Hinge Propositions and the Serenity Prayer

G.E Moore’s “A Defence of Common Sense ” was fi rst published in 1925 and his “Proof of an External World ” fourteen years later.1 Apparently Wittgenstein had a long-standing interest in these papers and during the last eighteen months of his life, stimulated2 by discussions with Norman Malcolm while his house-guest in Ithaca in 1949, he composed the four short sets of rough notes we now have as On Certainty. The pre-occupation of these notes3 with Moore’s two papers, even when Moore is not being explicitly mentioned, is evident to anyone who reads them with those discussions in mind. Perhaps the single most prominent and distinctive theme of these last writings of Wittgenstein is his insistence on a contrast, missing from Moore, be-tween knowledge properly so regarded — that is, a state of cognitive achievement, based on completed enquiry — and a much wider class of certainties: propositions which “stand fast” for us not because they have won through under scrutiny of relevant evidence but because, so he suggests, they are somehow presuppositional and basic in the very process of gathering and assessing evidence or within our more general ‘world picture’. My primary interest here is in the analytical taxonomy of these “certainties”, but an underlying concern will be with whether Wittgenstein succeeded in pointing to a principled and stable form of response to the proble