embodied, world-involving experience, that doesn’t capture Wittgenstein’s point. He doesn’t need to say feelings are “world-directed engagements” to reject the inner data picture, his point is that inner feelings aren’t private objects that fix meaning.

I think your point would be better served in a separate thread.

:up:

Without inner feelings there would be no Form of Life. There would be no social activities such as playing football, no cultural events such as going to the theatre, no language game, no financial systems, no production, distribution and trade of goods and services, no Philosophy Forum.

As our Form of Life would literally not exist without our inner feelings, in this sense, it seems that the ultimate foundation can only be “inner feelings”. — RussellA

Yes, without inner life there’d be no human form of life, that's obvious. No hunger, fear, joy, pain, interest, boredom, no motives to act, no point to practices. I’m not disputing that. But it doesn’t follow that inner feelings are the ultimate foundation in the sense of what fixes meaning, normativity, or rule following.

Inner feelings are part of the background that makes our practices possible. The foundation Wittgenstein is talking about, when he talks about bedrock or what stands fast, isn’t a hidden inner item that guarantees correctness. It’s the public practice itself, viz., training, shared responses, correction, agreement in judgement, the whole web in which “right and wrong use” has a place. If you try to make inner feelings the foundation in the stronger sense, you collapse correctness into “whatever seems right to me,” and you lose the very distinction between seeming and being correct that rule following requires.

I’ll grant the first claim, no inner life, no human world. But the conclusion doesn’t follow, viz., inner life doesn’t function as the rulebook or meaning fixer. It’s a condition for having language games, not what determines the grammar of the moves within them.

Example: Two people feel the same inner feeling: a tight chest, racing heart, sweaty palms.

One says, “I’m excited.” The other says, “I’m anxious.”

Their inner feeling might be identical, but the meaning of “excited” vs “anxious” isn’t fixed by that inner feeling. It’s fixed by the public grammar, again what counts as appropriate use, what follows from it, what kinds of reasons support it, what responses you might get, what counts as correction (“No, you’re not excited, you’re worried”), and how we learn the words.

So inner life is the condition that makes this whole region of talk possible, but it doesn’t act as a private rulebook that determines which word is correct. So, the grammar lives in the practice.

I don’t think there’s a contradiction here, but I do think you’re sliding between two different claims, viz., what makes language possible versus what fixes the meaning.

You’re right the language game like “I’m in pain” only works against a background where people are generally sincere and where there’s regularity between pain and pain expressions. If today “I’m in pain” and tomorrow “I’m hungry” were random noises with no stable pattern, the practice would collapse. But that point is about the conditions under which the practice is usable, not about the meaning being fixed by a private inner object. The regularity that keeps the practice going is part of the public grammar: it’s exactly what shows up in training, correction, and in what we count as misusing the words.

On the “empty room” point, I agree, the sentence doesn’t change meaning depending on audience size. If I say “I’m in pain” alone, it’s often pointless, but it isn’t meaningless. The meaning is still what it is because the expression belongs to a language I already speak. Wittgenstein’s claim isn’t “no audience, no meaning.” It’s “no practice, no meaning.” The empty room e.g. presupposes the practice is already in place.

Where your argument goes off is when you say the language game is founded on a rulebook that asserts a consistency between feeling and saying. That “rulebook” isn’t an extra layer behind the practice. It just is the practice as it’s lived, i.e., we treat “I’m hungry” said in pain as a mistake, a joke, a lie, confusion, or a special case, and those distinctions make sense because the language already has standards of correct application.

So, the relationship is the following: inner life is necessary for these language games to exist at all, but inner life doesn’t fix meaning privately, by itself. Meaning is stabilized publicly, by the norms of use that make it possible to distinguish correct use, misuse, pretense, and error. That’s why your Andromeda example doesn’t land. A language game isn’t some free-floating abstract structure that exists independently of beings who live it. It’s inseparable from our form of life. Our language games are relevant to us precisely because they are woven into human needs, feelings, and responses, and that’s where Wittgenstein is working.

You’re missing Wittgenstein’s point, and a few of your claims are just false. You’re treating inner inspection and then applying a label as some paradigm case. But Wittgenstein’s point is that this isn’t the model. “I’m in pain” in the first person generally isn’t a report based on evidence, it’s an avowal or expression. Yes, a person can reflect on what they feel, but that reflection is optional and secondary. If you treat it as the foundation, you’ve already put the inner object picture back at the center.

You also say Wittgenstein rejects concepts, but that only works if concept means a private mental thing we consult before we speak. That isn’t Wittgenstein’s view. He relies on concepts in the public sense, the grammar of a word, what counts as using it correctly, what counts as a mistake, and what follows from it. If you deny concepts in that sense, you’re denying the very thing he’s investigating.

The same point shows up in the game example. Wittgenstein isn’t saying there is no concept of game. He’s saying there’s no single essence of game. He uses game to point out that a concept can be held together by family resemblance rather than a strict definition. Saying “there is no concept” disregards his point and replaces it with something he never claims.

Finally, your picture collapses normativity into imitation. “Choosing to behave like others” explains copying, not rule following. Rule following requires the distinction between what seems right and what is right, between correct and incorrect moves. That distinction shows itself in training and correction.

So, the point is simple. Inner feelings make these language games possible, but they don’t fix meaning. Concept isn’t some spooky inner tool, it’s the public grammar of use. And rules aren’t authoritarian commands; they’re the norms of what makes correctness and mistake intelligible. If you want to disagree with Wittgenstein, disagree with that, not with behaviorism or private mental classification, because those aren’t his positions.

I mostly agree with the point you were making (although the post was deleted). “Look and see” can sound like an appeal to the obvious, but in Wittgenstein it often means, look until what looked obvious becomes strange, and until you can see the grammar that was leading you. Your quotes from Part II were doing exactly that, they shift from clearing away confusions to reorienting our vision (like the duck rabbit), what he calls aspect seeing.

I wouldn’t separate these into “preliminary clarification” versus “the deeper thing,” as if clarity were just stage one and then the real philosophy starts. In Wittgenstein the “deeper” work often is the clarification, once we see that clarification isn’t tidying up definitions, it’s reorganizing our view of the field. PI 122 is a perfect statement of this, i.e., the aim is a clearer overview that lets us see connections. That’s not a mere preface to understanding, that is what understanding amounts to in many cases.

And the “primeval chaos” remark fits that too. It’s not chaos as mystical darkness, it’s the pre theoretical mess of our actual practices and reactions, the place where our pictures lose their grip and we have to find our way without a single master key. Part II’s discussion of aspect blindness is a good example, it’s a conceptual investigation into what it would be like to lack a certain capacity, and why that capacity matters for meaning, which shows that seeing here is not just passive reception, it’s bound up with our concepts and our ability to take something as something.

So yes, Wittgenstein is doing more than removing confusions. He’s changing how we look, by moving us from a theory driven picture to an overview of what's possible with our concepts, and that often involves aspect change, imagination, and a new way of seeing connections. But that “change of view” isn’t separate from the method, its Witt's method reaching its goal.

Tool 6 is rule following. Wittgenstein’s point is that a rule isn’t something that contains its own application, and it isn’t made secure by an inner interpretation, because any interpretation still needs a rule for how to apply it. So, the question “what makes this the same rule?” bottoms out in the ability to go on in the same way, across new cases, with the possibility of correction, that’s what rule amounts to inside a language game. If you remove the possibility of right and wrong, and make every step correct by private reinterpretation, then following a rule collapses into whatever seems right. The bedrock isn’t a hidden mechanism, it’s the practice of going on.

We do have to be careful, because the “open vs closed” split doesn’t map very well onto Wittgenstein and can sneak back in the false choice between individual freedom and community authority as the ground of meaning. Language games can be improvised like kids play or regimented like chess, and both are intelligible because there are learnable norms and ways of correcting. The community view also doesn’t have to mean a top-down authority, norms can stabilize through ordinary training and correction. But if open means anything goes with no criteria, rule following collapses into “whatever seems right,” which is exactly the slide Wittgenstein targets. The real issue isn’t open vs closed, it’s whether a sign is embedded in a practice stable enough to make right and wrong use intelligible, and whether normativity is explained by inner items, communal sanction, or the lived practice itself.

causal stories and inner experiences can be real, but they aren’t what fix the meaning.
— Sam26

If people had no inner feelings, then there would be no language games.

It follows that we have language games because we have inner feelings.

Therefore, if I did not have the inner feeling of xyz, there would be no language game of “I feel xyz”

Therefore, “I feel xyz” in the language game must be referring to my inner feeling of xyz.

The meaning of "I feel xyz" in the language game must be referring to my inner feeling of xyz. — RussellA

I understand the argument, but it slides from a harmless point to a stronger conclusion that doesn’t follow. Yes, if we had no inner life, we wouldn’t have our sensation and emotion language games. But it doesn’t follow that the meaning of “I feel xyz” is fixed by a private inner object called xyz.

Two points are at work. First, dependence isn’t the same as meaning, and pain talk depends on the fact that humans feel pain, but what fixes the meaning is the expression’s role in a shared practice, when it’s appropriate to say it, what counts as sincerity or pretense, what responses it calls for, how it’s learned and corrected. Second, reference isn’t private pointing, i.e., if meaning depended on an inner ostensive definition, “this sensation is xyz,” there’d be no standard for correct use, only “it seems right to me,” and that can’t mark the difference between right and wrong application, which Witt points out.

And there’s more to the story than “inner vs behavior.” “I’m in pain” in the first person present usually functions as an avowal or expression, not as a report based on evidence, whereas “he’s in pain” is where checking and criteria show up more clearly. Those criteria aren’t just one bit of behavior either, they’re a whole pattern of life, context, history, what follows, what helps, what counts as exaggeration. So inner feelings matter, they’re part of the background, but they don’t supply the rulebook that makes the words meaningful.

And yes if there were no inner life at all, language itself would be impossible. A language game isn’t just noises plus outward motion, it presupposes creatures for whom things matter, who can be trained, who can respond, who can mean and be meant. But that point is about the conditions under which language exists, not about what gives meaning to particular expressions. Inner life makes language possible, while the meaning of our words is stabilized by their public grammar, the shared practices of use, correction, and uptake that give those words their place in our shared language life.

If Wittgenstein rejects both hidden causes and behaviourism, what is his foundation for the Language Game? — RussellA

He doesn’t offer a “foundation” in the sense of a hidden cause or a behaviorist reduction. The language game “I’m in pain” is grounded in the practice itself, viz., how we’re trained to use it, what responses it calls for, and the public criteria that distinguish real cases from pretense or misuse within a shared form of life. Causal stories and inner experiences can be real, but they aren’t what fix the meaning.

Tool 5 is family resemblance, and it’s Wittgenstein’s way of solving a very common philosophical habit, i.e., the habit of demanding a single hidden essence behind every important word.

Instead of assuming that a concept must be defined by one essence in all cases, Wittgenstein tells you to look at the actual cases and note how they overlap. You’ll often find similarities, crisscrossing connections, partial overlaps, and clear differences. The concept holds together, not because every case shares one core property, but because the cases resemble each other in multiple intersecting ways.

It’s for stopping the slide from “this word is important” to “this word must name one special thing.” A lot of philosophical puzzles start when we force a concept into an essence shape it wasn’t meant to fit. If we do that, we either invent a mysterious entity to serve as the essence, or we declare that ordinary use is sloppy and needs to be replaced. Wittgenstein’s wants us not to rush. Survey the different uses. Let the concept show you its structure.

Game is Wittgenstein's classic case. Board games, card games, children’s games, sports, video games, solitary games, competitive games, cooperative games. Some have winners and losers, some don’t. Some require skill, some are luck heavy. Some are played for fun, some for money, some as ritual. There’s no one trait that every game has. But there’s also no confusion in ordinary life. We learn the concept by learning a family of activities and how the word is used in each context or case.

Philosophers often confuse thiings by asking questions like, “What is the essence of knowledge?” and then they expect a definition that covers every case with strict necessity. Wittgenstein’s approach loosens that grip. Look at how know functions across uses: “I know the way home,” “I know French,” “I know he’s trustworthy,” “I know the results are significant,” “I know I left the keys on the table.” These don’t all work the same way. The criteria differ, the checks differ, and the kind of confidence involved differs. Some uses lean heavily on evidence and verification, some on competence and training, some on trust and track record. If you force them all under one essence, you’ll either flatten important differences or invent something abstract that doesn’t match how we use the word in everyday life.

This is also where my four senses of certainty matter. A philosopher may demand absolute certainty as if every “I know” is supposed to carry that weight and then conclude that knowledge is impossible. But many everyday knowledge claims aim at epistemic certainty, defeater resistant enough for the practice at hand, not invulnerable in every imaginable scenario. And in the background, there’s hinge certainty, what stands fast so that any checking and doubting can even get started. Once you see that knowledge and certainty don’t form a single uniform category, a lot of skeptical arguments lose their force, because they depend on treating all cases as if they had to meet the same standard.

A good diagnostic question here is: “Am I assuming this word must have one essence, and is that assumption doing the damage?” If yes, the family resemblance tool is usually the release.

The meaning isn’t a ghostly extra.
— Sam26

This is the critical line and hundreds of posts have centered around this confusion. This comment is often read to mean "there is no ghostly extra," asserting a metaphysical claim about what might exist in one's mind. That then results in accusations that the internal state is denied and that we are all p-zombies speaking in the Chinese Room. The point is that meaning does not rely upon the ghostly extra, but that is not to suggest anyone is saying anything about what that ghostly extra might be or not be. The point is that it's ghostly, offers no explanatory value, and cannot be meaningfully discussed. It's beyond what philosophy can treat as explanatory for meaning. — Hanover

Yes, I’d agree with most of that, but I’d add bit more, so it doesn’t overreach.

I agree with the central point, i.e., people hear “there’s no ghostly extra” as a metaphysical denial of inner experience, and that’s a mistake. A better interpretation is methodological and grammatical, viz., whatever those inner things are (probably consciousness itself), they aren’t what gives the word its meaning and they can’t serve as the meaning fixing item we were tempted to posit. So, Wittgenstein isn’t trying to turn us into p-zombies. He’s trying to stop us from treating meaning as if it were an object in our own private theater.

I also agree with the claim that the “ghostly extra” provides no explanatory value for meaning. If you say, “The word means X because I have a private inner item that guarantees it,” then you haven’t explained anything, because you’ve introduced something that doesn’t have public criteria of correctness. You can’t distinguish “seems right to me” from “is right,” and that’s exactly where the philosophical mirage begins.

The one part I’d adjust is the phrase “cannot be meaningfully discussed.” Wittgenstein does talk about inner life, sensations, intentions, imagining, and so on. He’s not banning discussion of the inner. What he’s saying is more specific, viz., inner accompaniments can’t play the role philosophers sometimes assign them, the role of a private object that fixes meaning all by itself, independent of use, criteria, and practice. In that sense, yes, it’s beyond what philosophy can treat as an explanation of meaning.

I’d endorse the comment with a small refinement, it’s not “don’t talk about inner states,” it’s “don’t treat inner states as the foundation that makes meaning possible.” That keeps the point sharp, and it avoids the zombie/Chinese Room detour.

I'll say thanks here for the grammar section in particular. I've never quite understood what Wittgenstein meant by this - not when reading Wittgenstein (only read excerpts, so that's probably to blame), nor when I read others talking about it. This is probably the clearest explication I've ever come across, and it fits nicely into what else I know about Wittgenstein. So: thanks again.

I do have a question: How does the grammer check relate to the language game. My intuition is to say you need to identify the language game before you ran the grammar check - or differently put: isn't the grammar just the structure of the language game? (I'll admit I find it confusing that he chose the term grammar.) — Dawnstorm

Thanks.

Excellent question, and I think your intuition is basically right, with a minor adjustment.

In practice, grammar check and language game don't refer to a fixed order. They’re two angles on the same problem, andoften we bounce back and forth between them.

The language game question is, what human activity is this expression part of? What’s going on here, asking, warning, promising, measuring, doubting, joking, praying, reporting, teaching, etc.

As for the grammar check question, given that activity, what role does this statement have, and what counts as a sensible move with it? What would count as evidence, correction, a challenge, a misuse.

So yes, you can say that grammar is the structure of the language game, in the sense that it’s the rules of use that make the game the game. But grammar check is the method of testing whether we’ve assigned the sentence the right role, or whether we’re placing it into the wrong game.

To see the difference, take the sentence, “I know I’m in pain.”

If we treat it as an ordinary knowledge claim, we’ll start asking for evidence or some verification. That’s one language game, and the grammar of know there are checks and defeaters.

But when “I’m in pain” is used as an avowal, or a cry, or a call for help, it’s a different language game. The grammar isn’t “I inspected an inner object and concluded,” it’s closer to “this is how we express pain, and this is how others respond.”

The language game helps you locate the setting. The grammar check helps you see whether the sentence is being shoved into a different kind of sentence than it really is. That’s why Wittgenstein can start from either end: sometimes you identify the game first, sometimes you notice a grammatical problem first and then realize you’ve got the wrong game.

On the term grammar, I agree it’s confusing at first. He uses it because he’s talking about rules of use, not about inner meanings or hidden entities. He could’ve called it “the logic of our concepts” or “the rules of the practice,” but “grammar” keeps reminding you that the norms are public in the sense that they’re learnable, teachable, and correctable within a practice, not private mental objects.

If I had to compress it into one line for the thread, I'd say language games are the activities, grammar is the rulebook, and the grammar check is how you catch yourself when you’re using the incorrect rulebook.

Thank you for your new Thread.

A thought that I have had for a while about Wittgenstein.

If a person said “I am in xyz” and did nothing, the word “xyz” would be meaningless to any observer of that person. In practice, the word only has a use within a language game if that word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, not what they are subjectively thinking.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might be.

https://tapandesai.com/cargo-cult-thinking/
The Cargo Cult Thinking: Beware of Imitating Behaviors
During World War II, remote Pacific islanders watched in awe as foreign troops landed on their shores, bringing crates of food, medicine, and supplies, things the islanders had never seen before. The soldiers built airstrips, set up makeshift control towers, and went about their routines. Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, they vanished when the war ended, taking everything with them
But the islanders had a plan.
Believing that the airstrips had summoned the cargo, they built their own, meticulously crafting bamboo control towers and wooden headphones, hoping the planes would return. They mimicked the rituals of the soldiers, waiting for the magic to happen.
But the planes never came back.

Cargo Cult Thinking, because when a person says “I am in xyz”, for Wittgenstein, the word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, it does not refer to the cause of why they said “I am in xyz” in the first place. — RussellA

You're welcome.

Thanks for your thoughts and the pushback. I think you’re right to be concerned about “just copying the surface,” but I don’t think that’s what Wittgenstein is recommending, and I also don’t think it’s right to say that a word only has use if it “refers to what they objectively do” as opposed to what they’re thinking.

First, if someone says, “I am in xyz” and there’s no shared life around xyz, no training, no examples, no circumstances where we’d say, “this is when you use that word,” then yes, it’s meaningless. But that’s not because nothing inner matters. It’s because there are no criteria for the word’s use. In most real cases the utterance itself is already part of the language game. “I’m in pain,” “I’m anxious,” “I’m confused,” “I’m remembering something,” can be perfectly intelligible even if the person is sitting still and doing very little. We might doubt sincerity in certtain contexts, but we still understand what they’re saying, because we’ve learned how those words function across a wide range of situations.

Now the cargo cult worry. Here’s the key point Wittgenstein is trying to keep us from blurring: criteria versus causes.

Criteria answer: “What would count as correctly applying this word here?”

Causes answer: “What produced this state or this behavior?”

Wittgenstein’s methods are mostly about the first question. He’s saying: don’t treat a conceptual question as if it were already a causal one. That’s not a dismissal of deeper understanding; it’s a refusal to do pseudo-science in the armchair. If you want causes, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and ordinary explanation are exactly where you should go. Nothing in Wittgenstein forbids that. He simply resists the move where we take a word, imagine it must name a hidden inner object, then demand a deeper explanation, which is just a picture we’ve smuggled in.

And notice, if anything, the cargo cult story is a warning about mixing up criteria and causes. The islanders copied what looked like the criteria for planes arriving, towers, headphones, rituals, but they mistook those things for the cause. Wittgenstein’s point is closer to don’t confuse the signs and rules that make a practice intelligible with the mechanisms that produce certain outcomes.

I would say that Wittgenstein isn’t telling us to imitate behavior instead of understanding it. He’s telling us to get clear on what we mean first, what would count as using the word correctly, and only then go looking for causes where causes are the right question. That’s not shallow. It’s often the difference between a real inquiry and a philosophical mirage.

Tool 4 is criteria, and it’s one of the best ways of keeping philosophy honest. If you’ve asked what language game you’re playing in, the next question is: what counts as getting it right, and what counts as getting it wrong?

A criterion isn’t just evidence. It’s what we count as settling, or at least strongly supporting, a claim in a given context. Criteria are built into how we use words. They are seen in what we count as a justified assertion, what we count as a misunderstanding, and what we count as a correction.

Criteria helps to avoid two extremes that generate philosophical problems. One extreme treats everything as a private inner thing that only the subject can access. The other extreme treats everything as if it must be checked by scientific measurement. Wittgenstein’s point is that our everyday concepts already have standards of application, and those standards aren’t mysterious. They’re seen in how we teach, learn, correct, and respond.

For example, take “He’s angry.” How do you know? You don’t usually run a brain scan. You point to tone, posture, what he says, what he does, the context, how he reacts when challenged. Those are the criteria in the language game. Notice the philosophical temptation, “But how do you know he’s really angry inside?” The criteria tool helps you see the problem. The concept angry isn’t mainly a label for a hidden object in an inner theater. It’s a concept with public criteria that we’ve learned to apply in everyday life. That doesn’t deny our inner life, it keeps the concept anchored to the practices that give it its use.

Another example, other minds. “How do you know anyone else is conscious?” Philosophers sometimes treat consciousness as a private object that can only be directly inspected by the subject. Then everyone else becomes an inference from behavior, and the whole thing starts to feel fragile. Wittgenstein’s criteria move isn’t to deny the inner life. It’s to remind us that the grammar of our mental concepts is tied to criteria in our shared practices. If you strip the criteria, the words stop having a stable use.

Now connect that to On Certainty. Skeptical doubt often asks for a kind of certainty that our everyday knowledge claims aren’t designed to deliver. Sometimes it demands absolute certainty, certainty in the sense of logical or moral necessity. Sometimes it demands an unrealistic epistemic certainty, certainty that would have to be defeater proof in every imaginable context. Wittgenstein’s point is that ordinary inquiry doesn’t run on that standard. More importantly, the background that makes inquiry possible isn’t usually a set of super claims that have been proven to the highest degree. It’s what I’d call hinge certainty, the arational bedrock that stands fast so that doubt and justification can get traction. If you try to doubt everything at once, you don’t achieve a purer form of inquiry, you undermine the very criteria that make doubt, check, and justify intelligible.

A quick question you can use whenever things get a bit abstract is: “What would count as settling this philosophical problem in this context?” If no answer is forthcoming then the question is probably detached from any practice, that’s a sign you’re not facing some deep metaphysical puzzle. You’re facing a concept being asked to do work it can’t do.

Tool 3 is language games, this is where Wittgenstein gets concrete. If the Wittgenstein's grammar asks, “What role does this sentence play?” the language game asks, “In what human activity does it actually play that role? (very important)”

A language game is the use of words inside a practice, viz., asking, answering, commanding, measuring, accusing, thanking, joking, praying, bargaining, teaching a child, doing math, doing science. The point isn’t that language is a literal game. It's that meaning lives in use, and use lives in activities with rules, training, and standards of correction.

It’s for resisting the idea that words get their meaning by pointing to hidden objects, inner items, or metaphysical entities. It helps with a very common philosophical error, i.e., taking a word out of one setting or context where it works perfectly well, then forcing it into another setting or context, and getting a mystery as the result.

For example, think about the word know. In one language game, “I know” is basically a way of saying, “I’m sure (like a conviction),” or “stop worrying,” or “I’ve got this.” In another game, “I know” is a claim that you can back up with good reasons or evidence, “How do you know?” Mixing these games can cause confusion. A person might say, “I know my spouse loves me,” and if you treat that as if it’s the same kind of claim as “I know there’s a cafe on that corner,” you’ll start demanding the wrong kind of evidence and acting as if intimacy is an empirical hypothesis. The trouble isn’t with love; it’s with forcing the sentence into the wrong game.

A skeptic says, “How do you know you’re not dreaming right now?” That question can be asked in some special contexts, like waking up disoriented, or in a movie, or as a thought experiment. But global skepticism tries to make the question applicable everywhere. Wittgenstein’s reply isn’t “here’s the proof that you’re not dreaming.” His reply is, what language game are you playing when you raise that doubt? What would count as settling it? What would it look like to live with that doubt as a genuine doubt? In On Certainty the punchline is that radical doubt isn’t the purest form of inquiry, it’s often a sign that the words doubt, know, and certain have been pulled from the very practices that give them their sense.

This is also where you see why “it’s all about language” is misleading. Language games aren’t just words. They’re words plus action, viz., training, correction, agreement in judgment, shared reactions, the whole backdrop of human life in which our expressions make sense.

Here's the test, when you feel a philosophical problem coming on, ask yourself, “What would people actually do with this sentence in real life?” If the answer is "nothing," or “I can’t picture it,” that’s a red flag. You may be looking at a propostion that’s been detached from any workable language game.

Thanks

Tool 2 - the grammar check, and grammar here in Wittgenstein’s sense, not in the schoolbook sense. He doesn’t mean punctuation or sentence diagrams. He means what are the rules of use for an expression, what role does it play, what counts as a sensible move, and what counts as a category mistake.

You take a philosophical statement, and ask, what kind of sentence is this supposed to be? Is it reporting a fact, giving a rule, expressing a commitment, giving a standard, drawing an inference, or doing something else? Sometimes philosophical trouble comes from treating one kind of sentence as if it were another.

It’s for spotting when a statement only looks like it’s saying something, when it’s really the result of our words getting detached from the contexts or settings that give them their point. You can also think of it as a way of asking, what would count as understanding this claim? What would we do with it?

For example, suppose someone says, “I’ve got a pain in my foot.” That’s not something you normally verify by looking for evidence in the same way you’d verify “there’s a nail in my shoe.” You might ask where it hurts, or whether it’s sharp or dull, or you might offer help. Imagine someone says, “I know I’m in pain because I observed it.” Such a sentence has the wrong grammar. It treats pain like an object discovered by inner observation, and it makes the person’s relation to their pain look like the relation to something external. You can feel the temptation, but the sentence is already sliding into a picture that isn’t expressing how we actually talk and respond.

Consider a philosophical example, “I know the external world exists.” It looks like an ordinary knowledge claim, like “I know there’s a tree in the yard.” But if you run a grammar check, you’ll ask, what would count as checking it, what would count as correcting it, what would count as evidence for or against it, and what would it mean to doubt it in the ordinary ways we doubt things? This is exactly where On Certainty starts to bite. Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that the proposition is false. It’s that in many contexts it doesn’t behave like a normal empirical claim at all. It’s closer to something that stands fast in the background of inquiry, the kind of thing you don’t typically confirm because it’s part of what makes confirmation possible.

A grammar check asks whether we’re trying to do philosophy with a statement/proposition that’s outside it's normal use. It looks like a straightforward statement of fact, but it’s functioning more like a rule, or a framework commitment, or a hinge. And once you see that, much of the philosophical pressure is dissipates.

Tool 1 is the simplest and, I think, the most important: “Look and see.”

When a philosophical question starts to feel deep, Wittgenstein’s first move is often to stop, and look at how the words are actually used in ordinary situations. Instead of guessing that there must be some hidden thing the word refers to, he'll point out what we already know how to do with it.

What it’s for, it’s for breaking the spell of abstract pictures. A lot of philosophy starts when we take a word that works perfectly well in our everyday life, remove it from its normal setting, and then demand an explanation of what it really is.

Think about the word game. Most people assume that a concept must have a strict definition. So, they ask, what is the essence of a game? But if you actually look, you find board games, card games, Olympic games, children’s games, solitaire, chess, tag, etc. There isn’t one feature shared by every case, and that discovery isn’t a defect. It’s a reminder that our concepts don’t always work by strict definitions, they often work by overlapping similarities (family resemblances).

Take the philosophical example, “What is meaning?” It can sound like we’re asking for a hidden object, a mental item, or a thing attached to a word. Wittgenstein’s move is to say, don’t posit anything yet. Instead look at what we call meaning in real life. We explain a word, we correct someone’s misuse, we translate, we follow an instruction, we misunderstand and then get it right, we use a word in a new context and people either accept it or reject it. The meaning isn’t a ghostly extra. It shows itself in the role the expression plays in our shared practices (forms of life).

If you want a quick test for whether “look and see” is needed, try the following: when you ask your question, do you immediately feel pulled toward a hidden mechanism or a deep entity that must be behind the scenes? If you do, you’re probably in Wittgenstein’s territory. The next tool, the grammar check, is what he uses to say exactly where the question goes off the rails.

Thanks for all of the replies. I'm trying to think of another subject for a thread. My philosophical focus tends to be very narrow, but hopefully I'll think of something that's interesting.

I don’t buy your reading of Wittgenstein. It takes his rule following comments and turns them into a kind of norm skepticism, as if Witt were saying there are no binding standards in a practice, only “creative re establishment” in each use case. That’s not what he’s doing.

Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that practices don't have any authority to correct us. His point is that the authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance. It comes from how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together. If you deny that any regularities or shared expectations can bind, you don’t get a deeper Wittgenstein, you get the complete collapse of rule following, which is precisely the kind of picture Wittgenstein is fighting against.

Also, the “language on holiday” move is being misapplied. The holiday isn’t “making a general remark about what must be in place for doubt or inquiry to make sense.” Moreover, On Certainty is full of exactly that kind of diagnosis. The holiday is when words are detached from their practical moorings and kept afloat by a philosophical picture that can’t be cashed out in the activity. So, saying “a doubt misfires if it cancels the conditions of checking and correction” isn’t grounding meaning in an abstract template, it’s describing what makes the words doubt, check, settle, and improve do any work in the first place.

Finally, “normativity is re established in each use” sounds attractive, but if you take it seriously it wipes out the very distinctions that make language games possible. A word works when it can guide what comes next and make sense of responses, challenges, and correction. That requires more than fresh enactment. It requires a stable practice for the notions of success and failure to have application.

I’m not appealing to “prior criteria” in the sense of a metaphysical essence of improve or doubt. I’m appealing to the ordinary fact that in inquiry, improvement talk is answerable to how the practice handles error, correction, and learning. If someone insists that nothing could ever count as settling anything, that isn’t a daring new use that “creatively re establishes” normativity. It’s a use that removes the success conditions of the very activity it’s pretending to describe. That’s exactly what Wittgenstein calls out, not something he licenses.

From a Wittgensteinian view, I agree with the method, viz., look at use. But “look at use” doesn’t mean every use is equally in order or valid, or that we can’t diagnose when a word has lost its grip.

In the actual language-games where we talk about improving inquiry, “improve” is tied to things like learning, avoiding mistakes, tracking error, increasing reliability, making progress, even if the metric shifts from case to case. If someone usesimprove while also insisting that nothing could ever count as settling, correcting, or learning anything, then the word is no longer doing the work it normally does. That’s exactly the kind of grammatical diagnosis Wittgenstein makes, not a stipulative definition, but an observation that the proposed use has detached from the practice that gives it sense.

My point isn’t “here’s the essence of improve.” It’s that in our epistemic practices, improve has a role, and that role presupposes some intelligible notion of getting things right versus wrong. If you cancel that, you haven’t extended the grammar, you’ve broken it.

One way to address of the “why stop?” question is to notice a structural pattern that shows up outside epistemology too. Gödel showed that in any formal system strong enough to do arithmetic, there are truths the system can’t settle using only its own internal rules. You can settle a particular undecidable claim only by stepping out of the framework's standpoint, i.e., going meta, adding axioms, thereby widening the framework. But then the same limitation shows up again at the new level. The demand for total closure keeps moving.

I think something structurally similar is happening in the hinge discussion. Ordinary inquiry works because some things stand fast: not because we proved them in the ordinary way, but because they are what make correction intelligible. When someone asks for reasons for everything at once, they’re not just asking for a better justification inside the practice, they’re shifting to a meta demand for a standpoint that can validate the whole practice without presupposing it. You can do meta clarification, and sometimes you should, but you don’t get a final, once-and-for-all foundation that stops the question forever. Like Gödel, the attempt to force total closure tends to generate an endless “one more level” move.

The point, of course, isn’t “don’t ask meta questions.” it’s distinguish between meta work that improves our ability to detect error inside epistemic inquiry, and meta demands that try to secure inquiry from outside, by a standard that can’t itself be justified without reintroducing the very background it’s trying to suspend.

what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place
— Sam26

I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rather than having to decide which questions are “allowed” or “forbidden,” to map hinges once and for all, to discard a bad analogy in favor of the right one, we need only look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification are actually used in our lives. There is no answer in advance to whether the question “Could our epistemic practices be improved?” is coherent. Sometimes it is coherent, sometimes it is idle, sometimes it is revolutionary, sometimes it is nonsense, and which it is depends entirely on the language-game being played. In actual life, rules are sometimes followed blindly, sometimes revised, sometimes ignored, sometimes negotiated. There is no sharp line between playing a game and redesigning it; there are just different activities with different criteria. — Joshs

Sure, we should look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification actually get used. But I think you’re using that point to dodge the problem.

Nobody here is trying to be the language police, deciding in advance what questions are allowed. The issue is simpler, viz., some moves stop functioning as doubt because they wipe out what would count as checking or settling anything. If you say, “Every check is suspect, every standard is illegitimate unless it’s justified by a further standard,” then you haven’t made inquiry deeper, you’ve taken away the ground where inquiry happens. At that point doubt becomes a posture, not an activity with any conditions of success.

And yes, in real life rules get followed, revised, ignored, negotiated, all of that. Fine. But revision still has to leave us with a difference between “we got it right” and “we got it wrong,” otherwise the idea of improvement doesn’t even have a target. That’s the hinge point. It’s not “mapping everything once and for all.” It’s just noticing that some philosophical questions keep the vocabulary of inquiry while canceling the thing that gives that vocabulary meaning.

I’m not saying, “it never makes sense to ask whether our practices can improve.” I’m saying: improvement talk is meaningful when it still leaves room for correction. But when the improvement proposal is really “nothing can ever settle anything,” then it’s not meaningful, it’s self-defeating.

The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails.
— Sam26

Yes.

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework
— Sam26

In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the rules, I don’t think this distinction holds for rational inquiry.
— Esse Quam Videri

even in literal games, rules can change, but note how they change: you can redesign chess, or create variants, but for any given game the rules stand fast while you’re playing. They aren’t propositions being assessed move by move, they are what make it possible for a move to be legal or illegal. And when someone says, “we should change the rules,” it’s often not clear what “improvement” even means without importing standards that aren’t internal to chess at all, enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, and so on. That doesn’t make the question incoherent. It just shows that redesign and rule following are different activities.
— Sam26

If we group these quotes together, I think we get a good picture of the issue. It reinforces my notion that there's nothing wrong with the case you make in your paper. The question of whether a game is a good analogy or metaphor is quite separate from the question of whether you've provided a more perspicacious understanding of JTB. I believe you have.

As to games . . . If a game is something whose rules can be questioned and/or improved (from a standpoint outside the game, of course), then it is not a good analogy for a practice governed by "bedrock hinges." I think all three of us would agree with this. Improvement or inquiry outside a set of rules is presumably governed by a further set of rules; otherwise the idea of "improvement" would be hard to explain. So I think you want to avoid suggesting that our ordinary epistemic practice is like a game with rules. Up to a point -- the point of foundational hinges -- it is; we usually play within those rules. But we can readily move to a different level at which the idea of improvement can't get a grip, since we'd be asking for "reasons to improve" that put into question what it would mean to improve. We've struck a bedrock hinge. But there is no literal game like that; the analogy does break down at that level. If chess were such a game, for instance, we'd be forced to say that a suggestion to improve chess can't be made because "improvement" only has meaning within the rules of chess.

So the main point I would press you on is the final, bolded sentence in your quote above. Why is redesign not a rule-following activity? It doesn't follow (all of) the rules of the practice being redesigned, but surely there are rules nonetheless, even for using concepts like enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, et al. Again, think of your own paper: In the name of a set of rules you carefully employ (and could no doubt explain if asked), you offer changes to the (subset of) rules that seemed to characterize JTB. But this "redesign" of JTB absolutely is a rule-following activity. If it weren't, we readers would get pretty impatient with you! If someone challenged you to lay out your justification for the improvements, you'd do it. You'd strongly resist the idea that such a challenge was incoherent, that it called into question the very idea of justification.

In a sentence, then: There is no game whose rules cannot be candidates for improvement; therefore rational discourse as a whole is not a game. — J

You’re mixing three different things and then acting as though the mix refutes my point. It doesn’t.

I would say Redesign is rule-following is a dodge.
Of course, redesign has norms, consistency, coherence, non-contradiction, etc. I didn't deny that. The point is whether redesign is rule-following in the same sense as the practice being redesigned. It's not. When you change chess you may use things like good game design, but you aren't making another legal chess move. You’ve shifted your activities. Saying “there are still rules” doesn’t answer the point, it changes the subject. If your objection is merely “there are norms at the meta-level,” then congratulations, everybody agrees, and nothing I said changes.

Second, you’re equivocating on “inside rational discourse.”
You keep saying, “rational inquiry includes self-reflection, so meta-level reflection is still inside inquiry.” Fine, but that’s just a slogan unless you say what makes it the same kind of inquiry. Here’s the problem as I see it. If every rule is always a candidate for improvement by demanding a further justification, you’ve just built another infinite escalation. At some point, you either stop, or you pretend you don’t stop while relying on what you refuse to acknowledge. That’s exactly what hinge talk is diagnosing. Not “don’t reflect,” but you can’t keep demanding a justification for the conditions of justification without smuggling those conditions in again.

Your JTB point is a category mistake. My paper redesigns JTB only at the level of how we handle justification in practice. That's all within the space of epistemic assessment. It isn’t an attempt to justify the possibility of justification from nowhere. So, your line “you’d strongly resist the idea that such a challenge was incoherent” misses the mark. I resist some challenges as incoherent, specifically those that cancel the very criteria by which the challenge could be evaluated. That’s not being evasive. That’s basic logic.

Now the sentence that really gives the game away is the following:

“There is no game whose rules cannot be candidates for improvement; therefore rational discourse as a whole is not a game.”

It's just assertion, and it’s wrong in an im0portant sense. The hinge point isn't “no rules can ever be discussed.” It’s that the norms that make discussion, mistake, correction, and improvement intelligible cannot all be put on trial at once without emptying those words of useful content. You can always say you’re challenging everything. But if you’re still using better, worse, reason, defeat, and correction as if they have some traction, then you’re relying on what you claim to suspend.

So no, the chess analogy isn’t claiming rational discourse is literally a game. It’s forcing a distinction you keep trying to blur, viz. that clarifying the conditions of intelligibility isn't the same thing as arguing for a claim within those conditions or parameters. You can have meta-level norms without turning bedrock conditions into ordinary premises. And pretending otherwise is exactly how the issue of global doubt and endless “improvement” talk becomes performative rather than really answerable.

es, you understand my point exactly. Sticking with actual games, there are cases where game rules have in fact been changed to improve the game, or at least change it in a way that pleases its players better. (Money in Free Parking, in "Monopoly"!). Could a game like chess -- our chosen analogy -- be improved through rule changes? I frankly have no idea, but the point is that the question isn't incoherent or meaningless. It's perfectly possible to inquire of chess players, and by extension of the game of chess itself, whether improvement is possible. And if we do that, we aren't asking whether there's a way to make the bishop move "better" along the diagonal. The criteria for "better" are outside any particular rule. We might ask, Should there be only 7 pawns? That would change the rules, not clarify them.

How might we try to answer? What would this "should" mean? This is where it gets interesting, and moves us into the whole issue of rational inquiry. There are surely aspects of entire games that can be evaluated in terms of cleverness, enjoyment, a kind of artistic unity. Where do those criteria come from? That's unclear, but we know they aren't internal to any game as such. There is no rule in chess that specifies how to increase enjoyment, or even whether enjoyment is part of the game.

So the person who claims that the chess analogy holds for empirical inquiry appears to be saying that all these extra-chess questions can't be asked. We're urged to see the empirical practice of seeking justifications as the game, or the same as rational inquiry, such that to ask for reasons why we perform the practice as we do is to "ask for reasons for being reasonable," which is incoherent.

Now I'm not saying this is wrong. Sam26 makes a strong argument for how hinges operate in our epistemic practices, and I think we all agree that justification must stop somewhere, otherwise we do fall into incoherence. But what I am saying is that I don't think the (literal) game analogy shows us the right picture of what is going on. We need a better image or explanation for the shape of epistemic practice that would make clear why it is identical with rational practice itself. A game analogy doesn't show this -- unless you really do believe that to ask "Could chess be improved?" is a meaningless question. — J

I agree that the question “Could chess be improved?” isn’t meaningless, and I’m not committed to the view that every extra-game question is nonsense (some are some aren't). The misunderstanding is where that point is misunderstood, as if hinge talk were meant to forbid reflection or redesign.

First, it helps to clarify types of hinges. Some are what I’d call foundational hinges; they can shift over time as a framework changes. Others are bedrock hinges, the sort that don't show up as a candidate for epistemic assessment at all, for example: I am an object among objects, objects persist, there is a world in which checking and correction make sense. When these change, it’s not like discovering a counterexample. It’s more like losing the stage on which counterexamples could even count as counterexamples. That difference is significant because your “could the rules be improved?” question is mainly about the first kind, the revisable, upper-level foundational hinges.

Second, even in literal games, rules can change, but note how they change: you can redesign chess, or create variants, but for any given game the rules stand fast while you’re playing. They aren’t propositions being assessed move by move, they are what make it possible for a move to be legal or illegal. And when someone says, “we should change the rules,” it’s often not clear what “improvement” even means without importing standards that aren’t internal to chess at all, enjoyment, fairness, aesthetic unity, and so on. That doesn’t make the question incoherent. It just shows that redesign and rule following are different activities.

Now bring that back to epistemic practice. The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place.

I'll reply soon.

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework (here I mean within the framework I've constructed in the paper).
— Sam26

In my opinion, this is where the chess analogy breaks down. Whereas in chess there is a clear separation between playing the game and explaining the rules, I don’t think this distinction holds for rational inquiry. To explain and justify the rules of rational inquiry is not to step outside of the game, but to deepen one’s understanding of the game itself, since inquiry includes the capacity for self-reflection on its own conditions. To place meta-level reflection entirely outside of epistemic normativity is to acquiesce to conventionalism. The claim that hinges can be appropriated by reason as necessary conditions of inquiry is not a claim about how we happen to play the game, but about what must be the case for judgment, error, and correction to be possible at all, and that is much something stronger than the chess analogy suggests. — Esse Quam Videri

I don’t think the chess analogy breaks down; I think it exposes the exact pressure point, viz., what counts as staying in the same game.

Inquiry does include self-reflection, but self-reflection doesn’t automatically remain within the same normativity. In chess, you reflect while you play, and you can revise your strategy, you can even decide to adopt a different opening. None of that touches the rules. Once you start asking what has to be in place for terms like move, illegal, mistake, and correction to apply at all, you’re not improving your play within the game. You’re spelling out the background rules that make what counts as a move in the first place. That’s not a conventionalist retreat, it’s a category distinction, which are the standards that govern ordinary epistemic claims, and they're not the same as the standards that govern clarifications of the conditions of those standards.

The worry about “acquiescing to conventionalism” only has standing if “outside the game” means “arbitrary social choice.” But that’s not what I mean. A hinge can be arational in role and still non optional. The point of the hinge diagnosis is precisely that these commitments are not mere conventions we could swap out at will, they are what gives judgment, error, and correction their force. A transcendental claim like “these are necessary conditions of inquiry” may be true in a structural sense, but it still doesn’t follow that the hinge has been appropriated into the ordinary space of reasons as a claim supported by evidence, alternatives, and defeaters. It has been explained as a condition of that inquiry.

I’d put it this way: meta reflection can deepen inquiry, but it can do so in two different modes. One mode stays inside the practice and improves our assessments, better evidence, sharper defeater handling, more precise concepts. The other mode articulates the background conditions without which assessment can’t gain a foothold. That second mode is not conventionalism, it’s not “how we happen to play,” but neither is it ordinary epistemic justification. It’s an explanation of possibility conditions, not a move competing with other moves.

With regard to hinges, I take it we agree that inquiry always proceeds from what stands fast; the remaining question for me is whether what stands fast is merely an arational background, or is meta-rational in the sense that the subject can come to reflectively understand why such commitments are unavoidable given the structure of knowing. If the latter, then such background hinges can themselves be appropriated into the game of giving and asking for reasons. — Esse Quam Videri

.

Calling hinges arational doesn’t mean they’re irrational, blind, or immune to ideas. It means they don’t operate as moves in our justificatory practices. In chess, the rule bishops move diagonally isn’t something you conclude from evidence or defend against objections inside the game. It’s what makes the game playable. You can explain it, even justify why we adopt it, but none of that turns the rule into a move you play on the board.

The sense of arational I’m using, viz., is that hinges are arational because they are conditions of intelligibility for ordinary epistemic assessment, not candidates for it. You can give a perfectly rational, clarifying account about why they have to be in place, but the hinge itself isn’t “supported by reasons” in the same way that an empirical claim is, because reasons already presuppose the background that makes support, defeat, check, and correction doable.

I’m not denying meta-level understanding. I’m saying the meta-level understanding changes what kind of thing you’re doing, i.e., explaining the rules of the game, not making another move within the epistemic framework (here I mean within the framework I've constructed in the paper).

The paper needs some revisions, but I think it could be submitted to...

1) Episteme (Cambridge), which is a general epistemology journal.

2) Synthese (Springer), which is another good match.

3) Ergo (Open Access, no author fees)

Your comment about "practice" is something I've been thinking about, so it's something to consider.

I never thought Gettier had something important to say about JTB, but it took a while to figure out exactly how the problem manifested itself.

Gettier does not overturn JTB; it signals the need to make explicit features of justification that the classical formulation left implicit.
— Sam26

From what I can tell, the Ten Coins situation does not have “features” at all, to even make explicit.

It is a standing within a practice, fixed by public criteria that settle what counts as competent support in the context.
— Sam26

This case doesn’t even have any criteria, or mechanics, or judgments (what you might call “linguistic training”) for the relation between coins and jobs. It is obviously philosophy trying to shoehorn formal logic onto a situation without any viable alternative. The fact that it is an imagined world actually does not matter. Wittgenstein creates simple situations (like picking a color of flower) but it is to show the consequences of imposing forced criteria by contrasting that with what we would need of a wider context of criteria and mechanics (even imagined) for a situation. Now the criteria for justification are all well and good, but this doesn’t even get off the ground; it just seems like a lot of work to say correlation is not causation. — Antony Nickles

The Ten Coins case is thin, and that is part of the point. Gettier creates a situation where the justification is basically a detachable bit of formal support that can be preserved while the world shifts underneath it. That’s exactly why I say Gettier is trading on an impoverished picture of justification: the case is set up so that there are no real practice-level mechanics for what counts as competent justification, no standards for error and correction, and no disciplined way to track mistakes. It isn’t exposing a flaw in JTB, it’s exposing what happens when we treat justification as some free-floating relation between propositions rather than as objective justification inside the practice of epistemology.

That also answers your “correlation is not causation” point. The moral isn’t merely “don’t confuse correlation and causation.” The moral is that the classical JTB slogan can be misread as if J were satisfied by any arguable support, even if the support is structurally incapable of carrying the conclusion across relevant mistake-conditions. I claim that once you make objective justification explicit as practice-governed, with defeater sensitivity and correction built into it, the Ten Coins style justification is revealed as too thin to count as knowledge. I’m not doing extra work to rescue JTB from Gettier. I’m saying Gettier only lands if we let justification be that thin in the first place.

You rightly emphasize that inquiry presupposes what stands fast, but you tend to treat these certainties as outside epistemic assessment altogether. How, then, do you account for intellectual conversion—those moments when what once stood fast becomes questionable and inquiry reorganizes itself at a deeper level? Are your hinges provisional horizons, or final grammatical boundaries? — Esse Quam Videri

Conversion is real, and it’s actually a good test of what I believe Wittgenstein means by hinges. Some hinges that stand fast for us are local and revisable (like the rules of chess), and when they shift the whole field of inquiry gets reorganized. But not everything that stands fast is like that. There are also deeper certainties (I'm an object separate from other objects) that function as conditions of intelligibility for doubt and checking in the first place, and those don’t shift in the same way, because if they did the activity of inquiry would collapse.

My answer is: hinges aren’t all on one level (some are foundational, but others are bedrock). Some are provisional horizons within a practice, the ones that can change as inquiry advances. Others are grammatical boundaries in the strict sense, the background without which “evidence,” “error,” “correction,” and “defeater” stop having any role. Intellectual conversion is usually a reorganization among the first kind, a shift in what was taken for granted within the system.

This is why I call (and others) hinge certainty arational. It’s not that a hinge is sacred or immune by decree. It’s that hinges typically aren’t the kind of things that are decided by the ordinary routes of objective justification. When they genuinely change, it’s less like refuting a claim and more like adopting a new framework.

Thank you for these clarifying remarks. I have one additional follow-up question: in your account, is objective justification sufficient for knowledge, or is it a necessary but fallible condition whose success still depends on the independent fulfillment of conditions?

You say, quite reasonably, that epistemology cannot guarantee orientation toward reality by introspection alone, and I agree entirely. But I would be similarly reluctant to say that orientation toward reality is guaranteed by practice instead.

The residual worry here is this: practices can be corrigible, sensitive to defeat, and historically successful, and yet still fail to deliver truth in particular cases. It seems that at some point we must appeal to ‘being’ (what-is-the-case) in order to explain how a judgement can fully satisfy the norms of well-governed practice and yet still fail to be true. Practice can regulate responsibility, but success still depends on how things are. I'm not saying that you are refusing to make such an appeal, only that I didn't see it stated explicitly anywhere in your paper. — Esse Quam Videri

Objective justification is necessary for knowledge, but it’s not a guarantee, because truth is the success condition. For example, I say in the paper “Truth remains the success condition for knowledge. To say that a belief is true is to say that the world is as the proposition represents it.”

However, even a well-governed practice is subject to failure: a belief can meet the standards and still turn out false. That’s not a defect in the idea of objective justification; it’s part the fallible character of our justificatory system.

What objective justification does secure is the right to claim "I know..." the right to treat the belief as knowledge, given our best efforts. That’s why I point to the guardrails: they don’t make truth automatic; they discipline the way justification can fail. “No False Grounds excludes cases in which the support is defective… Practice Safety excludes cases in which truth is reached only by luck… Defeater Screening excludes cases in which the belief cannot retain standing under relevant challenge.”

This is also why I keep insisting that the target is epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty: “much of what we count as knowledge is not secured by absolute certainty,” and JTB+U clarifies “how fallibility and knowledge coexist.”

If you want one line: objective justification governs responsibility and standing, truth governs success, and my claim is that we can have real knowledge without infallibility because our practice of justification aims at disciplined, defeater-resistant stability, while still understanding that “how things are” can definitely surprise us.

1. On Justification vs. Judgment
You speak eloquently about justification within practice, but where, precisely, is judgment?

You describe justification as a public standing governed by grammar and practice, but you do not clearly distinguish justification from the reflective act of judgment by which the subject affirms that the conditions for truth are fulfilled. Do you intend judgment to be absorbed into justification, or is it an irreducible moment you have not yet made explicit? If it is absorbed, how do you avoid collapsing epistemic success into conformity with practice?

Main concern: Knowledge is not exhausted by correct use or standing; it culminates in an act of judgment that affirms being. I would argue that act cannot be replaced by grammar without loss. — Esse Quam Videri

I don’t want “judgment” to disappear, and I’m not trying to replace it with grammar. I’m trying to locate its role in the process.

On my view, judgment is the act of taking p to be true, the moment a person makes a commitment about belief X. Objective justification is what makes that commitment responsible, not a mere statement. So judgment and justification aren’t rivals. Judgment is the affirmation of X, justification is the warrant for that affirmation in a practice that includes standards for evidence, mistake, correction, and defeat. Without judgment, you don’t have a claim at all. Without objective justification, you have conviction, guesswork, or mere assent, even if you can produce something that looks like a justification.

That also answers the worry about collapse into conformity. My account doesn’t say “whatever a practice treats as justified is thereby knowledge.” A practice can be defective, insulated, or sloppy. That’s exactly why I make the constraints explicit, viz, the practice has to be one where error is possible, correction is intelligible, defeaters are taken seriously, and standards are answerable to failure modes. If those conditions aren’t in place, then you can have judgment and even conformity, but you don’t have objective justification in my sense.

On your last line, “an act of judgment that affirms being,” I’d put it a bit differently. Judgment can be oriented toward what is the case, and in that sense, it aims at reality (the facts), but epistemology can’t guarantee that orientation by introspection alone. That’s why I keep the paper aimed at epistemic certainty, objective justification, not at Cartesian absolute certainty. Judgment is irreducible as a human act, but the epistemic status of the judgment depends on whether it is governed by the right standards of practice rather than merely produced with confidence.

As I'm going through your paper -- which is extremely good -- I want to clarify one thing: Do you consider that traditional JTB is supposed to guarantee knowledge? Or is its goal more modest -- to provide grounds for claiming knowledge? — J

I take traditional JTB to be doing something more modest than guaranteeing knowledge in any infallible sense. I treat it as a grammar for when a claim to know is responsibly made, a true belief with objective justification in the relevant practice of what justification entails within the 5 methods I describe. That’s why I say JTB “mirrors the way we distinguish between mere belief and belief that has a secure place in our shared life,” and why it remains “a natural starting point” for thinking about knowledge.

This is also where it helps to separate JTB as a definition from JTB in practice. As a definition, it gives a clean schema. In practice, justification is not a simple box-check, it’s what your claim can actually justify inside a practice that has standards for evidence, error, correction, and defeat, and that treats some challenges as relevant and some not.

Those standards of practice (justification) aren’t private feelings or inner impressions, they’re “displayed in our shared procedures of correction and agreement, in what counts as getting it right and what counts as needing revision.”

I don't claim that JTB guarantees knowledge unless you're speaking about deductive reasoning (it's absolute in a restricted way). Most of our knowledge is inductive and so it's mostly probabilistic. It really depends on your method of justification. The method I provide can do both.

So in my framework, I talk about four senses of certainty, and these help explain the two different uses of "I know." First, there's epistemic certainty, which is really about having objective justification, something that stands up to public criteria and can’t easily be defeated. Then there's subjective certainty, which is more about personal conviction, it's the feeling of being sure about something from your own perspective. There's absolute certainty, which is tied to logical or moral necessity, i.e., things that simply cannot be otherwise. And finally, there's hinge certainty, viz., those arational bedrock commitments that make all these other kinds of certainty possible.

Now, when we say, "I know," we can be using it in that subjective sense, expressing a personal conviction, or we can be using it in the epistemic sense, pointing to something that meets those public standards of justification. My approach tries to show how these different senses of certainty all fit together. By grounding them in hinge certainty, we can see how both the subjective expression of "I know" and the epistemic use of "I know" are part of a larger, integrated picture."

Instead of framing hinges as a metaphysical claim about reality, let’s consider how they function structurally. Just as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that certain limits are built into formal systems, Wittgenstein’s hinges show that certain fundamental assumptions are built into our epistemic practices.

In other words, hinges aren’t there to prove anything metaphysical. They’re there to show where our practices of justification find their foundational footing. By drawing a structural parallel to Gödel, we see that these structural boundaries are not arbitrary; they’re intrinsic to how our epistemic language
games work, and hoow systems of belief work generally.

The takeaway being: when we talk about hinges, we’re pointing out that certain stopping points are part of the grammar of justification. They help us see why pushing certain doubts beyond those points stops being an epistemic move and becomes a different kind of game entirely. That’s the structural parallel to Gödel’s insight, and it’s what gives hinges their power.

I guess I can't get away from hinges. :grin: