Social Dependency

Abstract

11.1 The outer world as an ingredient of the inner world—Reconsideration of what must be naturally assumed: levels of belief—Husserl’s retrieval of Leibniz’s concept of “monad”—A plain admission: monadic otherness—Influence of Heidegger’s philosophical anthropology—Limitations of the Husserlian idea of an “open community of monads” for a social epistemology. 11.2 Wittgenstein ’s “language games” and the acquisition of language—Learning a word implies mastering epistemic fundamentals that are needed for disambiguation according to the context in question—Wittgenstein and contextualism—Contextual and extra-contextual standards: a pragmatic view of knowledge requires that we relax our epistemic demands—Cohen on social groups and reasoning abilities—Objectivity reconsidered—The relativistic character of a contextualist view and Wittgenstein’s notion of “inherited background”—Epistemic fundamentals are not socially determined—Distinguishing between ontological and social dependency as a form of conciliating objectivity and context-sensitivity. 11.3 Wittgenstein on certainty and Moore’s misinterpretation of the sociability of language—The grammar of “to doubt” and “to know”—How the bipolarity of propositions including these verbs works in some contexts but not in others—Ontological suspicions as illusive: they constitute merely violations of logical grammar—Radicalizing the scenario: a closer look at radical scepticism—Pritchard and the Wittgensteinian “groundlessness of our believing”—Why an “epistemic angst” only makes sense at a second-order level of consideration, which presupposes a first-order assimilation of the world: our “arational hinge commitments”—Accessing Pritchard’s problem of the “epistemic vertigo”: Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation—A moral-epistemological way-out?