The epistemologists dilemma is the idea that it is not possible to know that there is an external world. Simply put since we see the world through our own perceptions there is no way to know what the “real world” outside those perceptions are. The idea that we do not know for certain that there is a real world is called skepticism. There are several responses to skepticism but the one presented in this paper will be Wittgenstein’s “therapeutic diagnosis”. This response is a negative response, meaning that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that we cannot know there is a world outside ourselves. Unlike other negative responses to skepticism Wittgenstein seeks to show that the assumptions made to get to skepticism are invalid due to concepts within the dilemma itself. This is in opposition to other forms of refutation which simply shift the burden of proof that the real world doesn’t exist back onto the sceptic. In other words, Wittgenstein will try to argue that skepticism is fundamentally incorrect and not just unproven.
To start it’s important to understand Wittgenstein’s view on the nature of philosophy in general. In particular Wittgenstein believes the approach taken by philosophy in its investigations are confused to the degree that he calls them nonsense. In this case he is not using the word nonsense simply to dismiss claims, but instead he is using it as a technical term to mean that the approach leads to things that are literally unintelligible. The reason Wittgenstein’s approach is called the therapeutic approach is because he believes this property of philosophical inquiry leading to unintelligibility is a disease that needs a cure. Wittgenstein views this unintelligibility arising mostly due to a breaking of the rules of language. For philosophy there is a temptation to get captivated into philosophical thinking and become so entranced with it that we refuse to argue the results. The fact that we are able to arrive at an answer through philosophical thinking is itself a reason for why we should trust the results of the inquiry. Likewise, because Wittgenstein believes philosophical thinking is deeply rooted within us as a method to explore ideas openly in a manner from which “we don’t know our way about” it seems to lend the results even more legitimacy. These results are even considered more “accurate” when the conclusions they lead to are transparently inaccurate to the world around us. In a sense, the belief that a conclusion has to be right even though it obviously seems wrong.
In a technical sense Wittgenstein views philosophy as a failure because of the methods it uses to explore topics, and in particular its failure to observe “depth grammar”. This principle is best explained by talking about a concept Wittgenstein calls “language games”. Essentially the idea is that in the world there are different contexts which people have conversations. For example, the words you use, and how words that have multiple meanings are used when talking to someone who is a computer scientist about computers would be different from a layman. Likewise in philosophy there is a “philosophical language game” that exists wherein words like knowledge, doubt, justification etc. have different meanings than they would in common parlance. This common parlance is what Wittgenstein calls the “ordinary language game” and it is the clash between the philosophical language game and the ordinary language game that causes this issue of “depth grammar”. Wittgenstein argues the philosopher violates the “rules of the game” (or depth grammar) to the degree that they produce nonsense that has the appearance of intelligibility, but not the substance. It is important to note that along with violating depth grammar Wittgenstein believes there is a methodological problem with philosophical inquiry. Wittgenstein argues that part of the actual method of philosophical inquiry lends itself to causing these depth grammar errors. In particular he believes philosophical inquiry should not include the proposal and/or advancement of theories. Wittgenstein instead believes making descriptive statements about the world and refusing to introduce anything but these statements and their analysis is the way to do this inquiry properly.
One such problem that lends itself to Wittgenstein’s description of unintelligibility would be the epistemologists dilemma and the belief that sceptics hold. For Wittgenstein Sceptics overstep the boundaries of intelligibility and break the rules of language such that their statements about the real world potentially not existing are nonsense. To do this Wittgenstein proposes two “remarks” (effectively arguments) as to where sceptics are going wrong in their reasoning. Wittgenstein begins his first by noting an argument used to refute skepticism by G. E. Moore. The argument boils down mostly to a claim appealing to an argument that he can prove the world exists by showing that he has a hand, and it is “real”. Essentially if you take this argument seriously it means you have solved skepticism by positing this argument that appeals to common sense in the fact that the hand seems real. For Moore his hand is real because “he knows” it’s real. For Wittgenstein and most sceptics this argument does not seem to be sufficient, at least not in the way it is appealed to by Moore. Wittgenstein instead asks whether it is reasonable to doubt your hand exists in the first place. In particular Wittgenstein says that there is a breaking of the rules of the language game taking place wherein the sceptic is doubting Moore “knows” his hand is real, but Wittgenstein believes that in order to claim to know something you must first be able to validate it. Because the sceptic can never actually posit a justification as to why Moore cannot “know” his hand is real, it is nonsense to “doubt” it in the first place. Essentially doubt only works where the information can be falsified possibly, and this inquiry is outside that realm for Wittgenstein. An important part to note with this is that this problem arises in the ordinary language game. Wittgenstein admits situations where you literally may have lost your hands and are unsure (such as a crash) would be reasonable to doubt if your hands are there. The problem with this argument is that Wittgenstein himself actually argues against this by saying that the proposition that his hands are real is due to his sight of the hands would be insufficient. As such since the senses are considered to be “not good enough” Wittgenstein actually buys into the primary justification for skepticism in the first place. Namely that experience of the real world cannot justify the real world itself, and with that admission sets himself back to square one.
The second remark he chooses is to say that sceptics in their skepticism do away with the justification, or necessary preconditions for the concept of doubting in their analysis and therefore cannot use doubt as an argument down the road. This argument hinges firstly on a notion of the world that Wittgenstein has that he calls his “world picture”. This is essentially the world as it exists based off the same sort of “common sense” understandings that Moore tries to develop in his work. Essentially this “world picture” is the minimum amount of information you need about the world in order to begin to base your conception of what is true and false off of. Without buying into this world picture there is no true or false with which to doubt things against. Wittgenstein likens this to the idea that the propositions that make up this world picture are the “hinge propositions”, and in the same way a door can only open when it has hinges doubt can only exist if these hinge propositions exist. Essentially to doubt without the prerequisites from which you can base that doubt off you are just being unintelligible. This unfortunately fails for two reasons.
The first reason Wittgenstein’s argument fails is that it violates his methodological concerns and proposes a theoretical in Wittgenstein’s argument. By proposing a theoretical set of these propositions Wittgenstein is advancing something theoretical which means his argument about intelligibility could be applied to this same argument since he is in the realm of philosophical thinking. Likewise, there is an issue where you need to posit “truths” that lead to absurdity. Positing that one’s hand exists because it is common sense is an argument that can easily be taken to absurdity. Since it is just taken as true without any way to justify that then there is no limit to the claims you could make that are similar because they are “common sense”. Because of these problems it ultimately seems that both of Wittgenstein’s arguments fail to disprove the sceptical claims made.