My conclusion certainly is NOT that knowledge about the world – meant in the sense that we learn and consistently understand patterns in our world – is unnecessary.

My position (and Wittgenstein’s) isn’t a wild skepticism or subjectivism. It simply rejects the traditional philosophical notions of knowledge on the basis that they make our claims to knowledge vulnerable to skepticism.

When I say that we “do not need to ‘know’”, it means that we do not need to “know” like G.E. Moore is trying to prove to philosophical skeptics. In fact, I (and Wittgenstein) are arguing that our sense experiences, taken at face value, are enough to prove that we are certain in our knowledge. We don’t need fancy philosophical arguments to prove that “here is a hand”; statements like “here is a hand” form the foundation of how we think, so to challenge their truth isn’t just mistaken, it’s also pointless.

Locke believed in equal rights endowed by nature (or God) – in turn, while he felt that natural law could be respected without a government, a government was necessary to fully ensure those rights. In terms of the “egalitarian” meaning of equality, it’s not so clear, though Locke did have some stuff regarding common property and limits on property acquisition.

Hobbes, on the other hand, has a more unclear relationship to equality. He was a full-on egoist. In that sense, everyone is equal in that they all ought to (on the ethical egoist interpretation of hobbes) pursue their own interests. He also tended toward the notion that in the state of nature people more or less have the same level of power. How equality translates to the Sovereign is unclear – as far as Hobbes had it, the Sovereign could organize society basically in any way as long as it served the only binding function Hobbes thought it should have – ensuring personal security.

Christian: I’ve heard the memory skeptical argument before, and it does at first seem like a great challenge. But I believe that it misses the point of the argument I advance against the problem of the induction, a central point of which is that all forms of philosophical skepticism rely on realist notions like the “external world,” which entail “correspondence theories” of truth and their cousins. Correspondence theories assume that there is something that lies beyond the senses, and that truth is correspondence between our beliefs and that extra-sensory something. These skeptical arguments can only function if that assumption is made, however. I argue that making this a criteria for truth is non-sensical, since we use the concept of truth in a functional manner and there is no way to verify correspondence; there is only a verification through empiricism. Psycho-epistemically, the whole notion of pointing out someone’s erroneous conclusion is something that is as sense-based as the conclusion itself.
This may be the descent into phenomenalism as you’ve described, but there’s a very important distinction to be made about the argument I put forward, which is that it’s not trying to make a metaphysical claim about what lies beyond the senses; it’s not trying to say “what there is.” It’s saying that philosophical skepticism offers nothing by way of implication: philosophical skepticism only refutes what’s a bad argument in the first place (which is the standard “truth is correspondence” argument). By definition, skeptics are dabbling in an area of philosophical futility: what lies beyond the senses.

Here’s something I’ve written for a future post that is relevant:

“For skepticism to posit that our sense-experiences are mistaken there must be something about which we are mistaken. In other words, our sense-experiences and what we derive from them must be fixed against a base-line of comparison. In asserting supra-sensory doctrines, one gives a host for many kinds of skeptical parasites which would die off otherwise. Without such doctrines, all we have are our sense experiences, and they, in some sense, must be incontrovertible. We are never “wrongly” feeling pain, if we are feeling it. We are never “wrongly” seeing the color red, if we are seeing it. We could always find a sense in which we could say that we do these things wrongly, but this is only possible against a base-line for comparison that is also within our senses. We might “wrongly” see the color red because the sun was shining in our eyes before we walked into a dimly lit room, but that is only in contrast to what we normally see in that dim room when our eyes have been under regular conditions—a distinctly sensory reduction of the difference between the two situations.”

So, Christian: how might we “wrongly” remember something? How would we go about figuring out that we’ve gone wrong? And if figuring out whether we’re wrong or not is impossible, then why bring it up? What possible implications does that have for our behavior?

Joseph:

I agree with you that logic is necessary for language. But the fact that it is necessary for language doesn’t entail that logic doesn’t have an empirical basis. Unfortunately, we cannot speak about that, for obvious reasons which you seem to understand. Because logic is in what we say and falsifying it makes no sense, any claim we make about its origins are non-falsifiable (for once someone rejects its origin, they reject logic, which is impossible). I believe I can accept this with no problem.

However, we can speak about the empirical basis of the construction of logical possibilities. It is one thing to say that we can not think “A” and “not A” at the same time, but it is another thing to say “I can imagine how you might be wrong” – that is something that is only possible with experience. Without experience, where does one get the content to falsify? Like Ludwig says in On Certainty, “there must be knowledge in order to doubt.”

A note on Wittgensteinian history: you do cite the Tractatus, from which Wittgenstein broke significantly. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were correct and I alienated from at least one major interpretation of Wittgenstein. But the whole argument I put forward struck me significantly as Wittgensteinian, and of course was significantly inspired by my understanding of PI and OC.

Anyway, that’s what I can render for now. It’s kinda sloppy, but I appreciate the thoughtful responses.

Logic is the essential tool in language to be able to make propositions in the first place. Therefore, it plainly is a misuse of language to fashion arguments for the empirical basis, i.e. non-necessity, of logic. The epistemic foundations of logic cannot be described, rather logical necessity is something plainly demonstrated. It is shown in a truth table; it is tautological.

As for Wittgenstein’s opinion on the “problem” of induction…

(Quoting from the Tractatus)

6.363 The procedure of induction consists in accepting as true the simplest law that can be reconciled with our experiences.

6.3631 This procedure, however, has no logical justification but only a psychological one. It is clear that there are no grounds for believing that the simplest eventuality will in fact be realized.

6.36311 It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise.

6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity.

6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.

… Sounds to me like he buys into it.

Namely, I am unsure of how the honest Wittgenstein can reasonably rescue his views from descent into phenomenalism. It must be admitted that the only facts of experience I can verify with 100% certainty are those occurring right here, right now. With every passing moment, the universe of atomic sense data is destroyed and remade.

When it comes to facts about past experiences, I have only my memory to go on — and it is precisely this fact that in my view makes induction prone to skeptical attack. A certain faith in the reliability of one’s memory must be presupposed before we can even begin to compare past experiences with current experience, or expected future experience.