Abstract
In the previous chapter I suggested that scientists can be seen as formulating alternative world-views or ‘possibilities’. These possibilities constitute new ways of creating and looking at particular worlds: the worlds of social, psychological, biological, chemical or physical phenomena. Further, I have argued that for a world-view or possibility to constitute ‘scientific’ knowledge or truth, it is necessary that it be warranted as knowledge or truth by particular groups of people who form scientific communities. The process by which truth- and knowledge-claims are granted scientific status, I have emphasised, involves persuasion, which itself relies heavily on argumentation and rhetoric.
The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Notes
Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Harvey Sachs, mimeographed lectures, University of California, Irvine (D.d.).
Ibid.; Thomas P. Wilson, ‘Conceptions of Interaction and Forms of Sociological Explanation’, American Sociological Review 35 (1970) p. 700.
I have discussed this at greater length elsewhere. Derek L. Phillips, Abandoning Method (San Francisco and London: Jossey-Bass, 1973).
Paul Attewell, ‘Ethno-methodology since Garfinkel’, Theory and Society 1 (1974) pp. 179–210.
R. Descartes, Philosophical Works of Descartes (trans. E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross), Dover edition, 2 volumes (London: Constable, 1955).
G. E. Moore, ‘A Defence of Common Sense’, reprinted in Philosophical Papers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959) pp. 32–59.
Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (London: Allen Lane, 1973).
Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).
Ibid., 54. Wittgenstein himself showed what he believed, what was important to him, by refusing to don the official costume prescribed for all candidates for a degree at Cambridge, and by refusing to dine at ‘High Table’ (because of the symbolic fact that the High Table itself was placed on a raised platform higher than the main floor of the dining hall where the undergraduates ate). This is reported in Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973) p. 205. More importantly, Wittgenstein showed what he felt about academic philosophy by giving it up altogether for several years.
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© 1977 Derek L. Phillips
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Phillips, D.L. (1977). Doubt and Certainty. In: Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03160-3_9
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