There is always something stimulating to be found in reading a spot of Wittgenstein. Given that his writings come in small doses, normally, you can usually pick up a book of his and read a few paragraphs and start pondering. I did just that recently and did a bit of thinking for myself as a result.
The bit I read was from On Certainty, starting from paragraph 84. This is in reference to a comment by G. E. Moore, that a part of the common-sense view of the world is that the earth now exists and has existed for a long time. The world has existed since before I was born. This is not a statement that I can, in fact, prove. Stroll notes that the existence of the world is an assumption of the sciences (and any other subject), but it is not proved by them. There is no university department, no research directed to proving the existence of the world.
But what sort of knowledge is this? Wittgenstein observes (paragraph 90) that ‘I know’ expresses a relationship between the speaker and a fact – that the earth has existed for a long time. Most of us would agree with Moore that the earth has existed for a long time, but what are our grounds for knowing that to be the case? What is the basis for this knowledge?
Wittgenstein notes that we are sometimes convinced of the correctness of something by its simplicity or symmetry. This is, after all, how a lot of theoretical physics gets done. After all both Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac believe that the equations of physics should be beautiful. At a more mundane level, when I am balancing the bank account, an answer which matches the balance the bank thinks I have is accepted straight away. I believe this calculation to be correct because it matches, not because there is no error in the calculation.
The sort of knowledge we are referring to here is knowledge of a non-foundational sort. We do not take these knowledge claims back to the basic building blocks of the knowledge, building up an argument that the world has existed for longer than I have been on it. In this sense this knowledge in ‘properly basic’. I have no reason to argue for it; the number of people who disagree is very small. It is in Wittgenstein’s view, certain and therefore does not need arguing for.
There is an interesting link here with the work of Alvin Plantinga, which is usually called ‘Reformed Epistemology’. Plantinga argues that knowledge of the existence of God can be properly basic, in the above sense. As we do not need to create an argument from a more fundamental building block that the earth has existed for a long time, so we do not need to create an argument that God exists from some more fundamental posit. Plantinga rejects, in this sense at least, arguments for the existence of God because, he suggests, God is more fundamental, more basic, than any other claim we can make. The existence of the universe, for example, used in the cosmological argument to suggest that some being must have made it, is not as fundamental as our knowledge of God’s existence. Thus the latter should be used to explain the former, not the other way around.
It could be objected that while Plantinga might have a point of some sort, he cannot prove that the existence of God is properly basic. That is a fair criticism but is also true of other facts that we take to be properly basic. The existence of the earth for a long time is unprovable; we can bring forward various bits of evidence for it being the case, but none of them amount to a proof, just a high probability. Nothing else works if we do not presume that the earth exists and has existed for a long time, but we cannot prove it to be the case.
We can also object that even if Plantinga is correct the assumption of knowledge of the existence of God only applies for some people. After all, there are a fair number of people who do not believe in God around, and, for them, knowledge of God’s existence is not properly basic. The existence of arguments that God does exist suggests that many people do need convincing, and the half dozen or so main arguments for the existence of God suggest that such knowledge is not properly basic.
It has to be conceded that most people do not require arguments that the earth exists. After all, simply jumping up and down should suggest to most people that it does. God is, of course, a bit more difficult. The fact that some people conclude that God exists, perhaps as the result of a spiritual experience, suggests that for them such a belief is properly basic. But can such a belief be generalized?
In a sense, of course. and from certain perhaps rather unhelpful viewpoints, such issues can be accounted for. Perhaps God does not want some people to believe in Him. Why that should be is, of course, a mystery, but then so is the answer to the question of why God created the universe in the first place. In a sense, from within a certain system of thought, knowledge of the existence of God is properly basic. It is just that that system of thought is not one which is in general circulation at present.
Nevertheless, there is an issue at stake here. Wittgenstein’s point about certainty still stands. What can we know with certainty? The answer is probably linked back through language and its uses. I can, linguistically, find what other people are certain about and agree. ‘The earth has existed for a long time’ is a statement that almost everyone would agree on. Those who do not can be persuaded, by such evidence as we have, that they are incorrect.
However, there is some personal knowledge which is properly basic to me, but not to you. ‘I had eggs for breakfast this morning’ is properly basic. You are unlikely to know what I had for breakfast this morning unless you observed me eating it. Similarly, but more radically, ‘I have a slight pain in my knee’ is a statement that you have no way of verifying. These are properly basic statements, but are they, really, equivalent to ‘I am certain that God exists’?
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