A standard Wittgensteinian response to philosophical problems is that they are reducible to mere linguistic puzzles. Since the origins of the so-called problem of induction lie in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1740), we might naively expect an inimical view to Hume from a Wittgensteinian standpoint. However, given Hume’s general spirit of philosophy elsewhere, Hume’s empiricism, from the Wittgensteinian standpoint, is at least very robust and sensible. So much ground is shared between these two grand thinkers, that to criticize Hume for his shortcomings is to be unfairly anachronistic toward the first philosopher to truly shatter the grandiose illusions of traditional philosophy. Further, these illusions were the very same ones which Wittgenstein would later come and elegantly but almost perplexingly smash further. Yet, not only must we afford Hume respect and credit for his ideas relative his place in time, as we often do with other philosophical giants, but we must still contend with his ideas in a very real sense in the present. In fact, the ground we will share here with Hume is indeed so great that an effective critique of Hume on any epistemic issue—like problem of induction—does not come easily, and we can only accomplish it with careful precision.
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Imagine the famous scene in the 1973 movie American Graffiti involving mischievous persons attaching the rear axle of a stationary police car via steel cable to a post, an accomplice speeding by, and the intent police officer pulling away in pursuit only to find the car jerked into the air and its rear axle pulled away from under it. With that in mind, now imagine there were two very science-focused vandals intent on wreaking havoc upon police property. One postulates to the other, “Remember American Graffiti? We could attach that police car’s rear axle to a pole; then the car will be immobilized like in the movie, and then the police will look embarrassingly bad in front of everyone!”
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Beginning with Descartes, traditional forms of epistemology have attempted to create a foundation of knowledge that can not be doubted. The skeptical tradition, employing and developing Cartesian doubt among other variations of it, has sought to undermine the possibility certainty about the external world and, more generally, all knowledge. The philosopher G.E. Moore attempted to respond to skepticism by directly demonstrating his certain knowledge of the external world. As a response to skepticism and to Moore’s attempted refutation of it, Wittgenstein essentially argues that while there is no valid means to actually answer the skeptic, the skeptic’s claims are nonsensical in the first place. The skeptic can only have functional claims when the propositions they doubt are removed from all possible contexts, rendering them meaningless and requiring an invocation of logic external to language and human understanding. Fundamentally, Wittgenstein replaces the response to skepticism’s “you cannot know” by Moore’s “I do know” with what ultimately reduces to, “I do not need to ‘know’.”
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