The title and subtitle entail the main claims of this article. In the face of the present debate on the question whether Wittgenstein was a foundationalist, a coherentist, or both things, I suggest that, at least in a certain important sense, he didn’t adopt either of these positions. The point concerns the status of propositions that I characterize as “unheard-of propositions” and that constitute the most important subclass of so called “Moore-type propositions”. Unheard-of propositions (and the corresponding beliefs) are neither doubted nor justified, they are not said and not even thought.
We simply count on them or we take them for granted. In calling our attention on these primitive, spontaneous and instinctive certainties Wittgenstein is trying to correct an intellectualist bias in traditional conceptions of human being. This reading is confirmed through an analysis of the origin of our basic certainties: we have some of them naturally or instinctively, we acquire others by training, but in neither case there are rational processes at stake (nor irrational ones, of course). The debate between foundationalism and coherentism conceals precisely what Wittgenstein is trying to uncover: a stratum of certainties that, being objective, precede the order of knowledge and justification.
Keywords:
foundationalism, coherentism, certainty, Moore-type propositions, human being
Fermandois, E. (2013). Neither foundationism nor coherentism. An anthropological reading of On Certainty. Revista De Filosofía, 69, Pág. 99–118. Retrieved from https://revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/RDF/article/view/30121
