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.

:up: I'll look forward to it.

Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage. — Joshs

Right -- essentially the two options that @Esse Quam Videri laid out. But I'll emphasize again, we can be unsure which option we like better, while separately maintaining that the game analogy is doing more harm than good at this point. In other words, I don't think @Sam26 needs to abandon any ground, necessarily, just abandon the metaphor. Which, given its prevalence in Witt-related phil, may be difficult.

That's how I see it, thanks for the elaboration.

That said, I'd love to hear from @Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice.

Yes, 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.

One way to highlight the issue might be to ask: Can a game be improved? If so, what criteria should be used? Are there ways of evaluating a "better game" outside the rules of a particular game? This is the "rational vs empirical" issue.

I've read your paper. It's a real advance on the topic, and should certainly be published. Where are you thinking of sending it?

A couple of comments:

- I noticed that the term "practice" is used a bit equivocally. Sometimes you're talking about our entire practice of epistemic justification, while other times you seem to be referring to more limited, specific practices or sub-disciplines. It matters because the former can't be queried for further justification, whereas the latter can. Perhaps devote a paragraph to this, showing why someone who asks for justification of how science is done, for instance, isn't slipping into the demand for absolute justification? A sub-practice can be questioned at its roots, from a standpoint that remains within the practice of epistemic justificaion. An entire discipline can be found to have a questionable "grammar." I think you agree with this?

- " . . . our practices of justification are complex and that the stability of knowledge depends on more than the production of arguments. When we recognize this, we are less tempted to treat disagreement as evidence of irrationality, and more able to locate what is actually at issue." This is a very important point. I'd like to see more about it. The ethics of doing philosophy are worth calling out whenever possible.

Quite apart from your paper, you’ve caused me to think more about the particular use of “grammar” here and elsewhere in Witt-related phil. I believe there are some important issues to understand about how the term functions – broadly, the degree to which it must remain metaphorical -- but I’ll save them for a possible OP of my own. I don’t think they affect the cogency of what you’re saying here.

I’ll keep following the thread with interest. Nice work!

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. — Sam26

This is exactly right. Your effort is towards laying out a conception of justification that is recognizable and plausible, and supported by practice; the Gettier cases aren't compatible with such a robust conception.

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?

I don’t think we need to drop the contrast the term is trying to gesture at. The point isn’t “justification shows us the Real,” it’s that justification is answerable to something beyond mere endorsement or conviction. . . . In that sense, reality isn’t doing much work. It’s just a way of reminding ourselves that error is possible, that correction is not merely a change of opinion, and that inquiry aims at what's true or justified. — Sam26

Great. Yes, it's the contrast that's important. We don't need a terminological conclave to decide which term might be the "right" one to capture it. IMO, way too much time is wasted in philosophy trying to convince people that one's preferred terminology for abstracta ought to prevail. That time could be spent actually inquiring into the concepts or structures, regardless of what terms we use for them.

If truth were nothing more than coherence of belief, stability within practice or endorsement by a community then the distinction between truth and opinion, or error and disagreement would collapse. — Esse Quam Videri

Completely agree.

something that is not exhausted by belief, endorsement or correct usage. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes again, and @Sam26 certainly sees it this way too.

this "something" doesn't have to be a full-blown metaphysical picture of Reality with a capital-R, but it does have to be robust enough to make sense of correction, learning, discovery and the possibility of being wrong. — Esse Quam Videri

This is where I've been focusing. I think we've come a long way in clarifying what the "something" needs to do, but questions may remain. At this point I want to give myself time to read Sam's paper in its entirety, as so far I've only been responding to the original summary and subsequent discussion. Then I may be better able to say more.

I basically agree with ↪Sam26 's reply here. There is a minimal metaphysical commitment that I would say is unavoidable; namely, that there is something that makes judgments true or false, independently of our taking them to be so. That’s enough metaphysics to ground inquiry — and no more than that.

I'm curious. What's fueling your "obsession" with the metaphysical question? Do you suspect that there is more to it than this? — Esse Quam Videri

On the minimal commitment, yes, I agree that it can ground inquiry. But are you also saying that philosophy can't or shouldn't be asking about what the "something" is that makes judgments true or false?

My perhaps obsessive concern with the appearance/reality question springs from my dislike of the term "reality" in philosophy. It's not that I think there's "more to it than this," but the opposite: I think there's less to it. I don't think we should say that epistemic justification can show us what is "real" -- though see @Sam26's point above, about how "truth," "reality" and "constraint" are all aiming at the same role in this discussion. Which is part of why I try to avoid "reality" as a term. I don't think it does much independent work. And at worst, it can blur the distinction between questions about being, and questions about thinking.

My interpretation is that J is not questioning whether global doubt is incoherent, but is asking why grammar should be considered sufficient to settle the issue. In other words, what explains why grammar imposes the limits it does? — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, though at this point I do wish we had a different term than "grammar," since grammar has such a specific meaning within language. Obviously none of us is saying that English grammar can settle philosophical questions. What sort of grammar, then, are we referencing? I tend to translate it as "mutual conceptual coherence," but perhaps there are other ways.

Grammar is the surface expression of deeper constraints built into what it means to doubt, inquire, and correct at all. — Sam26

A good insight, and a potential answer to the question raised above. Again, it allows us to turn away from the idea that language is actually the issue. Doubt and inquiry are practices, not units of language.

global doubt misfires because it cancels the very conditions that make doubt an intelligible, or an answerable activity — Sam26

Yes. And I'm focusing on these "very conditions" -- how should we describe them? What ontological commitments are involved, exactly? It sounds like all three of us see the same basic picture, but we're each working to give the most perspicuous account of what we see. I may be over-obsessing about the idea of "distinguishing appearance from reality," but is this really what we must claim for justificatory practices? To ask it differently: Could we instead claim that we distinguish truth from opinion? Is our warrant for talking about truth any stronger than our warrant for talking about reality? It's a genuine question; I'm not sure.

On the fundamental metaphysical question about the status of our practices in relation to reality: yes, that question remains. Wittgenstein doesn’t abolish it. What his line of thought does is block a certain way of posing it, the way that tries to demand a justification for the whole framework while still using the framework’s notions of justification, evidence, and correction. — Sam26

OK, good enough.

I’m not trying to smuggle in a practice that gives us access to Being. I mean something more minimal, i.e., that our ordinary epistemic practices already operate with a contrast between getting it right and getting it wrong, between correction and mistake, between appearance and reality. — Sam26

Also OK, as long as we don't get too excited about "appearance and reality." That, as you say, is a different metaphysical animal in most philosophical approaches.

I don't want to make the thread all about hinges, but I also don't want to not take questions about hinges. — Sam26

Fair enough. I don't want to pull you away from the focus of the thread, though I think we both agree that JTB+U is an attempt to shore up a strong notion of what justification actually means, which requires the hinge idea to carry a lot of weight, as a limit point for ordinary epistemic justification.

If I say I know a tune that is playing, I may be asked to give the title of the song (right/wrong), or to hum the rest of it. — Antony Nickles

This example raises a possibly disconcerting question. Suppose what I say is, "I know I've heard that tune before." Is there any justification I can be asked for, or can offer? This seems different from the earlier "purple cow" example, where we can separate out "purple," "cow", etc., which are public, from the private data of "I am thinking of . . ." What would be the equivalent public criteria for "to know one has heard before"?

Returning to your earlier post from yesterday:

So when Witt indicates a stopping point, the point isn’t “here is where I recommend you stop.” It’s “past this point your demands no longer operate as epistemic demands.” — Sam26

So the question is, Is this stopping point as clear as the one that ends the 500-yd race? The right answer might be, Some are and some aren't. In fact, it might be helpful to take a pair of alleged hinges that may be central to epistemic justification and really work through a demonstration of why one is, while the other may not be. How exactly does skepticism about, say, "There is an external world" necessarily and unambiguously undercut the concept/grammar of doubting? (I think your familiarity with all this may make it appear more obvious than it is to others.) I'm not suggesting this is an impossible challenge, quite the contrary. I think the more we understand about why the limits of justification are what they are, the better we'll be able to circle back and ask what knowledge really is.

Which is all merely to affirm what you say here, especially about the hierarchy:

The disagreement isn’t whether practices have hinges, they do. The disagreement is where to locate them, how to describe them (I think there's a hierarchy of hinges), and whether someone’s philosophical demand has genuinely left the space of epistemic assessment or is still a legitimate request for further justification within it. — Sam26

Lastly:

“this is where we stop” isn’t a gesture, it’s a disciplined account of how our epistemic life actually works. — Sam26

A tangential question: Would you allow any of this to be culturally conditioned? That is, might Chinese philosophy's epistemic life "actually work" differently? Or is that move the same as the psychological move concerning an individual, where justification becomes an empirical study about the human consciousness rather than an analysis of concepts/grammar?

And now . . . I'll read your paper. Are you looking for more or less the same kinds of feedback as the earlier questions for the original posts?

Hinges aren’t merely linguistic habits or conversational conveniences. They are bedrock commitments by which we take ourselves to be in contact with reality. They function as conditions of possibility for inquiry, but precisely because of that they carry ontological commitments: — Sam26

No, the hinges are neither habitual nor pragmatic/convenient. But . . . "By which we take ourselves to be in contact" -- that's the rub. What is the practice being described which can result in contact with reality, aka, that which ontology studies? This question isn't limited to Witt-related thought, of course, but nor do the Wittgensteinian moves render it unproblematic.

Another way of saying it: To carry ontological commitments -- which I agree that hinges do -- is not to be part of what ontology studies or describes. There remains the question of the status of our epistemic practices as they relate to what we're pleased to call "reality." That is an Ur-metaphysical question, so possibly out of bounds for the Witt line of thought?

More to say about the rest of your reply -- as always, you nail the issues beautifully -- but gotta run now.

And that’s why I keep separating two things, viz., the ontological project asks what must exist for anything to exist. The hinge project asks what must stand fast for our practices of doubt, evidence, error, and correction to be intelligible. Those projects can converge, but they don’t automatically converge, and the burden is on the theologian to show that they do. — Sam26

Good, that works for me. And we can notice that the liminal area between the two projects would lie in how to understand the term "stand fast". It has to refer to something different than ontology, but exactly how would we characterize what it is that is standing fast? And in what space, so to speak, does this occur -- is it strictly a linguistic/grammatical inquiry?

On “must they be wrong” and “what’s the persuasion for ‘you should stop at X’”: I don’t think the hinge idea is a recommendation about where one ought to stop, as if Wittgenstein is issuing a rule. It’s a description of where our justificatory practices actually do stop, where reasons run out and the background stands fast. You can refuse to stop, but at some point the demands cease to be ordinary justificatory demands and become a different kind of philosophical ambition, for example a metaphysical demand for an ultimate ground. That ambition can be coherent, but it’s no longer the same as ordinary epistemic judgements. — Sam26

I'm not sure I agree with this. It implies that Witt is innocently noting a fact of the matter -- "Here is where our justificatory practices stop" -- rather than making a recommendation to avoid what he considers to be nonsense or, indeed, a kind of mental illness. If the question were really so simple, everyone would be a Wittgensteinian, and that would be that. Closer to the truth, I think, is what's implied in your phrase "at some point," and what Witt thought happened after that point.

The point at which an exploration of language becomes a metaphysical inquiry is far from clear, I would say. And while you generously call coherent "a metaphysical demand for an ultimate ground," I'm really not sure Witt would. Isn't his attitude more like "Fine, go ahead and refuse to stop at the point I've indicated, but what you think you're doing is no longer what you're in fact doing. So you really should comport your practice with what I'm showing you to be the limits of sensible discourse"? Two different references for "ought," I guess. It's as if someone said, "I'm going to win this 500-yd foot race by running 1,000 yards." Witt might reply, "You ought to stop at 500 yards, not because that's better in some way, but because past 500 yards you're no longer running the race." He's not saying, "The race ought to stop at 500 yards." That's the part he claims he's merely indicating, as a fact. But you should stop there, if you want to still be part of this practice.

A hinge, or related group of hinges, is meant to be where epistemic justification stops. But any unclarity about what counts as justification is going to be a problem for Witt as much as for JTB. That's part of why I like your work on this topic. An explanation of justification must itself be justified, and that's why you're writing your paper. You don't claim to be able to simply show the place where "justification" now holds water as a concept; you argue for it carefully. I often wish Witt was as careful, brilliant aphorist though he was. But then I've only read parts of "On Certainty," so I may be talking out my ass.

. . . to argue that God isn’t merely one more claim inside the system, but part of what makes the system possible. My point is: that’s a coherent aspiration, but it’s also a very high bar. To succeed, the theologian would have to show that the denial of God undermines the grammar of justification itself, not just that God is a good explanation, or a satisfying metaphysical picture. And until that bar is met, “God exists” looks less like a hinge and more like a substantive claim that remains open to epistemic assessment, including defeaters, alternatives, and the usual standards of practice. — Sam26

Right. The necessity of God for the very structure of justification is -- if true -- deeply hidden. So much so, that it requires huge systematic effort to bring it to light. As you say, this is a coherent project, and many philosophers and theologians believe it can succeed. This does require abandoning what you're calling the substantive claim, which many are reluctant to do. I would say it also requires at least some explanation of why the hinge-certainty here is so much more difficult to establish than that of, say, "The world exists," and of why a person can evidently do all the practice-based work of justification while vigorously denying the God-hinge, even after it's been carefully argued for. (This is harder than it looks, because the idea of a hinge is that it represents a place you stop, and advocates of the God-hinge simply refuse to stop with "The world exists" etc. Must they be wrong? What is the persuasion for "You should stop at X"? I've often wondered this about Wittgensteinian phil. in general.)

the desire to make God hinge-certain is structurally parallel to the hinge idea, — Sam26

This was really my point, or observation. In both cases, what's wanted is an acknowledgment that justification or rationality depends upon a deep-background source that is not itself an item for justification. Theologians probably have better success showing God as ontologically, rather than conceptually (grammatically), necessary. Which raises an odd question: Could you consistently maintain that God is necessary for there to be Being at all, but not necessary for there to be rationality and justification?

The question of causation only enters, possibly, when a particular mind thinks Prop A and Prop B.
— J
I don't follow. What else could it [a proposition] be other than thoughts? — Patterner

This is an excellent question, and something of a thorn in the side of the traditional understanding of what a proposition is.

A prop. is supposed to be the object or content of a thought, much as a tree could be the object of a perception. The tree is there, regardless of whether anyone in particular perceives it; when you and I both perceive it, we are perceiving "the same" tree. And so with a prop.: It's supposed to be independent of any particular thought, and you and I can correctly speak of having "the same" thought when we mean "are thinking of the same proposition." (Obviously we're not having the same brain event, since our brains are separate.) There's also the implication of persistence, so the prop. remains an item in the world even if no one thinks it, just as the tree does. One important difference: Many would argue that a prop. requires a "first thought," so to speak, to bring it into existence, whereas a tree does not. Thus on this view props are mental creations, yet also weirdly independent in the way I've described. (However, the props of math are regarded by the majority of mathematicians as "already out there," requiring no "first thought," at least by a non-divine consciousness.)

Anyway . . . the more we think about this picture, the more problematic it gets. Sebastian Rödl, in Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, offers a strong critique. This passage, while a bit sarcastic, gives the idea ("p" is a proposition here):

Philosophers are in the habit of indicating the object of judgement by the letter p. There is an insouciance with respect to this fateful letter. It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. For example, when we do epistemology, we are interested in what it is for someone to know - know what? oh yes: p. If we inquire into rational requirements on action or intention, we ask what it is to be obliged to - what? oh yes: see to it that p, intend that, if p, then q, and so on. However, if we undertake to reflect on thought . . . then the letter p signifies the deepest question and the deepest comprehension. If only we understood the letter p, the whole world would be open to us. — Rodl, 55

Thus, your question, "In what way can a proposition be 'merely' a proposition, and not a thought?" is what Rödl wants to know too. If only we understood the letter p! (The subtitle of his book is "An Introduction to Absolute Idealism," which gives you a clue about how he answers it.) But for our purposes here, suppose we accepted the received view of what a prop. is. Can we then make any sense of the concept of entailment as a special kind of relation between props, but not thoughts?

Any of the propositions that form the premises of a syllogism, for instance.

Prop A: "All humans are mortal."
Prop B: "Socrates is a human."

Taken merely as propositions, is there any reasonable sense in which we can say that they cause:

Prop C: "Socrates is mortal."

I don't think so. We've had to invent a new word -- entailment -- to use in order to talk about the relation of Props A and B to Prop C. The question of causation only enters, possibly, when a particular mind thinks Prop A and Prop B. That, I believe, is what you're getting at with saying "One thought causes another thought." And clearly it's contingent: If I'm simply no good at elementary logic, thinking Props A and B will not cause me to think Prop C, no matter the entailment.

If this sounds right to you, then the question would be: What is it about Props A and B that, if you do think them and understand them, causes the thought of Prop C?

These layers differ in depth and scope, but they share a common role. They stand fast for us in ways that are not themselves open to epistemic assessment. They shape the riverbed against which justificatory flow is possible. — Sam26

A possibly interesting question occurred to me, reading this. Most sophisticated theology would maintain that the existence of God is certain, but not open to epistemic assessment, or at least not any assessment that would resemble ordinary justification. Is there any reason not to accept such a claim, along with claims like "There is a world" and "Objects persist"?

One natural reply is, "But there being a world, and objects persisting, are essential parts of how we play the game of justification. Their 'grammatical certainty' is evident. This is not the case with 'God exists'. We can do all the things we need to do in our practice-based justification without needing 'God exists' to be certain or even true."

So this may be the often unacknowledged basis for building a structure of rational theology. The theologian hears this reply and responds, "Very well. You've challenged me to show you why 'God exists' is indeed part of the grammar of rational justification." And from this we get, for instance, Thomism, or a Plantinga-like "analytical theism."

My point is that the wish to show the necessity of God to human existence is, oddly, in harmony with the wish to establish certainties that define our practices. Whether the theologian succeeds is of course another matter.

I really don't know what you mean by entailment . I don't think there's any such thing as a "correct conclusion" where this topic is concerned. It's not a math problem. One thought causes another thought. . . — Patterner

I agree this is difficult. Harking back to my distinction between the two senses of "thought": Suppose we substituted the "proposition" sense of "thought" and said, "One proposition causes another proposition". Do you still think that would be true?

Williams’s distinction between the actions of life and the search for truth — Sam26

This is actually Descartes's phrase -- quite a prescient distinction for a 17th century person!

Even if the negations can be stated coherently, the question remains whether the skeptical posture can be sustained without borrowing the very criteria of correction that it's trying to bracket. — Sam26

Yes. The first step is to rescue Descartes from incoherence, and then his defender has to take a position on the "criteria of correction" that separates them out from ordinary justifications. I agree that Williams doesn't have the last word here.

I’m inclined to treat the Method as a philosophical exercise with a special aim, not as an account of doubt that illuminates ordinary justification. — Sam26

Absolutely. And again, philosophers will differ on whether that special aim really makes sense. Descartes thought he had discovered something about the connection of knowledge and incorrigibility. But had he? I think that depends entirely on how convincing one finds the cogito. My own take, in a sentence, is that the cogito tells me that I am, but not what I am -- what "I" is. Well, enough of that. :smile:

I agree with your last point about understanding. I’m not trying to eliminate the experiential aspect of grasping. If you want to talk about “mental practice,” I’m open to that. My point is that whatever phenomenology we offer still has to be disciplined by the same kinds of constraints we’ve been discussing, i.e., it needs criteria for what counts as getting it right, what counts as misdescription, what would count as correction, and what would count as defeat. In that sense, even an inquiry into inner understanding isn’t purely private. It’s still answerable to practice-governed standards, even if its data are first-person. That’s a nice way to connect your point back to the thread without letting it drift into an uncheckable subjectivism. — Sam26

Yes indeed. How far can the basic "bracketing" move take us away from our experiences as intersubjective/public intelligences? While it's correct that only I can supply the first-person data that would confirm or deny whether "I am now thinking of a purple cow" is true, it remains the case that getting this right, even in the privacy of my own mental home, means accepting the same public criteria we'd need for an actual purple cow. And all the more so when we turn to the much more complicated case of understanding.

If you want to explain how Williams defends Descartes, I’m interested, but I’d also want to keep the distinction clear between (a) Descartes as a philosophical exercise and (b) whether that exercise should be allowed to set the standards for ordinary, practice-governed justification aimed at epistemic certainty. — Sam26

Yes, that distinction is important, and as we've said, Descartes's project is off on a tangent from ordinary epistemic certainty. His kind of certainty is interesting to analyze, but no one would reach for Cartesian doubt as a way to understand JTB. Here's how Williams puts it:

There is no question, we must always remember, of hyperbolical doubt playing any rational role within ordinary life: the Doubt is to be taken entirely seriously in the context of an enquiry into what can most certainly be known to us . . . but [as Descartes says] 'one must bear in mind that distinction, which I have insisted on in various places, between the actions of life and the search for truth . . .'" — Williams, 61

This is precisely the same distinction you want to make, I believe -- except that for you, "the search for truth" looks chimerical from a Wittgensteinian standpoint, and you have reasons for doubting (sorry!) whether the Method should "be taken entirely seriously". No matter. What's important as a takeaway here is that JTB+U is a contribution to understanding "the actions of life", the actions of practice-governed justification.

As for Williams' defense of the validity of Descartes's radical doubt: It hinges on the distinction Williams makes between "the universal possibility of illusion" and "the possibility of universal illusion." Descartes believes that "it is epistemically possible that all supposedly perceptual judgments are mistaken," and Willams points out that "the strict contradictory of a perceptual judgment is not itself a perceptual judgment." What he calls "the everyday negation" of a statement like "There is a table in front of me" is a contrary, not a contradictory -- that is, it translates as "What is in front of me is not a table." So radical doubt is only senseless if misunderstood as "the universal possibility of illusion."

Williams's book is a great read, but I don't want to belabor Descartes.

I can accept inner understanding as real, while still insisting that justificatory standing isn’t a private feeling and can’t be reduced to a report of how things seem. The practice-governed side is what I’m trying to keep in view. — Sam26

Good. My only reason for introducing the experiential aspect of "understanding" was to ground it in what we might call "mental practice," something we do, in a different sense from "what we do" in the practice of justification. But an inquiry into that aspect of understanding would be a type of phenomenology, governed by the public guardrails you outline.

That would be the point in question. Bernard Williams, in his book on Descartes, has this analysis:

When we reach the fully 'hyperbolical' doubt, as Descartes called it, we encounter a new kind of problem, which concerns the meaning of the proposition which the Doubt invites us to entertain. What is the content of the idea that, compatibly with other things seeming as they do, there might not be a physical world at all? If the hyperbolical doubt were arrived at merely by generalization from the particular doubts . . . it does not look as though there could be a coherent answer to this question. All the cases of error which the Doubt seized on in the earlier stages of the argument involved the use of some perceptions to correct others, and while we might be able to say, consistently with that, that we were not absolutely sure at any given moment that the present perception was veridical, we could not consistently say that no perceptions were. — Williams, Descartes: The project of pure enquiry, 57

Would you agree that this is the Wittgensteinian objection? If so, I can go on to say more about how Williams defends Descartes here.

I’m not asserting an empirical thesis about consciousness, as if I were claiming “understanding has causal power in the brain” or “understanding is a measurable mental property.” I’m pointing to the role the concept plays in our justificatory practices. — Sam26

Yes. But isn't it also the case that understanding is an actual mental phenomenon, something that can occur for you or me? Or perhaps this represents a philosophical difference along the usual public/private lines; perhaps you don't countenance talk of inner mental states, etc. I do, but I'm happy to acknowledge that your project doesn't need a decision one way or the other about that in order to discuss how justificatory practices work.

I appreciate these thoughts on the Cartesian method. Possibly I'm not quite seeing your point, because my defense of Descartes would be simply this: There is no global doubt. He doesn't doubt everything, he does reach an endpoint, and it is absolutely certain, at least to him. If he had gone on to doubt the cogito, your analysis would be correct, and Descartes would be the first to agree -- doubting the self is doubting the entire framework for doubt.

As to whether the method occurs within a practice, I think it does: Descartes is clear about what would dispel or legitimize a given doubt. Granted, there is debate about whether his criterion (which rests on a particular notion of incorrigibility) is a good one. But we have to remember that Descartes's target is doubt and certainty themselves, not whether a certain subject "really" is how it seems. As he wrote, "No one of serious mind ever doubted" the existence of the external world.

You say, "Ordinary justification aims at epistemic certainty, not absolute certainty," and perhaps this is key. The Method is not ordinary; it doesn't attempt to mimic how we arrive at epistemic certainty. Descartes's project was weirder than that.

I find it amazing that people find Gettier significant. — Sam26

Yeah, and that's why I was curious what you thought the "core intuition" was. Perhaps it was deeper than I'd thought . . . but no, I'm with you on this.

*
I'd meant to circle back to this:

You/we take it to be certain that the role of understanding in human consciousness is significant, that it makes a difference, that it is a desideratum quite separate from knowledge — J

I think you’re close.

I’d just tighten the hinge, so it isn’t framed as a claim about human consciousness, as if it were an empirical thesis. In my use, the hinge is more grammatical than psychological: — Sam26

Could you say more about this? I think I see why you believe that talk of consciousness in this context has to be empirical, but before replying I want to be sure I understand you.

Good. So the question is, Does this picture change if we replace "Kant" with the premises of an entailment? Not everyone would recognize the correct conclusion, of course, so let's limit the example to those who do. For those people, is this merely another version of thinking "Monty Python" because that's what they associate with "Kant"? I think "B" because that's what I happen to think of when I think "If A, then B; A"?

I guess this comes down to asking, "What does it mean to think an entailment?" Is there a special sauce we need to add, in order to make it the thought of an entailment, rather than a succession of thoughts with personal causes, so to speak?

OK, I see. Do you think conscious thoughts might be entirely epiphenomenal? All the work happening below the surface?

about an aesthetic response to a narrative . . . — Tom Storm

Or an ethical one.

I meekly suggest that you're both right. Both interpretations are mainstream Christian theology, with the redemptive-sacrifice one being the more traditional and scriptural, but by no means the more arguable.

It doesn't seem so machine-like. — jkop

I have to say, it does to me. A Roomba can do this, and more.

Surely, a thought needs to be thought? — Patterner

This again brings up the equivocation in what the word "thought" can represent -- either a proposition, or the mental/brain event whose content is that proposition. Pretty sure @jkop had the first in mind here. And yes, the whole idea of these uninstantiated propositions is problematic. All I can say is, that's the received view in most of anal. phil. A proposition is supposed to say or represent what it does, independent of any particular mental event; so we can talk about two minds thinking "the same proposition" etc. But see Kimhi and Rödl for dissenting opinions.

Is it not an illusion to regard that which enters consciousness as will-power, as a cause? Are not all conscious phenomena only final phenomena—the lost links in a chain, but apparently conditioning one another in their sequence within the plane of consciousness? — DifferentiatingEgg

Dunno. It's a little hard to make out what you're saying. Where do you think the illusion comes in?

The basic idea is that some "why?" questions misfire because they try to put into question that which makes questioning possible in the first place. Framed like this, it can be seen as a retorsion argument, or argument from pragmatic contradiction. — Esse Quam Videri

Yes, I think we're all on the same page with this now. I raised a question about how the Cartesian method does or doesn't fit this conception, and that could be a good discussion too (I appreciate what @Sam26 is saying about it) but outside the OP.

Doubt isn’t a free-floating posture you can apply to anything at will. It’s a move inside a practice, and it only makes sense where there are criteria for what would count as checking it, correcting it, or settling it. — Sam26

Right, that would be the difference between a skepticism that is meaningful, versus one that merely capitalizes on our language's ability to frame "why?" questions. As above, I think Descartes stays within a recognizable practice using his method, but TBC elsewhere.

Back to Sam's questions:

Do you think Gettier cases still refute JTB even if we build in the guardrails and the “+U” clarification.

Is my diagnosis too dependent on relabeling the justification condition rather than answering the core intuition. — Sam26

Your analysis of JTB pretty well answers the first question, I think. You conclude, "Gettier is trading on an impoverished picture of justification," implying that Gettier cases never refuted JTB, properly understood, in the first place. Your guardrails and "+U" show why, and once again it's key to your concept that it is a showing, an explanation, not an added ingredient required to save JTB from the jaws of Gettier.

The second question is a little unclear to me. How would you lay out "the core intuition"?

Thanks, this is very good. You've helped me understand better what's at stake in the particular, problematic "why?" When this level of "why?" is reached, the question is actually no longer about the original subject (in this case, having two hands). It morphs into a demand for justification of the entire conceptual apparatus. And since this must inevitably include the concept of "justification" itself ("borrowing the tool") . . . we have a problem.

The only place I'd put up a little flag would be when you speak about "the ordinary criteria as illegitimate in advance" as a sign of hinge-questioning doubt. This problem goes back to Descartes, and is outside the scope of your OP, but I would make the case that Cartesian methodical doubt doesn't actually posit anything as illegitimate in advance, and neither does the skeptic in our example. In both instances, the skeptic is really raising a question about certainty, not about some subject. No genuine doubt is being expressed -- existential doubt, I might call it -- concerning two-handedness. Doubt is wielded as a tool to sculpt certainty, to learn how far the whole method can be pushed before we have to cry "I can conceive of no further doubt!"

I would say that asking "why?" is not itself an epistemically "innocent" act. It assumes that there is something to ask "why" about, admits the possibility of finding an answer, and presupposes that some answers will be better than others, among other things. To ask "why" is already to make a move within the game. Would you agree? — Esse Quam Videri

That's a good question. In his referenced paper on Witt and Godel, @Sam26 writes:

"As Wittgenstein observes, "There is no why. I simply do not. This is how I act" (OC 148). This insight captures something crucial about the nature of foundational certainties: they are pre-rational in the sense that they precede and enable rational discourse rather than emerging from it."

And he offers these examples:

". . . basic statements like "I have two hands" or "The Earth exists." Unlike nonlinguistic hinges, these can be spoken and seem propositional, yet they resist the usual patterns of justification and doubt."

So what happens if we ask "Why?" about the justification of such a statement? We might give two analyses. In the first, which I think is yours, we'd say, "The question is meaningful, and admits of an answer. It may be the case that no satisfactory answer presents itself, but that is not the question's fault, so to speak. The fault lies with us (with philosophy), in our inability to provide a deep enough explanation." In the second, which uses the hinge idea (if I understand it), we'd say, "This sort of 'why?' takes us outside of what it means to look for a justification. There's no satisfactory answer because the standpoint from which the question can be meaningfully asked presupposes the conceptual (Sam would say 'grammatical') equipment needed to ask it."

That said, I lean more toward the first analysis than the second. Is it possible to doubt whether I have two hands? Yes. Do we know the general sorts of things that justify our (comparative) certainty about two-handedness? Yes. Perhaps Sam can go on to elaborate the ways in which "the usual patterns of justification and doubt" are resisted. To me, it seems equally possible that we are simply more certain about two-handedness.

Can you name a hinge you think my framework relies on, and say whether you think it should stand fast or be challenged. — Sam26

Maybe this: You/we take it to be certain that the role of understanding in human consciousness is significant, that it makes a difference, that it is a desideratum quite separate from knowledge. To be skeptical about understanding – to say something like “You can’t prove to me that what you call understanding has any effect on what I say and do” -- is a kind of undermining, as you describe, since it seems to demand the very framework which it calls into question. But I’m not sure about this; so many skeptical challenges can be interpreted not as questioning a hinge proposition but simply as demonstrating that our language allows us to ask “Why?” about pretty much anything.

At the very least, we find ourselves with a problematic involving the concepts of knowledge and understanding – perhaps that is a kind of hinge. I can’t justify my certainty that this pairing is both necessary and in tension, but nor can I imagine how to do any philosophy at all without taking it to be so, much less use the concept of "justification".

I’ll leave all this for you to decide, as you’re much more familiar with the hinge concept than I am.

The thought of standing up that results in standing up, is not more mysterious than a fruit fly's ability to identify an obstacle and fly around it. — jkop

I kind of agree. But the mystery enters when we claim that the person's thought is the cause of the movement. We don't say that about the fly, as you demonstrate: You tell a story about ions, cell membranes, et al., which is no doubt true. You don't say "The fly decides to fly toward the oatmeal." Our view about fruit flies is that they don't decide anything, as such; they "act accordingly"; they are stimulus-response machines, and if there's some sort of consciousness too, then it's along for the ride, and makes no choices. But for a person, if we say, "I didn't really choose to stand up, but rather, my various ions and synapses were the cause that produced this effect," we would be staking out a radical physicalist/behaviorist viewpoint.

Thanks!

my target’s confusion about what sort of thing a hinge is, not an attempt to end reflection. — Sam26

Yes. And we can go on to ask: If we know what sort of thing a hinge is, does it render further questions about its status as a building block of rationality pointless? That might be the strict Wittgensteinian reading. But is it the necessary one?

Anyway . . . not really germane to your OP.

the question I’m asking in this thread isn’t aimed at that version of Christianity. — Sam26

Fair enough, as long as we can agree that they really are different versions of Christianity, not a correct or authorized version and a series of heresies.

And I agree that liberal and progressive theologians are part of the living landscape. But notice what their move often is: they reduce the evidential burden by relocating the claim, from “this happened” to “this means,” from event to symbol, from history to existential interpretation. That may be a coherent religious posture, but it’s no longer a claim that stands or falls on testimony in the same way. — Sam26

Right, as regards the resurrection, for instance. The life and teachings of Jesus, though, probably do need an evidentiary basis. I'm not aware of a Christian theology that allows that an actual person named Jesus of Nazareth never existed . . . but who knows, maybe there is.

Christianity stands or falls on a single historical claim: that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. — Sam26

I probably won't be contributing much to this thread, but . . . you do know that millions of people call themselves Christians today who don't believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, despite Paul? Are they mistaken to do so, according to you? Or is it possible that your version of what Christianity involves is too traditional, given the very active, living presence of this religion in our culture? I wonder how many contemporary liberal and progressive Christian theologians you've actually read.

it helps to make explicit something I left implicit. In many domains we do not vet understanding by inspecting a static artifact alone, as if it were a completed proof. — Sam26

Yes, this is the main elaboration I was offering. And it connects with what you say here:

“public” does not mean “a pile of citations,” it means susceptibility to the practice’s checks, including dialogic ones when the case calls for it. — Sam26

You're right, of course, that (linguistic) dialogic confirmation is not always the only route. Perhaps we need to think in terms of interactive confirmation of understanding, leaving as open as possible what sort of interaction is appropriate.

But I want to put this carefully, so it does not look like an added criterion. The “further step” you describe is not a separate requirement piled onto justification, it's one of the ordinary ways a practice determines whether a person has justificatory standing or has only borrowed it. It is the difference between an utterance that happens to be correct and a competence that can carry that correctness across the relevant cases. In that sense, the dialogic process is a method of assessment, not an additional condition of knowledge. — Sam26

Very good. We can't lose sight of the role (and placement) of understanding in this scheme. The distinction between "method of assessment" and "additional condition" keeps this clear. Would you want to go into more of the problems with the traditional construal of "justification" (without the +U)? Or maybe you can assume your readers are already familiar with the literature.

Here are a few responses to your questions:

From post #2

Is my use of “grammar” illuminating here, or does it obscure what is really going on. — Sam26

I find it easy enough to understand, in context, but it isn't what I'd call illuminating. Depends on one's comfort with Witt, I think. Maybe drop it, for a general philosophical audience?

post #3

Is this notion of understanding genuinely distinct from justification, or does it collapse into it. — Sam26

As discussed above: In a certain sense it does "collapse into it," but not in an invidious way. The collapse is a matter of where you locate the work of understanding, as part of what we mean by justification. Conceptually, there is no collapse, however, and the terms can't be interchanged.

post #4

Is Practice Safety a useful idea, or does it collapse into defeater screening or into reliability talk. — Sam26

I like it. It captures something over and above defeaters and reliability.

post #5

Do you think “linguistic training” deserves to be a distinct route, or is it better treated as part of the background of the other routes. — Sam26

I don't think it's a distinct route, which tells you a lot about my philosophical commitments! If it were me, I'd make it a background condition, but there are strong Witt-related reasons not to.

post #6

Do you think hinges are real features of our epistemic life, or are they a philosopher’s invention to stop regress. — Sam26

Frankly, this is too big a question to be handled here. For your purposes, they fit the theory and do explanatory work. If you're asking for a personal response . . . I believe there are unjustified "inherited backgrounds" we require in order to do philosophy. I prefer Nagel's discussion to Witt's, partially because for Nagel the status of this situation is problematic, a spur to further thought, whereas for Witt, if I understand him, the hinge concept is meant to close the subject, as an antidote to perplexity. But my knowledge of Witt isn't deep.