Aren't tastes and personal preferences also truth-apt?

For isn't it possible to doubt our own tastes and preferences?

Don't we often say that we want something, but regret having done it? Don't we often say we prefer something but regularly do the opposite? And aren't we sometimes glad to have been forced to do something that we wouldn't have done voluntarily?

I've noticed for instance, that when I am depressed I will insist that I don't want to do something, say go for a walk, but when forced to do it I actually enjoy the walk.

So if a person's verbally expressed tastes and preferences are understood to convey information about their future behaviour, then they are falsifiable and hence truth apt. Perhaps society does know what is best for each of us.

Namely, as mentioned in the OP, if we reduce matters of what gives one meaning in life or purpose to a matter of taste or personal whim, then haven't we idiotized the issue of what gives one meaning in life to a simple matter of what I like best or dislike most? — Wallows

Only if epistemology is premised upon a hard object-subject distinction. Or put equivalently, that one's epistemology is based upon the correspondence theory of truth, or alternatively, that pre-existing truth is interpreted as being discovered rather than presently constructed by the observer, whereby their preferences and decision-making are considered irrelevant to the truth they obtained.

Once the correspondence theory of truth is rejected, epistemological scepticism is transformed into ethical and aesthetic preferences.

For example, consider the so called epistemological problem of other minds. According to the correspondence theory of truth, either other minds exist or other minds do not exist and their ontological status is independent of the way human behaviour is judged by an observer. This leads to sceptical doubt , the problem of individuality, the hard-problem of consciousness etc.

On the other hand, suppose the "truth maker" concerning the existence of other minds, is viewed more holistically as being as much a function of an observer's perceptual relationship to the entity he is observing. According to this anti-realist account, an observer's conception of other minds is as much an account of his personal preferences that guide his perceptual and cognitive actions than it is the behavioural data he is viewing.

So in short, if correspondence theory is rejected, then preferences are epistemologically relevant.

Necessary statements are commands or policies, i.e. speech acts, whose origin of force is the intentions of the speaker or institution who asserted them. This includes metaphysical assertions, ethical assertions and all universally quantified 'propositions' over infinite domains in science and mathematics.

So "Bachelors are unmarried men", when interpreted as expressing a necessary truth, is to declare a policy allowing the substitution of the former as a synonym for the latter without exception. Hence the image of it holding in "all possible worlds".

However, when interpreted as expressing a publicly verifiable proposition "Bachelors are unmarried men" is both contingent and under-determined.

Anyway, doesn't the semantic under-determination of the word "determinism" render the question meaningless?

Consider the following circular definition, which nevertheless has intuitive meaning.

Determinism is the thesis that the state of the universe at any given time, together with the laws of nature, fixes (determines) the states of the universe at all other times. — SophistiCat

But this definition is also fulfilled by taking determinism to refer only to the fixing of an arbitrary finite number of states. And no amount of protest against this non-standard interpretation of "determinism" is able to eliminate it.

So it isn't clear in my mind, as to how the original question can be sufficiently represented.

I don't think that Quantum mechanics is helpful or useful in this sort of discussion, because of it's many conflicting interpretations that parallel the philosophical disputes that already existed in classical mechanics in relation to probability, time and counterfactual reasoning.

In my constructivist opinion, what is impossible cannot even be thought. Impossibility refers to the sentences of a language that have no application in a given language-game.

So, i interpret special relativity as saying that an object of positive mass accelerating to c isn't a meaningful proposition of relativity, i.e. that it isn't even wrong, because it cannot be constructed from the application of the postulates of special relativity.

Recall Wittgenstein's analogy for verbal definitions in terms of occasional sign-posts that are placed to guide walkers along a route. The sign-posts tend to be laid down only at the points where they are useful, namely at the places where walkers frequently become lost or confused.

The route is analogous to the implicit conventional use of a word, whereas the sign-posts are analogous to the explicit conventional definition of the word. Needless to say, individual walkers will walk idiosyncratically , regardless of whatever the sign posts say.

And is it necessarily the case that a walker who frequently follows the route could give an accurate verbal account of it without him actually following it?

Interestingly Lewis Carroll's paradox concerning the meaning of logical deduction in "What the Tortoise said to Achilles" came 50 years earlier than Wittgenstein's remarks concerning the relationship between rule-based definitions and language use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles

Whilst this is slightly jumping the gun, later on in PI Wittgenstein expresses a similar logical refutation of the idea that the use of language can be grounded in rule-based definitions or explicitly expressed conventions, because in a nutshell the very meaning of rules and conventions is grounded in their use! - For otherwise our definitions lead to infinite regress.
As an example, just try to define the logical operators non circularly.

Also, regarding the question of 'exactness' with respect to the specification of rules, Wittgenstein had questioned earlier in his career (i think during his middle period in Philosophical Grammar), whether the notions of exactness, identicalness etc were a priori in the sense of being phenomenological aspects of experience. The significance being whether or not exactness is empirically reducible. For if it isn't, then the notion of exactness is well, inexact, it's meaning only being demonstrable as a family resemblance of uses across different language-games.

Yes, the concept of intelligence is anthropomorphic, for we understand intelligence to be the capacity to solve problems of relevance to ourselves.

This then leads to the consequence of believing that intelligence is definable in terms of a particular class of algorithm, say deep neural networks with the capacity to react to stimulus the way we do. But this is an illusion, because as far as making predictions is concerned, it is easy to show that on average, no machine learning algorithm can solve a randomly created problem better than any other algorithm. See Wolpert's No Free lunch theorem for a modern reboot of Hume's problem of induction.

So the very definition of intelligence is inductive bias. To say that a process is "intelligent" is merely to say that it is similar to another process, and hence is useful for modelling the other process. So it is perfectly reasonable to call Alpha-Go intelligent - relative to the problem of go, since AlphaGo was designed to learn and represent maximum utility go sequences, at the cost of AlphaGo having relatively lower performance if trained to solve problems dissimilar to go.

i am unable to visualise or demonstrate a semantic notion of logical inconsistency.

I can demonstrate what might be called psychological inconsistency, for example by holding a self-negating belief, such as "This sentence is false. Therefore it is true. Therefore it is false... etc", but this isn't any different from writing {-1, 1, -1, 1,...} as a consequence of iterating the equation x(t+1)=-x(t) starting from x(0) = -1.

This is hardly what one might call the semantics of logical inconsistency, which requires two incompatible statements to be held simultaneously. But this isn't imaginable by definition. At most, I can imagine a driver encountering two signposts for a town which point in opposite directions, and him being unable to make a decision. Or two people disagreeing as to which word applies in a situation. Or a computer program failing a software test.

So logical inconsistency at most refers to a syntactical convention of communication of which nothing else needs to be said. It has no significant implications.

Leave the future alone if you're looking for certainty because certainty isn't possible for even the present or the past. As Bertrand Russell once said the universe could've sprung into existence 5 minutes ago with false memories of the past. Certainty isn't possible. — TheMadFool

It is inferences that are uncertain, whereas a report can only be considered to be false in the sense of violating our conventions for communicating reports.

But is there a clear distinction between inferences and reports? For example, is the sentence "It appears that the dark clouds are about to rain" a necessarily uncertain inference or a necessarily true report?

I understood Wittgenstein as insinuating that one's private experience of red, i.e. phenomenal red, is neither a necessary nor sufficient estimation of the public use of optical red. The purpose of ostensive definition is to 'set up' the estimation of optical red in terms of phenomenal red, and vice versa, without either being semantically reducible to the other, since while they conceptually overlap they are not conceptually equivalent.

Yet at the same time Wittgenstein pointed out that the meaning of physical concepts such as optical red cannot be meaningfully said to transcend the holistic totality of one's experiences, due to the meaning of utterances resting upon use and demonstration.

So I understood Witty as rejecting the epistemologies of both phenomenalism and physicalism, whilst being close in spirit to metaphysical pluralism - not in the sense of substance pluralism but in the sense of use pluralism and family resemblance.

The obvious yet strange thing about predictions is that they cannot be future-referring in any physical sense since they are only expressed in immediate response to present stimuli.

Hence predictions could be interpreted as being reports of the immediate present, thus they could be considered to be necessarily true, regardless of whatever happens in the future.

To the best of my amateur knowledge, there isn't general agreement as to whether Kant meant to posit anything literal that was a-phenomenal. After all, why would he posit the literal existence of something beyond the bounds of sense that his synthetic theory of cognitive judgement denies as having empirical meaning?

It seems to me that Kant could only have been self-consistent if noumena in the literal sense was meant as an empty figure of speech, but with which Kant conveyed metaphorically the notion of there being bounds of meaningful discourse in terms of the ordinary empirical notion of a visual boundary.

Is hearing voices qualitatively different from hearing your own thoughts?
Or are there intermediate cases, where the voices are semi-controllable and semi-self identifiable?

You are free to call a hypertask the motion of an arrow by saying "this moving arrow is a hypertask", which says nothing other than "this is a moving arrow", but you cannot derive the conclusion that motion is a hypertask through summation of individual terms of a series. For there is no notion of "infinite summation" in standard calculus except as a figure speech referring to a bound of the sum of finitely extended finite series that is defined via the principle of induction. You are possibly mistaking the principle of mathematical induction for a proof that a hypertask summation can terminate at a finite value, when mathematical induction is merely a definition for what "infinite series" means in the sense of a bound with respect to finite series.

Zeno's paradox even applies to each of the infinitesimally small elements of a supposed hyper-task. Suppose we use a non-standard calculus that defines a "hyper-real" number 'epsilon' that is both positive and yet infinitely smaller than every positive real number such that it's value when multiplied by the 'number' of natural numbers equals 1.

If you are prepared to swallow arguments of classical logic that permit such a thing , then as I recall, it can also be shown that the logic permits models of "hyper-hyper-real" numbers that are infinitesimally smaller than epsilon, and so on, without bottom. So one cannot appeal to the notion of infinitesimals and hyper-tasks without running into "higher-order" zeno's paradoxes.

Sadly one cannot appeal to mathematics without begging the question. Sure, a normalised infinite geometric series equals 1, which is to say that it is the upper and lower bound of any finitely extended geometric series. But the only way of assigning time intervals to each term of the associated geometric sequence, say {0.5,0.25,0.125...} is to ignore the application of zeno's argument to each and every term.

And the only way to reach the value of the bound is to literally sum an infinite number of terms, which assumes the existence of a hyper-task that mathematicians do not possess -unless , say, motion is considered to represent such a hyper-task, which is precisely what Zeno's argument calls into question.

Well, delusions are rather not beliefs; but, convictions that are justified and maintained through erroneous reasoning like cognitive distortions. — Wallows

But aren't depression and anxiety treated as beliefs produced by cognitive distortions in CBT? And what is the definition of a cognitive-distortion?

Couldn't the falling success rate of talk therapy for treating neurosis possibly be an indication that the placebo effect and behavioural conditioning are the main causal agents responsible for talk therapy's success in treating neurosis, as opposed to talk therapy working due to reasoned argument?

In many cases, the depressive's beliefs about himself and the world are probably more rational than his therapist's in the sense of being evidence based. Perhaps CBT works mostly as a rhetorical device whose success has more in common with religious propaganda than with rational and honest epistemology of the self.

In my own case I frequently have bouts of depression in which I will give lengthy evidence based justifications for my negative life expectations, yet my expectations often change instantly positive the moment the sun comes out... This seems to suggest that negative rationalisation is an epiphenomenal symptom of depression rather than a cause of it.

And knowing all of this doesn't help me avoid negative beliefs during a future depressive episode...

So while there are clearly phenomenological and neurological differences between psychosis and neurosis, I am tempted to think that they should be pushed closer together.

As a non-schizophrenic I have some difficulty understanding delusions, but as an occasional depressive i am familiar with reality contradicting my negative expectations.

Are schizophrenic delusions categorically different from neurotic beliefs? For example, is psychotic paranoia qualitatively different from social-anxiety paranoia? Is the introspective rationalization of those states similar or different?

Thought experiments are nothing but a form of empirical simulation. For any thought experiment can be substituted for a publicly demonstrable virtual reality simulation. But a simulation isn't a simulation of anything until it is actively compared against some other empirical process by using some measure of similarity.

Once this is grasped it is trivial to understand, for instance, how Zeno's paradoxes fail as thought experiments concerning motion. The lunacy becomes clear when a proponent of the argument is forced to demonstrate the paradox with an actual arrow.

Zeno's arguments are better understood to be a thought experiments for Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. You can analyse the arrow's exact position at any given time, but in order to do so you first have to stop the arrow and thereby destroy it's actual motion. But these argument's are still not a priori or "non-empirical" whatever that means, rather they are phenomenological and involve memories and imagined possibilities.

Drawing upon Wittgenstein, one might say that the meaning of a thought experiment is how it is used. Hence thoughts 'in themselves' do not express impossibility.

Impossibility refers to the expression of a thought that isn't usable within in the context of a given language-game. For example, if somebody claims to imagine a heavy object travelling at or beyond the speed of light, they aren't wrong in terms of *what* they imagine, rather the contents of their imagination isn't a model of relativity; but their imagination will be a model of some other theory.

Suppose that somebody was tee-total most of their life, yet had not worked for years due to treatment resistant depression and addiction. For such a person, could it be immoral for them to not experiment with illegal drugs?

This sounds somewhat like Popper's argument that says that physicalist (let's call it that to avoid confusion) ontology is too impoverished. But a physicalist need not limit herself to just the "objective" language of physical causes. At least I haven't yet seen a persuasive argument to that effect. — SophistiCat

The underlying dispute seems to be whether the determinist can consistently assert an objective distinction between reasons and causes. Such a distinction could only be objective if the truth-maker of a reason is transcendent of the proximal causes of it's assertion such that the reason isn't merely said to be true or false by linguistic convention.

How can the determinist consistently assert that "determinism is true" is neither made true by linguistic convention, nor by the proximal causes that provoked him to say it?

The following temporal duration, A, has an exact length of 3. Proof:

A: "one..........two...........three"

Now does it make sense to dispute this, by arguing that I could have counted the same interval twice as fast?

For mustn't any supposedly 'counterfactual' argument refer to a newly constructed interval, B, and not to the past interval A that no longer exists and therefore cannot itself be re-measured?

B: "one,two,three,four,five,six"

If one accepts the counterfactual argument that A might have been counted differently, then one is led to ask how fast the same interval could have been counted, which leads to the further question as to whether there is a limit. In which case the above statement of A isn't a definition of A but merely one of many possible descriptions of A, namely that it just so happened to begin and end when I was counting.

On the other hand, if one rejects the counterfactual argument then A has an exact length of 3 by definition, and there is nothing more to be said about it.

By his very belief in universal determinism, the determinist, if he is consistent, cannot interpret his opponent's sentence " I possess free will" to be an actual claim to possess an objective property. This is because if universal determinism is true then the only objective meaning the determinist can ascribe in his opponent's sentences are the physical causes that precipitated them. Therefore the determinist must understand his opponent's sentences to be trivially and necessarily correct in an epistemological sense whatever those sentences are, and to be 'wrongable' only in the conventional sense of disagreeing with the linguistic convention adopted by the determinist.

This paradoxically implies that the thesis of universal determinism makes no substantial objective claims either, by failure to oppose a substantial counter-thesis.

To my understanding, our practical usage of the verb "to determine" which always relates a 'determiner' and a thing being determined, points to the natural way of dissolving the problem of free will.

"this denial either presupposes free will for the deliberately chosen response in making that denial, which is a contradiction, or else it is merely the automatic response of a nervous system built by genetic coding and molded by conditioning"

Right. So a determinist cannot interpret his opponent as asserting a contrary epistemological position. Therefore the determinist cannot interpret his own position as making an epistemological claim.



My view is that any assertion of a necessary consequence is an active imperative as opposed to a passive description of an objective matter of fact. Therefore i agree with the above argument that determinism isn't an epistemological position.

To my mind, determinism does not express the factual content of a proposition, rather it expresses our intended use of a proposition. We don't discover physical laws that were already there in our absence, rather our physical laws express our intended cultural responses to our observations, similar to our legal laws.

To see this, suppose that we were trying to teach Physics to an unruly student who refused to abide by our experimental physics conventions in his application of the equations. Since we can only provide him with a finite list of commands, he can always find a way to abide by our stated instructions and yet violate our intentions to produce nonsensical and lawless results.

Our Physical laws are therefore only meaningful relative to our obedience to the experimental conventions that we use to confirm them. Hence they are partially representative of our choice to conform to physics culture.

I will certainly attest to have had many lucid dreams, but yet, I am unable to describe what makes my previous lucid dreams different from my memories of non-lucid dreams.

Certainly there is a present difference between being lucid versus non-lucid. For example, I can in this present moment either lose myself in a book, or I can scrutinise my environment and check as to whether my experiences cohere with my memories and understanding.

But does it make sense to assert that one can remember being lucid?

Many Christians fall into the mistake of associating meaning with private sensation or private experiences. For example, many will often associate some inner experience with that of the Holy Spirit, or the idea of the soul as something private to each of us. Each of these examples are very similar to the beetle-in-the-box. — Sam26

Supposing a Christian, Bob, associates some ineffable inner experience with the Holy Spirit, is perfectly happy, and never complains of experiencing confusion. Why would Wittgenstein, the philosophical therapist who hated substantial philosophical theses, think Bob is nevertheless making a mistake? what should be the criterion of correctness here? the opinions of the priesthood? or Bob's happiness?

Supposing Bob compares his religious experiences with fellow Christian Alice, who also says that she identifies the Holy Spirit with her ineffable private sensations.

Given that Neither Bob nor Alice can point to anything public playing the role of the "holy spirit", can Bob and Alice be said to be in agreement here about their ineffable experiences? or is there at most merely a delusion of agreement?

Well from each of their perspectives, experiential agreement might mean "The other appears to perform similar rituals to me and expresses similar sentiments as I do, and that is my criteria for them having the same ineffable experiences of the Holy-Spirit as I do".

In which case Bob and Alice's agreement isn't an illusion relative to their chosen criteria.

The Beetle-in-the Box analogy therefore isn't applicable.

Even I feel I understand what Bob is saying, and I'm an atheist who never practices religion. So am I under a delusion of understanding Bob? According to Alice's opinion and her criteria, the answer is probably yes. Relative to my own criteria? no.

Wittgenstein's private language metaphors seem to provoke their own misunderstanding, namely that to understand a language is to have absolute criteria of correctness.

Assertions must only be judged relative to independent criteria if they are to be interpreted as conveying truth-by-correspondence. That is all. And in my opinion, this is all Wittgenstein was pointing out.

I understand Wittgenstein's "Beetle in the Box" discussion as referring to the same aesthetic quality of depth to our language. In that discussion he considers the logical consequences of equating the meaning of a name with a particular sensation.

"if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant." L.W

This nominalistic equivocation of names with particular experiences produces an aesthetic of superficiality similar to your picture of the garden-path leading nowhere and is in contrast with our actual use of names, in which names are representative of roles played by particulars within a language game.

As you hinted, the aesthetic depth of a name corresponds to an appreciation of the role referred to by the name , i.e. to the name's potential use.

I think the underlying problem is that our concept of 'other minds' straddles the subjective-objective distinction and cannot be categorised as either. As a result it seems inappropriate to speak of ethical principles as being either subjective or objective.

To my mind the subjective-objective distinction is only applicable to practical situations in which there is a verifiable criterion of truth that is independent of one's feelings about the matter. For example, when betting on the outcome of a football match.

Ethical judgements do not fall into this category, since one's feelings are the ultimate arbiter of truth here.

A realist who interprets the concept of Necessity as being a mind-independent principle of nature that is charted by causality, will have to either deny humans of will, or reduce the human will to causality rending the notion of free-will as meaningless.

An anti-realist who identifies the concept of necessity not as a description of nature "in itself" but with what we think ought to happen or what we intend will happen, will generally be a "free will compatiblist" with respect to causality, since he will view causality as purely a language for describing past orderings of events.

It should be clear that for both the realist and the anti-realist, knowing more physical facts cannot force either to change their position.

To my mind, the concept of self-control is partially distinct from the concept of motivation.

Motivation is a relationship of attraction between a person's biological drives such as sex, hunger, companionship e.t.c, and the person's environment that triggers or suppresses the person's drives and that as a consequence compels or inhibits the person's behaviour in pursuit of satisfaction.

To my mind there is no such thing as "self-motivation". What we call self-motivation is more accurately described as being in a state of psychological momentum towards a goal-state when one's drives are already awoken. The likelihood and extent to which an individual achieves his goal-state is a function of "self-control", which refers to the extent to which the individual can ignore competing reward signals that threaten to divert his actions towards less rewarding behaviour.

To my mind "self-control" should really be called "partial-self control", since it not only consists of an individual's partially learned neurological abilities and habits, but also the degree of social support the individual receives as well as the quality of environmental feedback he receives. Together they keep the individual's productive behaviour on track, by determining the extent to which the individual continues to anticipate future rewards as a consequence of his actions, and the extent to which the individual finds working towards the goal satisfying in and of itself, before the goal state is reached.

In many cases the skeptic fails to understand how to use the word doubt, and it is also true that the non-skeptic fails to understand why this is the case. Therefore, the non-skeptic will argue against the skeptic making the same mistakes in their use of the word know. Both Moore and the skeptics have fallen into the trap of not understanding the rules of the game. The rules are not spelled out, they are implicit, one must come to understand the rules by thinking about the many uses of words like know and doubt. — Sam26

I don't believe Wittgenstein would have supported this, as that appears to imply that skeptical doubts are largely symptomatic of bad English. I believe that Wittgenstein took the skeptic's malady much more seriously as a deeper psychological and epistemological problem, and disagreed with Moore precisely for this reason.

In fact, I believe Wittgenstein would have taken more issue against the non-skeptic for misinterpreting what the skeptic is attempting to express, especially if the non-skeptic insisted that individual expression should be understood relative to, or worse, subordinate to essentialist ideas concerning language use in the form implicit community conventions. For this is platonism about rules in another disguise.

Going back to your pornography example, not only doesn't the individual have a clear concept of what pornography is or is not, but neither is there any implicit essential idea of the concept in the general community. Every individual who joins a community proactively contributes via his actions and verbal behaviour to the community's ever-evolving meaning of its language. Like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, individuals are the evolutionary engines of community conventions, and shouldn't held to it for sake of philosophy. Why wouldn't Wittgenstein have held this more common-sensical view?

Recall Wittgenstein's sympathy with what Heidegger was attempting to express in Being and Time. Rather than chastise Heidegger for failing to conform to our ordinary usage of the word "being", Wittgenstein said he understood what Heidegger was attempting to say even as Heidegger bumped his head against the limits of language.

I believe that Wittgenstein strongly rejected logical-positivism on the basis that a community shouldn't get to decide the value of individual expression on the basis of linguistic conformity . For that leads to scientism, authoritarianism and the suppression of aesthetic expression.

The universe is constitute of many parts. There is however one process which describes the evolution of whole since all parts are interacting with each other. This means that there should be a single consciousness if we relate consciousness to motion of parts. Instead we observe that consciousness is personal and local. How do you resolve this problem? — bahman

By rejecting the fictitiously imagined "birds-eye" perspective of reality, where one pretends to oneself that one is transcendentally observing reality detached from one's first-person perspective.

Once the meaning of all concepts including the concepts of "matter" and "other minds", are understood as pertaining to empirical criteria of verification in the first-person, the transcendental fiction of seeing the universe in the third-person can be rejected as nonsensical.

This is why I separated philosophical and scientific inquiry. Even in cases like normative ethics, which seem to me to be statements based on the way people think the world should be, there is no way to really ground any of the arguments in reality. — MonfortS26

Even assertions of metaphysics and ethics must be reducible to empirical propositions about how the world really is. For to assume otherwise is to assume that verbal behaviour has non-physical causes.

When a religious person earnestly asserts that "God Exists", to doubt the factual accuracy of what he is saying is in some sense to misunderstand what he is saying. For the only meaningful scientific problem is to ascertain the environmental stimuli that upon interacting with the person's brain provokes his assertion. Thereupon identification of the environmental stimuli, we can interpret the religious person's assertion "God Exists" as his empirical measurement of said environmental stimuli.

Yep, none of our concepts are linguistically representable, because our intended use of rules cannot be finitely represented in terms of rules and signs. We can at most express what we mean and intend, but we cannot reduce meaning and intention to rules and signs.

This critical anti-realist insight renders rules and laws as having trivial epistemological significance, since the meaning of rules and signs is ultimately grounded, explained and justified in terms of our behavioural dispositions, as opposed to our behavioural dispositions being grounded or justified in terms of mind-independent rules and laws. This in turn ought to lead to a rejection of the free-will-determinism dichotomy.

The point that Wittgenstein seems to be making is that doubting the existence of one's hands, or doubting the existence of the external world, fall outside the language-game of use for these particular words. — Sam26

Presumably Wittgenstein would not want to imply that every or even any skeptic's epistemological malady is curable by merely insisting to them that their use of the word "hands" should conform to ordinary usage - especially considering, as you have mentioned, that Wittgenstein was against the reduction of word usage to precise definitions, whether they be formally stated rules or socially demonstrated rules of conformity.


The Skeptic who doubts the existence of his own hands is generally the Humean skeptic who doubts the predictability of his hand's future behaviour. These doubts further bring into question the predictability of language games, the reliability of the linguistic definitions they serve to ground and the conceptual networks we derive from them.

Like in your pornography example, I cannot give to myself a precise, explicit and all-encompassing definition of what I mean by "my hands". And it is imaginable that my hands will pass through this solid wall in front of me, and that in this event we might - or even might not - collectively abstain from referring to them as "my hands" .

Of course a non-skeptic might remark that this event is in-ordinary and unlikely in the eyes of the community. But their remark which a skeptic will likely consciously accept, cannot be made into an argument of refutation against the skeptic's position, for the skeptic is consciously insisting on what is in-ordinary.

The philosopher can only empathise with the skeptic who asserts the in-ordinary and try to publicly unravel the mystery that is the skeptic's private-language game of in-ordinary doubt. In other words the philosopher must try to understand the skeptic's doubting-behaviour as behavioural expression of a different sort.

I passed out once for ten minutes. When I came round, I had no idea how long I'd been out. Another time I passed out for twenty minutes, same result. The last time it could be like that, only no coming round. Of course I won't be round to tell the tale. But that doesn't mean it's a tale that can't be predicted, whether truly or falsely. It doesn't sound meaningless - it's an explanation of 'infinitely long and unconscious'. — Cuthbert

A third party can certainly make sense of your death and say that you are "permanently no longer around to tell the tale", since your corpse can be empirically verified as being deceased according to biological definition. So your death has empirically meaningful behavioural consequences for everyone except for yourself. But that doesn't mean that you can meaningfully refer to your own expiry and say things like "i will be asleep forever", and that is nonsense even from a third-person's perspective.

It is naturally tempting to imagine oneself from a third-person perspective and pretend to witness one's own death, and to mistake this imagined thought experiment for self-knowledge. But this attempt at deriving first-person knowledge by making a transcendental analogy with the third-person creates many philosophical problems by running over the bounds of sense without any regard for principles of cognitive closure and empirical meaning.

There is an incommensurable semantic barrier that separates our behavioural understanding of other minds from our mentalistic understanding of our own experiences.