1.1 The Rejection of Individualistic Epistemology in the Later Wittgenstein

It is curious, and a sign of the deep erasure of (the later) Wittgenstein’s ideas from many current debates in analytic philosophy, that in the context of the contemporary rejection of this overarching model, his views are not routinely presented as the most radical break with all fundamental tenets of individualistic epistemology.

Many of Wittgenstein’s insights prove to be fatal to key tenets of individualistic epistemology. For instance, his conception of meaning as use, in the Philosophical Investigations, stresses the ineliminable role of the community not only for language acquisition but also for determining rules, meanings, and, with them, the concepts which we deploy in thought (contra the Kantian transcendental model), and opens up to their cultural and historical variability (contra Kantian universalist pretensions). His rejection of the very possibility of a private language, whose meanings should putatively be private experiences, stands against the Cartesian model of the mental, as well as the empiricist appeal to sense data as the source of all our concepts. His rejection of the very idea that we may have privileged knowledge of our own mental states – due to their observation within one’s own mental arena – and no knowledge of other people’s mental states, goes against any form of solipsism; his emphasis on the instinctive and embodied expression of the mental, which is key for acquiring psychological concepts and the ability to attribute them to oneself and others, goes against individualistic models of self-knowledge and of knowledge of other minds. Finally, his rejection (mostly in the Blue BookFootnote ¹) of the Cartesian idea of the self as a mental substance, and of the Kantian idea that the self is a mere condition of possibility of experience and thought, let alone a bundle of sensations or memories, as Hume and Locke respectively held, in favour of the idea that when ‘I’ refers at all, it refers to an embodied entity, are all further blows to essential tenets of individualistic epistemology.

Wittgenstein’s later writings were also relevant for the development of disciplines in the social sciences. In anthropology, for instance, the Remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough (Reference Wittgenstein1993) were crucial for the rejection of James George Frazer’s positivistic methodology. Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Religious Belief (Reference Wittgenstein1966), his several remarks in Culture and Value (Reference Wittgenstein1980) as well as in On Certainty (Reference Wittgenstein1969), inspired a new approach to the understanding and study of religion. His ideas contributed to the rejection of positivism in sociology, also thanks to Peter Winch’s The Idea of Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (Reference Winch1958); and, owing to Barry Barnes and David Bloor’s (Reference Barnes and Bloor1996) Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Analysis, they contributed to the development of the so-called ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of science. Finally, Wittgenstein’s idea of language-games and rule-governed practices were key for the development of game theory.

1.2 The Rejection of Individualistic Epistemology in On Certainty

Yet, it is in On Certainty that the relevance of Wittgenstein’s ideas to contemporary social epistemology becomes even more obvious.Footnote ² For the key contention is that all inquiry revolves around ‘hinges’ (OC 341–343) – that is, propositions that have an empirical form and yet are removed from doubt and investigation. By staying put, they allow ‘the door to turn’. That is, they allow us to form justification for, and possibly gain knowledge of ordinary empirical propositions. As he writes in those key passages:

For instance, it’s only by taking for granted that the Earth has existed for a very long time that we can take fossils to bear on the determination of the age of the Earth. If we didn’t take that for granted, then the presence of those fossils would have no bearing on the inquiry into the age of the Earth, as it would be compatible with the Earth’s having popped into existence only recently, replete with everything we find on it.

Unlike Descartes, who in his First Meditation seeks to question all his prior beliefs to identify what withstands doubt and can serve as a secure foundation for the rational reconstruction of knowledge, Wittgenstein maintains that doubt arises only after beliefFootnote ³ (OC160) and does not serve as a means of attaining either knowledge or certainty. That is, rational doubt is possible, for Wittgenstein, only by taking hinges for granted. Thanks to them, we can then acquire reasons against specific j/k-apt beliefs – that is, beliefs that are either justified or known.Footnote ⁴ Hyperbolic, global doubts are necessarily unmotivated by reasons, since they call into question the hinges that make it possible to acquire reasons for and against ordinary empirical propositions. Being unmotivated by reasons, they breach the criteria for meaningful doubt and are, in fact, a mere illusion of doubt. As Wittgenstein puts it in OC (450): ‘A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt’.

Furthermore, the metaphysical possibilities raised by Cartesian sceptical scenarios are ultimately nonsensical for Wittgenstein (OC 383, 676), although certainly deserving of careful investigation (OC 37). Outside their ordinary employment, in contexts of sensory and cognitive disconnect, sentences like ‘It’s raining’ or even ‘I am dreaming’ cannot refer to events in the world, even if it is raining outside or one is indeed dreaming. Rather, they may only refer to the dream of the rain or to the dream of dreaming. Thus, the Cartesian sceptical hypothesis, encapsulated in the phrase ‘I am dreaming’, doesn’t express any truly conceivable possibility: if I am dreaming of it, it cannot describe the situation I am in, but, at most, only my dreaming of it, in which case it shouldn’t worry us any more than dreaming of the rain should worry us about getting wet.Footnote ⁵ If, in contrast, ‘I am dreaming’ is thought of or asserted while being awake, it is false, and easily disproved by the application of ordinary criteria of verification.

Hinges, furthermore, have the form of empirical propositions, or, more precisely, are propositions about ordinary material objects (OC 401–402) or parts of physical bodies, like hands and feet, or tables and chairs; animals and plants, like cats and trees; chemical compounds, like water, as well as planets and celestial bodies like the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. In some cases, they are propositions grounded in habit and memory, like ‘My name is … ’, and they mostly depend on being enculturated within a certain form of life.

The relevance of this observation is that at the foundation of all our thinking, for Wittgenstein, there are neither propositions about sense data, contrary to the empiricists (OC 90, 426), nor solely a priori truths, let them be the Cartesian cogito, or logical or mathematical propositions (OC 303–306, 651), or a priori categories. Indeed, a key aim of On Certainty is to go past the received view and claim that just as we don’t call into doubt a priori truths, and keep them firm against all possible counterevidence, so we don’t call hinges into doubt and, at least in context, don’t admit of contrary evidence. As Wittgenstein writes in OC (340): ‘We know, with the same certainty with which we believe any mathematical proposition, how the letters A and B are pronounced, what the colour of human blood is called, that other human beings have blood and call it “blood”’.Footnote ⁶

In both cases this is due, for Wittgenstein, to the role these diverse propositions play in our communal epistemic practices. As Wittgenstein writes in OC (655, 657):

Interestingly, moreover, the certainty enjoyed by our psychological avowals, for Wittgenstein, is not itself a function of a privileged and infallible access that subjects putatively have to their own mental states. Rather, it is the result of our communal, linguistic practice, in which subjects are accorded authority over their own mental states, at least ceteris paribus (i.e., provided there is no reason to suspect deceit or conceptual impairment). In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes (PI 247–248):

It is a grammatical remark, for Wittgenstein, and therefore an outcome of our linguistic practice, that people are accorded authority over their own mental states, which, in turn, are conceptualized in such a way that they are not taken to be intersubjectively manifest. Consequently, ‘Only you can know … ’ with respect to them is a grammatical remark that reminds us that, in virtue of that very practice, a third party’s doubt or uncertainty about the fact that one is in pain, or has a certain intention, when one avows those mental states, is excluded from the language-game, at least ceteris paribus (i.e., if there is no reason to think they may be deceitful or conceptually impaired).

Once more, this should make us realize that the various items that traditional epistemological projects have posited as sitting at the foundations of all human knowledge and as inherently certain, are in no way special. All certainties – also the ones that have long been thought to be the outcome of individualistic investigations and to pertain to private realms, like the mental, or to be accessible only by means of a priori reflections, like mathematical ones – are in fact a function of the role they play within human linguistic and epistemic practices.

Thus, as we saw, hinges are typically acquired through enculturation within a shared form of life and are by no means the outcomes of solitary inquiry, contrary to the tenets of individualistic epistemology. Hinges, however, are many and diverse, for Wittgenstein. As he writes: ‘And the bank of that river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alteration or only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now in another gets washed away, or deposited’ (OC 99).

Hence, some hinges stay put over time and cultures. For instance, we take it for granted that the Earth has existed for a very long time, and that it was inhabited by our ancestors well before us. Of course, the precise age of the Earth has been a topic of heated debate, but not the hinge proposition that the Earth has been existing for a long time.

Some other hinges, however, may and do change over time (OC 96–98, 336). Thus, what we consider to be justified/able (and therefore known/able) is not given once and for all but inextricably depends on our historical, and social situatedness. One of Wittgenstein’s examples is ‘Nobody has ever been on the Moon’,Footnote ⁷ and he considers examples of propositions which used to play a hinge-like role – for example ‘The Earth is flat’ – for which contrary evidence was either ignored or explained away, that no longer play a hinge-like role for us. Writes Wittgenstein (OC 96–97):Footnote ⁸

Still, according to Wittgenstein, and contrary to W.v.O. Quine’s (Reference Quine1951) later rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction in ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’, at every moment or relative to any given context, we may distinguish between propositions that play a hinge-like role and those which don’t, even though at a different time, or in a different context, the former may become empirical ones, and the latter may be hardened into rules. As he writes (OC 98):

Yet, to reiterate, hinges are typically acquired by being part of a linguistic and epistemic community. We don’t have them thanks to the pursuit of a personal quest for certainty, let alone one that accords pride of place to the deliverances of introspection or of purely a priori reasoning. On the contrary, as Wittgenstein puts it, they are the ‘inherited background’ against which we distinguish between true and false (OC 94). Thus, neither inquiry nor knowledge would be possible for isolated subjects. Clearly, then, the rejection of the main tenets of individualistic epistemology, with its psychologistic or purely a priori underpinnings, is an overarching theme of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and particularly of On Certainty. To repeat, for him, at the foundations of our thinking and inquiring there are, rather, propositions about material objects, which are susceptible to change over time, and which are part of an inherited world-picture (Weltbild, OC 93–95, 162, 167, 233, 262).

1.3 Wittgenstein and the Critical Dimension of Social Epistemology

So far, we have considered, in very general terms, the contribution of Wittgenstein’s later writings to anti-individualistic epistemology. There is, however, another aspect to the ‘social turn’ in contemporary analytic philosophy: a growing focus, particularly led by feminist epistemologists, on social structures and differences, especially those related to power and privilege.

In this connection too, the later Wittgenstein has – perhaps surprisingly – something to teach us. I say ‘perhaps surprisingly’ because his ‘quietism’ – that is, the view that in philosophy we cannot advance theses and that ‘all explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place’ (PI 109) – is often considered to make his views unserviceable in the context of politically charged issues, characteristic of feminist epistemology, or within the contemporary wave of ‘ameliorative’ projects in philosophy of mind and language.

However, thanks especially to Naomi Scheman’s pioneering work (Scheman Reference Scheman2011, but see also Scheman and O’Connor Reference Scheman and O’Connor2002, Code Reference Code1991, Tanesini Reference Tanesini2004, O’Connor Reference O’Connor2008, Ashton Reference Ashton2019, and Laugier, Provost, and Trächtler Reference Laugier, Provost and Trächtler2022), Wittgenstein’s ideas have been rallied to the feminist cause. More recently, thanks to Anna Boncompagni’s work (Reference Boncompagni2019, 2024 a, b), as well as to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock and Constantine Sandis (Reference Moyal-Sharrock2004) and Coliva (Reference Coliva2025a, Reference Colivad, Reference Coliva2025), On Certainty and some ideas in the later Wittgenstein have been brought to bear on various forms of epistemic injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2007), and on discussions about gender and trans identities (Stoljar Reference Stoljar1995, Reference Stoljar and Witt2011, Hay Reference Hay2020, Coliva Reference Coliva2025a).

More generally, the later Wittgenstein continuously asks us to imagine alternative practices, epistemic or otherwise. Consider the famous case of the odd wood sellers in The Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein1956 I, 59) with their alternative epistemic practice of measuring the quantity of wood and of paying for itFootnote ⁹; or the case of the builders in the Philosophical Investigations, with their partially different language-games; or the different forms of life he asks us to imagine – let them be biologically different ones (PI II 223e), or only culturally different ones (OC 92, 132).

These exercises in imagination have the role of exposing the contingent nature of our epistemic practices, language-games, and forms of life. They aim at debunking the idea that there are essences and metaphysical necessities at every corner where we are normally tempted to see them. Rather, once tested through imagination, alleged essences, or metaphysical necessities, often turn out to be projections of our way of operating with language and thought. To the extent that such an essentialist conception of reality is shared by lay members of the community, becoming able to see it for what it is – that is, merely a projection of our categories and practices onto reality – can be a liberating skill for philosophers to share with the rest of their community. That is, Wittgenstein’s own methodology can be a powerful ally in the context of philosophical and critical world-building. Yet, Wittgenstein is also unsympathetic to the idea that if something is merely imaginable it should be taken into account to understand our extant concepts and practices.

What some Wittgenstein-inspired feminists have noticed (particularly Scheman Reference Scheman2011) is that looking at materially different forms of life, or even at the heterogeneity of a single form of life – especially on the margins, where ‘mixed, nonbinary, interstitial, complex, contested, unclear identities’ emerge and ‘invite rethinking our existing categories’ (Boncompagni and Coliva 2024: 1) – can have a similarly liberating effect, while overcoming Wittgenstein’s own scepticism regarding the possibility of imagining radically different forms of life. Furthermore, endorsing the cause of the marginalized could help bring about the shifts in the ‘river-bed’ of thoughts (OC 96–97), and could have a truly emancipatory function.

1.4 A Look Ahead

In what follows, we won’t consider the pars destruens of Wittgenstein’s considerations further. Rather, we will focus on his positive views concerning key issues in present-day social epistemology, in the dual sense of anti-individualistic and critical social philosophy. First, we will look at Wittgenstein’s take on the nature of this shared and inherited background, for which some of his predecessors like Thomas Reid, or even contemporaries like G. E. Moore and Susan Stebbing, reserved the label of ‘common sense’, and which some theorists today consider ‘common knowledge’ (Section 2). Then, we will look at Wittgenstein’s ground-breaking account of trust in the transmission of hinges (Section 3). Afterwards, we will consider the bearing of Wittgenstein’s reflections on so-called ‘deep disagreements’ – that is, disagreements over hinges (roughly) – which cannot therefore be resolved by applying shared epistemic methods (Section 4). We will connect the treatment of deep disagreement with the question of when the genealogical challenge to the good standing of our beliefs is epistemically significant. Finally, we will look at how Wittgenstein’s account of family resemblance in the Philosophical Investigations, his views about the authority of avowals, and his remarks on hinges like ‘I am a man/woman’ may be taken to bear on (i) present-day debates about the concept woman, (ii) the role of self-identification in the determination of one’s gender, and (iii) testimonial and hermeneutical injustice (Section 5).

2.1 Moore (and Newman) on Common Sense

Wittgenstein developed many of the ideas presented in On Certainty in response to G. E. Moore’s account of common sense. It is therefore apposite to revisit Moore’s views before addressing Wittgenstein’s. Since ‘A defence of common sense’ (Reference Moore1925), Moore had held the view that there are several truisms, that is, propositions that are true, and known with certainty to any adult human being, thus constituting a common – that is, shared – body of knowledge. Here is a sample of them (Moore Reference Moore1925: 33–34):

According to Moore (Reference Moore1925: 34), moreover,

Moore’s truisms were carefully chosen to be as safeguarded from sceptical assaults as possible. They did not include either religious propositions (or presuppositions), contrary to what Thomas Reid (Reference Reid1764) and other philosophers of the Scottish School of Common-Sense Philosophy had maintained,Footnote ¹⁰ or scientific ones, as Wittgenstein is keen to do in On Certainty, as we shall presently see. Nor did Moore focus on the relationship between common sense and science. Contrary to one of his main, unduly forgotten contemporaries – that is, Susan StebbingFootnote ¹¹ – Moore was not exercised by the apparent clash between what Wilfrid Sellars would have called the ‘manifest’ and the ‘scientific image’. Nor was he exercised by the potential clash between common sense and religious dogma. Rather, he thought he could use common sense to oppose philosophical theses put forward either by idealist or sceptical philosophers. The former deny the commonsensical truism that there are physical objects and therefore say something false, according to Moore; whereas the latter say something self-contradictory for they claim we don’t know that there are and have been many human beings besides ourselves, while taking for granted that there are (other) human beings, by talking of what we – collectively – don’t know.

Furthermore, the groundbreaking role that Moore’s defence of common sense has with respect to social epistemology needs to be stressed. For his truisms are indeed the object of common knowledge. That is of knowledge which is possessed by (virtually) all members of the epistemic community and is taken for granted in all our epistemic interactions. Moreover, since they are more certain, for Moore, than any principle one might want to appeal to in the attempt to justify them, it turns out that at the foundation of knowledge there are neither self-evident beliefs like the Cartesian cogito, nor beliefs based on individual experience, but, rather, beliefs about physical entities, including our bodies and their surroundings, which are shared by (virtually) all members of the epistemic community. The classic foundationalist image in which the latter beliefs are grounded on the former is thus completely overturned.

Interestingly, moreover, Moore (Reference Moore1925: 43–44) held that:

Thus, for Moore, truisms are known on the basis of some other proposition, or evidence more generally. Yet, we don’t know – that is, we don’t recall – what that evidence was. However, even if we don’t know how we know them, we do know them nonetheless and indeed know them with certainty, according to him.Footnote ¹² Needless to say, this confers a weird epistemic status on common sense, especially because it doesn’t seem far-fetched to provide some evidence on the basis of which we know, for instance, that we are embodied or that we have lived on or in close proximity to the Earth throughout our lives, or that the Earth has existed long before our birth.

Despite an altogether different account of the scope, epistemic status, and role of common-sense truisms, as we shall see, Wittgenstein concurs with Moore that these truisms play a peculiar role within our epistemic practices and that they are safeguarded against assaults launched by both idealists as well as sceptics.

Before turning to Wittgenstein’s account, it is worth mentioning that in the opening passage of On Certainty, and in relation to the peculiar epistemic status of the premise of Moore’s (Reference Moore1939) celebrated ‘Proof of an external world’ – that is, ‘Here is a hand’ – Wittgenstein mentions Cardinal John Henry Newman. As he writes (OC 1):

Newman, a Catholic theologian, who had converted from Anglicanism and who had become the first rector of the Catholic University of Ireland (now University College Dublin), in his influential An Essay in Aid of the Grammar of Assent (Reference Newman1870: 140), had maintained that:

According to Newman, these propositions which resemble, if only in part, Moore’s truisms, are the object of our assent. This is a mode of rational acceptance, for Newman, of a proposition which is not based on proof, or on conclusive empirical evidence. Writes Newman (Reference Newman1870: 141):

In fact, the assent is produced by the illative sense,Footnote ¹³ according to Newman, which is a faculty or capacity of the rational mind, to produce wholehearted assent to a proposition, even in the absence of proof or conclusive evidence. Writes Newman (Reference Newman1870: 274): ‘It is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions. This power of judging and concluding, when in its perfection, I call the Illative Sense’.

Notice that like Moore, Newman too stresses our inability to mention all our evidence in favour of these propositions, and he too thinks that it would be inconclusive. Still, we have no reason to doubt them, for, as one may put it, borrowing from Wittgenstein, ‘nothing in [our] picture of the world speaks in favour of the opposite’ (OC 103), and we are therefore rationally entitled to hold on to them. For instance, in connection with our belief that Great Britain is circumnavigable, Newman writes (Reference Newman1870: 294):

Thus, the illative sense manifests itself in acts of virtuous, prudent judgement, which proceed independently of any formal proof or conclusive evidence. Newman likens it to Aristotle’s phronesis (Reference Newman1870: 275). As he explains in a letter to W. Froude, ‘the illative sense is a faculty of the mind which, when properly nurtured, corresponds to Aristotle’s phronesis. Its field of action isn’t virtue but the inquisitio veri. This faculty decides for us … when and how to pass from inference to assent’.Footnote ¹⁴

It merits note that, for Newman, the assent produced by the illative sense concerns not only everyday propositions like the ones mentioned in the previously quoted passage, but also religious ones. He thus puts forward a parity argument which is meant to vindicate the idea that just as there are many everyday propositions we rationally assent to, even without proof or conclusive evidence, so the assent to religious ones is likewise rational, even though we have no proof, or conclusive evidence of them.Footnote ¹⁵

Finally, it must be stressed that while the illative sense is a faculty of the human mind, its proper functioning and flourishing is due to the upbringing within a community of knowers (or believers, in the religious case), which imparts a ‘picture of the world’ through examples, testimony, and education, as we saw in the previously quoted passage. Consequently, one could assent to propositions one did not assent to previously, or that are not assented to by another person (Newman Reference Newman1870: chapters 9–10). In other words, the propositions assented to by means of the illative sense far exceed Moore’s truisms and are subject to personal and cultural variation. They include religious propositions, as well as broadly scientific ones (e.g., geographical and astronomical truths). Their variety, as we shall see, is thus similar to the multiplicity of ‘hinge propositions’ we find in On Certainty, even though Wittgenstein, at least in that work, does not address religious propositions, and focuses mostly on everyday ones, instead. Contrary to Newman, however, he doesn’t presuppose that our assent to them is the outcome of the operations of a peculiar faculty of the rational mind, such as the illative sense. Rather, as we shall see, he claims that we inherit them through our upbringing within an epistemic community that holds them fast, and passes them on to its members, through examples, testimony and education.

2.2 Wittgenstein: Common-Sense Truisms as Hinges

As we saw in the previous section, Wittgenstein thinks that justification, knowledge, and rationally motivated doubts are possible only by taking for granted a myriad of propositions, which, like hinges, need to stay put if we want the door to turn (OC 341–343).

Their range is wide and includes Moore’s truisms, and premises of his proof, Newman’s examples (or very similar ones), ‘Nobody has ever been to the Moon’ (at the time when Wittgenstein was writing, OC 106, 108, 171, 286), ‘Water boils at 100 °C’ (OC 292, 567, 599, 604), ‘Cats don’t grow on trees’ (OC 282), ‘My name is LW’ (OC 328, 425), and so on.

Moreover, we also saw that Wittgenstein doesn’t think all hinges are on par: some are part of the bedrock, and aren’t subject to change, whereas other ones are open to change from context to context or over time. For instance, ‘I have two hands’ may be a hinge in a Moore-like scenario, while ceasing to be one after a car accident. By contrast, ‘There are physical objects’ or ‘the Earth has existed for a very long time’ aren’t subject to change.

In On Certainty we can discern three main theses regarding hinges,

1. (1) Hinges aren’t empirical propositions;

2. (2) Hinges aren’t known/justified;

3. (3) Hinges are part of a world-picture.

We will illustrate them in turn. Yet, before embarking on that task, let me clarify that here I am presupposing my own (along several others’) interpretation of Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘Satz’ as ‘proposition’. Contrary to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation (Reference Moyal-Sharrock2004), and in agreement with Crispin Wright (Reference Wright1985, Reference Wright2004), Michael Williams (Reference Williams, Kölbel and Weiss2004), Duncan Pritchard (Reference Pritchard2015), and as already amply discussed in Coliva (Reference Coliva2010, Reference Coliva2013a, Reference Colivab), it must be noted that by the time of On Certainty (and already in the Philosophical Investigations), Wittgenstein had a family-resemblance conception of propositions.Footnote ¹⁶ In particular, he had given up on bipolarity – that is, the possibility of being both true and false – as the distinctive feature of genuine propositions.Footnote ¹⁷ Bipolarity remains the distinctive feature of empirical propositions, but propositions extend beyond that domain, to comprise, in On Certainty, those hinges which, while having a descriptive content, do not play an empirical role, for they are not open to empirical investigation, either because they are presupposed by all investigations, or else because the investigation is closed with respect to them. In this sense, their role is more like that of rules, rather than of empirical propositions (OC 95–96). Furthermore, some of them are mostly implicit and are hardly ever expressed – for example ‘There are physical objects’ or ‘I have hands’ – whereas some of them are acquired through testimony from other members of our linguistic community – for example ‘Water boils at 100 °C’, or ‘Nobody has ever been on the Moon’ (at the time). Whereas the former is manifested mostly in our actions and in our ways of thinking and inferring, and yet, if one had the relevant concepts, could be expressed if requested, the latter are explicitly taught, even though, once acquired, they are taken for granted without being subject to any further investigation.

3.1 Wittgenstein on Testimony

Testimony, as we saw, is central to the transmission of hinges and, thus, to the transmission of what needs to stay put for us to be able to acquire justification for, and knowledge of ordinary empirical propositions. As Wittgenstein writes in OC (94):

Testimony relevant to the transmission of hinges takes place not only through direct interactions between human beings, in various situations characteristic of human upbringing and education, but also indirectly, by means of textbooks, the media or, today, by means of the internet.

Testimony in general is successful in transmitting justification or knowledge only if the attestor is trustworthy – that is, knowledgeable and sincere with respect to what they are asserting. Testimony is one of the topics in social epistemology which has received the most attention in recent years. For so-called ‘reductionists’ (who develop the Humean position, like Fricker Reference Fricker, Chakrabarti and Matilal1994), testimony manages to transmit justification and knowledge only if one has independent reasons to think that the attestor is trustworthy. By contrast, for ‘anti-reductionists’ (who develop a Reidian position, like Burge Reference Burge1993), no such independent reasons are needed. All that is needed is that one has no reason to think that the attestor is untrustworthy.

Wittgenstein seems to object to the reductionist viewpoint. We don’t seem to need to ascertain the epistemic credentials of attestors before being able to acquire justified beliefs and knowledge from them. As Wittgenstein writes in OC (23):

That is, if the attestor is trustworthy – that is, knowledgeable and sincere with respect to what they are saying – then we do acquire knowledge (or at least justified belief) from them without having to ascertain their epistemic credentials.Footnote ²¹

Still, in the case of hinges, according to Wittgenstein, it isn’t because they have been passed on to us by trustworthy people that we know or believe them. In fact, as the reader will recall from Sections 1 and 2, hinges aren’t known, in the ‘empirical’ or ‘epistemic’ sense of ‘knowing’. Nor are they believed in the k- or j-apt sense of ‘believing’. At most, they are known in the grammatical sense of ‘knowing’ which, as we saw in the previous section, may be glossed as ‘it stands fast for me and many others that … ’. Writes Wittgenstein in OC (137):

Furthermore, it is only by possessing a language and the hinges characteristic of our various epistemic practices that we can then go on to form reasons, on specific occasions, to doubt or ascertain the trustworthiness of attestors. Thus, any judgement regarding attestors’ trustworthiness – that is, their being knowledgeable and sincere – depends on already possessing the hinges necessary for such a determination. As such, it cannot be the case that one must first judge that the attestor is trustworthy before one can acquire a hinge from them (see also Hertzberg (Reference Hertzberg1988) and Lagerspetz (Reference Lagerspetz1998: 94) on this point). This, by itself, is of course compatible with both the reductionist and anti-reductionist positions concerning genuine transmissions of knowledge (or justification) in the case of ordinary beliefs. Yet, we have seen some reasons to think that Wittgenstein was not inclined towards reductionism on that front either.

3.2 Wittgenstein on Trust and Hinges

Still, for Wittgenstein, trust is crucial to the transmission of hinges. In fact, out of the 676 entries in On Certainty, approximately thirty are devoted to this topic.Footnote ²² This is due to the fact that he decouples trust from trustworthiness. For he rightly divorces the issue of what trust is from the issue of when it is merited, and hence from the issue of under which conditions someone is worthy of trust, which may indeed vary according to context. For instance, being a trustworthy attestor amounts to being sincere and knowledgeable, as we have seen, whereas being a trustworthy spouse means to be supportive and faithful (at the very least), and being a trustworthy friend means to be supportive, loyal, and sincere, say. This runs contrary to a whole tradition of thinking of the relationship between trust and trustworthiness which we find already in Hobbes,Footnote ²³ and revisited in contemporary authors (Hardin Reference Hardin2002, Hawley Reference Hawley2019), who take trustworthiness to be prior to trust, in the analysis of these cognate notions.

Be that as it may, trust has been subject to intense debate over the last few decades, at least since Baier (Reference Baier1986). Much ink has been spilled on whether trust differs from reliance, and if so, which further conditions need to obtain to give rise to trust (call these ‘reliance +’ accounts).Footnote ²⁴

What Wittgenstein says in this respect in On Certainty is refreshing. For he thinks that trust in fact characterizes our relationship to hinges. We trust that there are material objects, that what has regularly happened in the past will keep repeating in the future, that the Earth has existed for a very long time, that we have hands and that we have never been too far away from the surface of the Earth (individually or at least as mankind up to the late 1960s). Furthermore, he thinks that we trust people (experts and non-experts alike), but also memory, our sensory faculties, objects, and artefacts (such as textbooks, or as we might think today, the internet), even if we don’t know how they operate, who has created or designed them, and so on. Thus, he goes beyond the dichotomy between trust and reliance we find in much of the contemporary literature.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, he does not propose sets of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for trust. Rather, he characterizes it as a basic stance of openness and reliance with respect to others, but also with respect to objects and artefacts, as well as our own faculties.

In more detail: for Wittgenstein, trust is manifested not only towards people, but also towards our faculties, like our senses and our memory. As he writes in OC (34, 337. Cf. 125, 133):

Moreover, according to him, we trust textbooks, even if we have only a rough idea of how the latter are produced,Footnote ²⁶ and we trust epistemic authorities. As he writes in OC (599, 600, and 604):

Once again, we do not trust our senses, memory, textbooks, or epistemic authorities because they have proved trustworthy or because we deem them so. Rather, we trust them and that allows us to acquire certain hinges from each of them. Our attitude of trust towards these sources carries over to the hinges we acquire from them. Only once in possession of such hinges, can we assess the trustworthiness of these sources and, from time to time, the good standing of (at least some) hinges as well.Footnote ²⁷

Thus, trust is transcendentally prior to trustworthiness as well as to distrust or even the mere lack of trust,Footnote ²⁸ for a judgement of trustworthiness depends on having ascertained whether a speaker, for instance, is knowledgeable and sincere. Yet, to ascertain that much, we need a language and epistemic methods, with their attendant hinges, which we have, in their turn, only thanks to trusting people, objects, our faculties, and so on. Trust, therefore, is transcendentally prior to trustworthiness, as well as to distrust, which can ensue only when there are good reasons to think that a speaker is, say, ignorant or insincere (or perhaps both). Yet trust is also prior to the suspension of judgement with respect to whether someone is trustworthy or indeed untrustworthy, and indeed prior to the mere absence of trust, from an epistemic point of view. For we need to accept what we are told in order to acquire the language and hinges necessary for obtaining and deploying the epistemic methods which would allow us legitimately to consider someone as trustworthy or untrustworthy – thus overcoming the absence of trust – or to reflectively suspend judgement about the issue. As Wittgenstein writes in OC (150–151, 509. Cf. 301–308)

And famously, in the very passages where the metaphor of hinges is introduced (OC 341–343), he writes:

Thus, it is part of the logic – that is the norms – of scientific investigation (and of any other kind of empirical investigation) for Wittgenstein, that certain propositions are in deed not doubted and are therefore taken on trust (OC 159).

Furthermore, trust is psychologically prior to distrust for Wittgenstein. For, as children (OC 159–162) we first trust, then only later, after having acquired a language and various epistemic methods, do we proceed to form reasons to distrust (or to suspend judgement, say, or indeed to form a judgement about someone’s trustworthiness). (Cf. Stern Reference Stern, Faulkner and Simpson2017 and Moyal-Sharrock 2005: chapter 9). As Wittgenstein writes in OC (159–162):

As a stance, hinge trust is also part of our psychologically inbuilt way of approaching reality.Footnote ³⁰ That is, as children we tend to trust adults and various authorities, as well as certain worldly regularities. Our doing so – with no grounds or reasons in their favour, at that point – is crucial to the acquisition of language and methods of inquiry, with their own respective hinges, which make it possible to then go on investigating the epistemic credentials of our initial trust, if need be, both with respect to the source of the information and about the information itself.

In addition, for Wittgenstein, evidence can be the cause of and/or can keep corroborating our trust in hinges, but it cannot epistemically ground it, for all our evidence depends on taking hinges for granted (OC 275–280), either contextually, or globally. As he writes in OC (429),

This connects with what we saw in Section 2. It may be that having seen or felt our toes a myriad of times it becomes a hinge for us and thus something which is no longer in need of evidential support but rather stands fast for us and against which we measure our sight or proprioception. Once turned into a hinge, however, evidence putatively in favour of such a proposition either presupposes it or is no more secure than the very hinge it should epistemically support. Conversely, the fact that evidence cannot speak against a hinge should not be taken to epistemically support it either. For it is in the very nature of hinges that, once understood as norms, evidence putatively against them is either discounted or explained away.

The best way of characterizing hinge trust, therefore, is as a basic stance of openness and reliance (OC 201–213, 508–509, 514–515, 571) on something and/or someone. It is a stance because it comes before and independently of being able to have j/k-apt beliefs. It is a stance of openness meaning that, when we occupy it, we act and take in information without questioning either its source or its content. In this sense, it is an unquestioning attitude we have towards what we trust. It is a stance of reliance – that is, of dependence – on objects, people, cognitive faculties, and/or institutional practices to provide us with language, methods of inquiry, and other epistemic capacities we need to form judgements and beliefs. As we saw, moreover, it is a basic psychological stance we have as part of our psychological make-up, which serves us well. For, to repeat, it is needed to acquire anything relevant to the entertaining of propositional contents and to their epistemic assessment.Footnote ³¹

Notice that even if hinge trust can be characterized as a form of reliance, this does not mean endorsing a reliabilist account of it. For, according to Wittgenstein, it is not because certain sources of information and methods are conducive to the formation of true beliefs that we trust them (or that our trust in them is justified, or otherwise in epistemically good standing). Rather, we act in a certain way – that is, we do trust our senses, memory, textbooks, experts, and so on. That gives us a certain picture of the world – that is, a set of hinges (OC 93–97, 162, 167, 262). Based on that, we then distinguish between what is true or false, justified or unjustified, known or unknown (OC 94). Thus, it is only by trusting first that we can acquire the means to, then, form and evaluate beliefs and their sources as reliable or unreliable. As he writes in OC (508–509, 514–515):

And he continues in OC (94, 205):

Hinge trust, moreover, has a distinctive phenomenology, characterized by feeling secure and certain. That is, ‘The reasonable man does not have certain doubts’ (OC 220). Hinges too, in many cases at least, are something we feel certain and secure about, for example, we feel certain and secure about our name, or about having hands, or about being born on a certain date in a given place. Yet, it is not this feeling that makes a hinge certain and secure. What makes a hinge certain is the role that hinge we basically trust/rely upon plays in the system of our judgement: it allows us to acquire evidence and justification for, and therefore knowledge of, ordinary empirical propositions, but also the means to doubt and inquire into ordinary empirical propositions.

Furthermore, hinge trust – in the dual sense of a basic attitude of openness and reliance, as well as of an attitude we most fundamentally have towards hinges – normally goes unspoken, and for this reason, it is almost ‘invisible’ and in a sense ‘elusive’. We take it for granted and it normally goes without saying that there are physical objects, or that the Earth has existed for a very long time, that this is my hand, that people know their own names, or that we can rely on our senses and memory (OC 94–95, 103, 397, 500–501, 568). Here is Wittgenstein (OC 95, 397, 568, 103):

Conversely, trust tends to become phenomenologically salient either when things do not work as expected – whence distrust may ensue – or when we are confronted with something unfamiliar and unexpected; so that what we normally take for granted or what goes without saying can no longer be assumed. Interestingly, raising doubts about hinges or indeed affirming that one knows them, when that is normally taken for granted, raises the issue of the legitimacy of our trust in them to the point of possibly annihilating it, at least within the philosophy seminar. Here is Wittgenstein again (OC 423, 481, 500–501)

In sum, our trust in hinges – and trust more generally – is operating in the ‘background’ of all our thinking, judging, and inquiring. Very rarely does it come to the foreground, and when it does, as it does when we do philosophy, it suddenly appears dubious. Of course, for Wittgenstein philosophy cannot overturn our basic certainties, but, for sure, raising the issue of the rational legitimacy of our trust in hinges as we do in the philosophy seminar does have the effect of making us uncertain about it and its content. This phenomenological point – as disturbing as it might be – is however entirely consistent with then finding, within the philosophy seminar, reasons to resist such an outcome. Indeed, On Certainty can be seen as aiming just at that (see Moyal-Sharrock 2005 and Coliva Reference Coliva2010 for a reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s anti-sceptical strategies). Moore’s and Stebbing’s philosophies of common sense may be seen as aiming at the same target, as we saw in Section 2.Footnote ³² That is, they too would insist that basic trust in Moore’s truisms and premises of his proof is legitimate as such. That is, philosophy can neither epistemically ground nor overturn it.

What Wittgenstein’s account of trust brings to light is the Janus-faced nature of trust. On the one hand, trust is characterized by a phenomenology of feeling secure and at ease both with our human and with our non-human environment. On the other, it is a stance that constitutively opens us up to the possibility of being let down. Far from being a problem, however, this just shows that this form of dependence is in fact a condition of our success as individuals and as a species. In this sense, such an account of trust illuminates what it means to say that humans are a social species. For at the heart of our individual and collective success, there is a reliance on others (as well as on several aspects of our environment) that allows us, as individuals and as a species, to acquire and transmit all necessary elements for forming beliefs and assessing them. To repeat, we do not trust because it has proved successful. Rather, we trust and that is what enables us to be successful – it allows us to possess a language and methods of inquiry that can vastly extend our knowledge and then it allows us to pass such knowledge (including linguistic knowledge) on to others.

Because reliance on others and on several aspects of our environment is ‘such a routine part of life, we very often trust without talking about it. Most of the time, it just happens’ (Simpson Reference Simpson2012: 560). Indeed, as Simpson remarks, ‘the actuality of trust may be very present, but it does not need to be talked unless there is some problem, and so trust is invisible’ (Simpson Reference Simpson2012: 560). It is only when trust is broken, or we are facing the unfamiliar that trust surfaces in the conversation.

3.3 Wittgenstein on Distrust

Being such a basic stance, trust is the default for us. Distrust, for us, is like illness with respect to health: it is not our ‘normal’ condition. Wittgenstein makes this point time and again in OC. Here are some pertinent passages, in addition to the ones in OC (159–162) we have already encountered (Section 3.2); namely OC (219–223):

What these and other passages make clear is that for Wittgenstein distrust and doubt are possible only when there are reasons and reasons are possible only if hinges stay put. Thus, trust is both a condition of possibility for, and prior to doubt and distrust. Starting with distrust or lack of trust would not be the most rational of moves. On the contrary, it would impede rationality and would border on insanity. To stress, we don’t need reasons to trust hinges. Rather, the fact that we do trust hinges allows us to acquire reasons for or against ordinary empirical beliefs and therefore allows us to engage in those practices that are constitutive of epistemic rationality.

Therefore, it is only when the initial conditions for trust have been systematically or egregiously infringed upon that distrust is acceptable or justified (cf. also Lagerspetz Reference Lagerspetz1998: 132–133). There is no quick and ready way of specifying when trust has been violated in this way, and therefore there is no easy way to establish when moving on to distrust is rational. As a rule of thumb, it may depend on our trust either being betrayed on multiple occasions and/or on significant issues, or indeed in conditions where we would routinely rely on people, objects, our faculties, and so on. Interestingly, from an epistemic point of view, if my sight and memory, which I usually trust, repeatedly let me down in what are generally considered normal conditions – when the lighting conditions are good, or when I am not intoxicated or affected by the posthumous effects of anaesthesia – then that rationally entitles me to distrust them. Whereas, if they let me down in abnormal conditions – when the room is too dark to see, or I am recovering from a concussion, say – then it would not be rational to move on to distrusting these faculties in general. Their occasional failure is entirely compatible with the fact that they remain trustworthy sources of information or of its retention, in the general run of cases.

Again, if in what seem to be normal conditions a person or even an expert gives me wrong information about topics in their purview, this makes it reasonable for me to stop trusting them, or even moving on to distrusting them (as sources of information at least in the area of discourse under consideration). By contrast, if the topic is not one they can be presumed to know or even be experts about, or conditions are not normal (e.g. they are intoxicated, under the effect of drugs, have just been injured, etc.) their passing on wrong information, at least on occasion, even on matters on which they may be presumed to be knowledgeable, is not sufficient to make it rational for me to stop trusting them or for me to start distrusting them, in general and/or with respect to their area of expertise.

Importantly, it is entirely consistent with what Wittgenstein says that hinges might also become the object of doubt and be abandoned over time, or in different contexts. Consider: it’s normally a hinge for most of us that we have hands. We trust that much in all our acting and thinking. After a car accident, however, that might be overturned and we may have to distrust the deliverances of proprioception that may still make us feel as if we had our hands, like in the case of phantom limb syndrome.

Be that as it may, since trust is the default for us, it has ‘ontological priority’ over distrust (see Stern Reference Stern, Faulkner and Simpson2017) and it is ‘axiologically’ superior to distrust (Stern Reference Stern, Faulkner and Simpson2017). For it is the stance that allows us to operate best from an epistemic point of view (and beyond). This explains why, as a stance, trust can be maintained in the face of counterevidence, at least to some degree. That is, we are not justified to move on to distrust if our faculties, other people, institutions, or our environmental conditions have betrayed us once or only on occasion, or if the trust has been broken on non-fundamental issues, or in non-standard conditions.

Trust, however, can be broken, and, when this happens, the consequences can be disastrous. For turning to distrust can deeply affect the way people go through life and their being in the world (CV, 54). In fact, as stances towards life – that is, as ways of being in the world – trust and distrust may be appealed to in order to mark the difference between the world of the ‘happy’ and the world of the ‘unhappy’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein1921: 6.43). Whereas the world of the happy is one of openness and confidence with respect to others, the environment and even oneself, the world of the unhappy is one of closure, insularity, and diffidence regarding others or even one’s own faculties. Distrust is therefore deeply dehumanizing.

3.4 The Bearing of Wittgenstein’s Views on Current Debates about Trust

Current debates about trust focus on the attitude, rather than the content of it. Thus, it is only to be expected that no attention be paid to hinges qua what we acquire by trusting people, objects, institutions, and faculties, in the process of acquiring a language and our methods of inquiry.Footnote ³³

However, as we saw, what we may call ‘hinge trust’ refers to a specific stance that characterizes trust in its most basic, or Ur- form. It is this feature of Wittgenstein’s account that has an important role to play in current debates about trust. For by looking at these debates, it is quite easy to get the impression of a problematic heterogeneity (Simpson Reference Simpson2012). Theorists seem to be interested in different things and somewhat artificially distinguish trust from reliance (see Goldberg Reference Goldberg and Simon2020 for a discussion; the distinction was first introduced in Baier Reference Baier1986), while such a distinction is hard to find in ordinary discourse or even practices and doesn’t track across languages.

C. Thi Nguyen (Reference Nguyen2022) is a noticeable exception, and indeed his account of trust as an unquestioning attitude is very similar to Wittgenstein’s. Nguyen, however, purports to distinguish between relying on and trusting objects and faculties. The key idea is that one may still rely on objects or faculties even if one doesn’t trust them because one has no other or better option than to rely on them, at least on a specific occasion. Yet, from a Wittgensteinian perspective the real contrast would be between trusting or relying on objects or faculties, on the one hand, and simply making use of them because one has no other (or no better) option, on the other. When, in the absence of other or better options, we are forced to take our car to go somewhere, even when we know it isn’t working properly, we are neither trusting nor relying on it to work properly. Rather, we are knowingly running the risk that it may not work as this is our only (or at least our best) option, given the circumstances.

Furthermore, contemporary theories of trust tend to focus narrowly on personal trust rather than on the general form of trust which, though it includes personal trust, also structures our relations to objects and faculties. While this can be motivated by the fact that many theorists working on trust have been interested in its moral implications, the fact remains that trust is not – at least not naturally – an attitude we have only towards people.

To characterize personal trust, then, contemporary theorists appeal to reactive attitudes, such as resentment and betrayal (Baier Reference Baier1986, Holton Reference Holton1994, Jones Reference Jones1996), as conditions that would allow one to distinguish between mere reliance and (what by their lights is) trust, or even ‘trust proper’.Footnote ³⁴ Yet, reactive attitudes don’t seem to be either necessary or sufficient for trust. For instance, one can trust someone to do something without resenting them (or feeling betrayed) for not complying with one’s expectations, if the matter at hand is not particularly significant. Or else, one can resent them for not meeting one’s expectations even if such expectations were not formed based on a relation of trust.

Of course, what we can elicit from On Certainty regarding hinge trust may be considered to be another kind of trust, which should be acknowledged alongside other forms of trust – especially ‘personal’ trust. Alternatively, the notion of hinge trust as a stance of openness and reliance on something/someone else may be taken to be fundamental also in the context of personal trust, and then used to specify more detailed conditions, which may or may not obtain in particular cases. For instance, I may be trusting you because you promised to φ; or because you undertook a commitment (which may have been incurred voluntarily, or because of occupying a certain social role, see Hawley (Reference Hawley2019)); or because you are well-disposed towards me; and so on. These further specifications may then be taken to be constitutive of normatively richer notions of trust (Simpson Reference Simpson2012), such as ‘personal’ trust. Alternatively, as I prefer (Coliva Reference Coliva2025b), they may be considered constitutive of normatively richer notions other than trust, such as being a word-keeper, a good spouse or a friend, a collegial colleague, and so on.

Be that as it may, it is clear that if hinge trust is a stance, which does not constitutively involve doxastic propositional attitudes, like the (k-apt) belief that something or someone will do what we trust them to do, there will be at least one notion of trust that is independent of such beliefs. This is important because it allows us to characterize infants ‘thoroughgoing dependence on their parents as a paradigm kind of trust’ (Simpson Reference Simpson2012: 559). Moreover, belief is rational only if backed up by reasons, but trust, at least hinge trust, is prior to the very possibility of offering reasons.

This, however, is also compatible with sometimes forming propositional attitudes of acceptance regarding what one trusts. For instance, if I trust that the floor will not disappear into the abyss, if I have the concepts necessary to consider the issue and I do consider the issue, I may assent to the corresponding proposition and even offer evidence in its support. Such evidence, however, is not the ground of my original trust. Thus, (contra Pritchard Reference Pritchard2023) there is no bar to considering trust in hinges as an attitude of acceptance of them.

Finally, although the quantity of literature on distrust in relation to trust is modest, in it the point is often made that trust and distrust are contraries, not contradictories. That is, they are not exhaustive, for one may not trust someone without thereby distrusting them. Yet, they are mutually exclusive: if one trusts someone, then that is incompatible with distrusting them (at least in a given area) and vice versa.Footnote ³⁵ Given that hinge trust is ontologically and axiologically superior to distrust, a Wittgensteinian approach to trust runs contrary to those theories, like Hawley’s, that aim to shed light on trust by elucidating distrust.Footnote ³⁶

3.5 Conclusions

To conclude, paraphrasing Wittgenstein (OC 253), we may say that at the foundation of all well-founded beliefs (including testimonial ones) lies unfounded trust – that is, a non-epistemic and even non-propositional stance of openness and reliance towards our human and non-human environment. If, as Moyal-Sharrock (2005) argues, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is responsible for bringing the animal back into epistemology, it is with the basic stance of openness and reliance that characterizes hinge trust that the animal is brought back into epistemology in general and into the epistemology of testimony in particular.

Finally, since all hinges, insofar as they are constitutive of epistemic rationality, are acquired by trusting others and the world, the innovative aspect of Wittgenstein’s proposal is that it isn’t ratiocination that enables us to participate in epistemic practices wherein epistemic rationality unfolds but rather occupying such an unreflective stance. Thus, Wittgenstein’s revolutionary move is not so much to have focused on the importance and primacy of action – Hume had already noticed that, outside the philosophy seminar, we act with a certainty that knows no doubt even if it cannot be supported by reasons. Rather, it is to have brought to light the fact that our animal, unreflective stance of openness and reliance onto others, our faculties, and the world is what allows us to acquire the hinges that are constitutive of epistemic rationality. That is, rationality and reasons would not – logically, and not just causally and genealogically – be possible without the animal; at least not for finite and social beings like us.Footnote ³⁷

4.1 Genealogical Challenges

An issue that has become prominent in contemporary social epistemology is the nature and bearing of so-called ‘genealogical challenges’. I am using the plural here because, though there is often overlap, there are in fact three distinct kinds of genealogical challenges. Yet, for expository purposes, it is useful to keep them apart. First, there is the kind of genealogical challenge encapsulated in the ‘you just believe that because … ’ (YJBTB) schema (White Reference White2010), also called ‘etiological challenge’. Accordingly, some of our deep-seated beliefs seem to be more the product of causal factors – such as social, historical, or even political contingencies – than the result of a purely rational deliberation. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty (Reference Mill1859: 17), the person who uncritically accepts the opinion of ‘the world’,

In recent years, diverging philosophical views, such as holding or rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction (Cohen Reference Cohen2000), or one’s large-scale political commitments (Cohen Reference Cohen2000), have been considered good candidates for this kind of genealogical challenge. The gist of this kind of challenge, then, is that it is merely a causal contingency if we end up embracing one or the other of these views, rather than different and incompatible ones.

Another kind of genealogical challenge is the one raised by Bernard Williams (Reference Williams2002), Edward Craig (Reference Craig1991), Miranda Fricker (Reference Fricker2007, Reference Fricker2008), and Thomas W. Simpson (Reference Simpson2012) regarding some key concepts such as truth, knowledge, testimonial justice, trust, and so on. This challenge suggests that, rather than look for sets of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions, which should give us, at once, the definition of these concepts and the essence common to all and only their instances, we should ask what these concepts are for – whence the name of ‘pragmatic genealogies’. In carrying out this task, then, we may reconstruct or even invent genealogies to expose the key, or Ur- function these concepts (might have) subserve(d).

Finally, there is a third kind of genealogical challenge – usually raised by so-called ‘critical genealogies’ – to be found, most famously, but by no means exclusively, in the writings of Nietzsche and Foucault, which aims at (i) a debunking effect with respect to the alleged objectivity of moral values, sexual categories, madness, or even knowledge, and so on. By unravelling the (presumed) socio-political power structures from which moral or religious doctrines originated, or how sexuality, madness and even knowledge are socially constructed and certified, these genealogies also aim to show (ii) how these notions and doctrines subserve the purpose of perpetuating the dominance of those very power structures.

Wittgenstein’s later writings are not concerned – at least not obviously – with this second aim of critical genealogies; whereas they relate to its first aim, which, arguably, overlaps with one of the goals of etiological challenges, at least in part. They are also connected with pragmatic genealogies. For, notoriously, Wittgenstein rejects definitional accounts of key concepts in philosophy and proposes instead a family-resemblance account of them (PI 65–77).Footnote ³⁸ He equally rejects the idea that there is an essence common to all and only the items that fall under such concepts. Furthermore, his methodological use of imagination to either show some key, allegedly original, and possibly simpler function some concepts may have played (PI 2–8), or how our concepts could have been different, in dissimilar natural and social scenarios, represents an important ancestor of this second kind of genealogy.

In the following, we will examine Wittgenstein’s reflections in On Certainty and their relationship to the etiological form of genealogical critique, paying particular attention to its debunking aim, which, as we have noted, is also a goal of critical genealogies. The connection is quite obvious, for, as we saw (Section 2), hinges are inherited from our community (like religious or political views); they are ‘hammered’ into us through education in formal and informal settings (like religion or large-scale political or philosophical views); they may change or evolve through time and space and are therefore variable (like religious, political, or philosophical views); and they constitute our image of the world, but such an image may be different for others – diachronically or even synchronically – like in the aforementioned areas of human inquiry and experience. Moreover, constituting an image of the world, and being the conditions of possibility of producing reasons for or against ordinary empirical beliefs, they may not change through argumentation – reasons come to an end and crucially presuppose the very hinges one party is upholding and the other one is rejecting, thus being rationally inert for the latter. A change of hinges, therefore, may only take the form of a conversion (like in the religious case, and possibly in the political or even in the philosophical one). Thanks to such a conversion, we are brought to look at the world differently (like in the religious case, and possibly also in politics and philosophy).

This kind of genealogical challenge is, therefore, a leitmotif of On Certainty, and seems to open the door to epistemic relativism, at least prima facie. For, insofar as reasons depend on hinges and hinges are variable and mutually incompatible, upholding a certain picture of the world is a matter of contingency, due to social or historical factors. Had we been born and raised differently, we would likely have had a different picture of the world and would thus recognize as rational (or irrational) other, incompatible sets of ordinary empirical beliefs, which would depend on holding on to other, incompatible hinges. Indeed, the whole of rationality – determined by our practices of asking/giving reasons – seems to rest on causally determined, and potentially variable – that is, contingent – hinges.

4.2 Deep Disagreement and Kinds of Relativism

In recent years, much attention has been devoted to the problem of disagreement among epistemic peers. Epistemic peers share epistemic methods and are assumed to be equally rational and knowledgeable with respect to the topic at issue. Classic examples involve returning opposite verdicts about how much is owed, when splitting a bill. The question then is raised when, once’s faced with a peer disagreement, one should be steadfast in one’s belief or else lower one’s credence.

As we saw in Section 4.1, many passages in On Certainty raise a different but related issue; namely, how to react to a disagreement about hinges – and in particular, whether a rational response is at all possible, when faced with such a disagreement. For, first, if hinges constitute epistemic methods, hinge disagreements raise the issue of when we could consider subjects or groups as epistemic peers, because, by holding on to different hinges, parties to this kind of disagreement would not share epistemic methods and couldn’t be considered to be epistemic peers.

Secondly, as observed by Robert Fogelin (Reference Fogelin1985: 6): ‘the possibility of a genuine argumentative exchange depends […] on the fact that together we accept many things.’ Consequently, disagreements over hinges ‘cannot be resolved through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing.’

Finally, there are issues that stem from the distinctive metaphysical-cum-epistemological profile of hinge propositions. For, as we saw in Section 2, Wittgenstein regarded hinges as neither true nor false (OC 196–206, at least in robustly truth-theoretical terms); as neither justified nor unjustified (OC 110, 130, 166; or at least as neither in need of further justification nor as held against justification); as neither known nor unknown (OC 121, at least in an epistemic or empirical sense of ‘to know’); and as neither rational nor irrational (OC 559, at least if rationality depends on being supported by justifications and evidence). Since disagreement involves taking opposite stances with respect to the truth, or the justification, or the knowability of a given content, it then becomes dubious that when there is a hinge clash there is also a genuine case of disagreement. Rather, there seems to be more of a case of deep distance between parties to the conflict.Footnote ³⁹

This issue, then, clearly bears on whether On Certainty ends up proposing a form of epistemic relativism, and, in turn, whether Wittgenstein was inclined towards a relativism characterized by faultless disagreement, or towards a relativism of distance.Footnote ⁴⁰ The question is whether hinge-disagreements involve two parties reaching incompatible and ultimately contradictory conclusions about the same propositional content, with neither being at fault from a third-person perspective, as in a disagreement over whether sushi is tasty. Alternatively, we might question whether such disagreements arise because each party’s position is inaccessible or unavailable to the other, so that what counts as reasonable for one party is not reasonable for the other, due to their differing perspectives. This would be similar to certain ethical judgments, where opposing views depend on being situated within different, de facto inaccessible moral frameworks, like the contrast between medieval samurai ethics and contemporary Western ethics, as famously discussed by Bernard Williams.

By paying close attention to the differences among hinges, as well as to Wittgenstein’s account of hinge-truth and hinge-rationality, a nuanced response may be returned to these interrelated issues. In fact, it may be argued that while there is a positional difference between those who hold that nobody has ever been on the Moon – like Wittgenstein – and those who don’t – like us – this is not by itself a reason to think that, according to Wittgenstein’s view in On Certainty, there wouldn’t be a way of rationally resolving the disagreement (see OC 106–108). For we are sharing the same ‘system’ – roughly, the one constituted by science – within which progress is possible.

Yet, for other hinges and possible disagreement about them, where altogether different systems of evidence are concerned, Wittgenstein’s views are more hospitable to relativism, in the form of a relativism of distance. Connectedly, that shows that within his framework, genealogical challenges are epistemologically salient only when disagreements of this latter kind are at stake (OC 608–612). In these cases, no rational resolution is possible, and persuasion (OC 262, 612) and conversion (OC 92) will have to take place, to allow one party to the debate to move over to the other party’s system of hinges.

4.3 Varieties of Hinges and of Reasons for Fitting into the YJBTB Schema

Here is a Table 1 with some notable hinges and some considerations for having them fit into the YJBTB – ‘You just believe that because … ’ – schema.

Table 1Varieties of hinges

‘No one has ever been on the Moon’ (OC 106, 108, 171, 286)	YJBTB you lived before 1969	Had you lived after 1969 you would not have believed it.
‘The Earth is flat’ (OC 85)	YJBTB you lived long before the scientific revolution; or are part of a (conspiracy) group that has no trust in science	Had you lived after wards you would have not believed it. You would not believe it if you were not part of a conspiracy group.
‘The Earth has been created (by God) in less than 7 days’ (OC 336)	YJBTB you have been raised in a creationist community	Had you not been raised in a creationist community you would not believe it.
‘God exists’ (OC 107)	YJBTB you have been raised in a theistic community	Had you not been raised in a theistic community you would not believe it
‘There are physical objects’ (OC35–37, 53–55, 57–59, 447, 454) ‘There is an external world’ (OC 20, 338)	YJBTB you have been raised in a community that speaks the ‘thing-language’.	Had you not been raised in a community that speaks the ‘thing-language’ you would not believe it.

4.4 The Rationality of YJBTB There Are Physical Objects Because It’s a Hinge

Based on our discussion so far, one might be led to think that, for Wittgenstein, the application of the YJBTB schema to ‘There is an external world’ or ‘There are physical objects’ is also epistemically problematic. Yet, here is what Wittgenstein has to say about ‘There are physical objects’ in OC (35–37):

Thus, ‘There are physical objects’ should not be interpreted as a description – as a statement about what there is. Interpreted that way, as the realist and the idealist do, it is nonsense, for Wittgenstein. However, it is not nonsense if interpreted as a grammatical statement about the fact that, in our language, we countenance such a ‘logical’ (OC 36) concept (as well as other ‘logical’, or ‘formal’, or ‘categorial’ concepts, such as color, quantity, etc.).Footnote ⁴² Thanks to such a ‘logical concept’ certain inferences concerning the continued existence of instances of that category (in fact, instances of sortal concepts falling under that formal concept, such as tables and chairs, etc.) even when they are not perceived are licensed, whereas other kinds of inference are forbidden.

Taken as a descriptive statement, the reasons appealed to by the realist are question-begging against the idealist and vice versa. Even their respective starting points, such as, on the one hand, the certainty of there being a hand here – à la Moore – or merely an experience as of a hand – à la the idealist (or phenomenalist) – would be question-begging against the opponent. Hence, taken as a descriptive statement, ‘There are physical objects’ would fit into the YJBTB schema and would produce a problematic instantiation of it.

When understood as a grammatical statement about the type of language we in fact use and the kinds of inferences the statement ‘There are physical objects’ permits or prohibits, it becomes clear that this is what enables us to transcend our cognitive locality. For it allows us to use our current experiences or memories to justify beliefs about specific objects, even when we are not perceiving them directly, have never perceived them, or will no longer be able to do so in the future.

Now, the important point is that the very possibility of having justifications and reasons for and against ordinary empirical statements understood as being about mind-independent objects depends on taking for granted the hinge ‘There are physical objects’. Thus, while it is true, for Wittgenstein, that we just believe that there are physical objects because we have been brought up in a community that speaks a language that countenances that logical concept, taking that hinge for granted is a condition of possibility for producing reasons and justifications for ordinary empirical statements, and is therefore constitutive of epistemic rationality. That is why holding on to it is rationally legitimate, even in the absence of non-circular evidence in favour of it.

4.5 Conclusions

While Wittgenstein’s hinges fit into the YJBTB schema because they have been inculcated in us through enculturation, and despite their possible cultural and historical variability, they do not always give rise to epistemically problematic instances of that schema. When hinges such as ‘No one has ever been on the Moon’ or ‘The Earth is flat’ are plugged into that schema, they merely show a positional difference that doesn’t undermine justification and knowledge when in fact possessed (in this case for the opposite views). When, in contrast, hinges like ‘There are physical objects’ are plugged in, given that they are conditions of possibility for epistemic rationality altogether, their fitting into the YJBTB schema is compatible with their being rationally held, despite not being supported by evidential reasons. However, when we plug into the YJBTB schema other culturally variable hinges, like ‘God exists’, which aren’t constitutive of (epistemic) rationality, the awareness that reasons for them would be question-begging against an opponent or at least no stronger than theirs reveals that, while we may adduce evidence in their favour, that evidence is not going to settle the issue against one’s opponent and for principled reasons. Of course, that does not make those hinges and precepts any less important to us and to our identity. Yet, it shows that some of our deepest convictions belong more to the way we see things than to the way things are, or indeed must be seen for epistemic rationality to be possible. Realizing that in different circumstances we would likely have had different ones shows, in its turn, that at least in these cases relativism – in the form of a relativism of distance – remains an option.

5.1 Woman as a Family-Resemblance Concept

A Wittgensteinian approach to questions such as ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘who counts as a woman?’ is predicated on the idea that meanings are arbitrary, and that often issues that seem to take the form of metaphysical questions into the nature of reality are better approached by looking at the workings of the corresponding words or concepts. For meanings and concepts are not set in stone: they are the result of certain social conventions, and they may change over time. Hence, a Wittgensteinian approach is anti-essentialist, if by ‘essence’ we mean a natural essence (or even a social essence, or kind).

First, according to a Wittgensteinian approach, concepts or meanings aren’t always determined by explicit definitions. Sometimes, clearly, they are – like in the mathematical, the scientific or in the legal context. Yet, when we are interested in the terms and concepts that people in our societies use in their everyday interactions, then that approach is often unavailable. The way in which people typically use these terms is rather through family resemblance.

Developing this idea, one might then propose that the meaning of ‘woman’ should be identified through family resemblance rather than through a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Accordingly, there would be people who are considered instances of the concept in question and then other ones would be taken to fall under the concept, if they share one or the other of the features of these cases, but not necessarily all or a (weighted) majority of them.Footnote ⁴⁴

There is considerable controversy about how best to understand family resemblance, even in the context of its possible application to woman. Some theorists (Stoljar Reference Stoljar1995: 282–286, Reference Stoljar and Witt2011: 42, Hale Reference Hale1996, Bettcher Reference Bettcher, Power, Halwani and Soble2012: 237, 241), for instance, think that it would depend on sharing some focal features, with the attendant difficulty of (i) determining what they are; and (ii) allowing for cases of being ‘more’ or ‘less’ women, thus creating a problem for the proper inclusion of some people into this category, not least lesbians and trans women.

Yet, as Friedrich Waismann explained the notion of family resemblance, borrowing Wittgenstein’s example of game: ‘it may be merely that every two games are connected by intermediate links’ (Reference Waismann1965: 82). That is, like tennis is a game which cannot be played alone and where there is winning and losing, so is solitaire, where there is winning and losing but which can be played alone, and so is playing with dolls, which can be played alone and where there is no winning or losing. Solitaire is therefore the intermediate link that connects tennis and playing with dolls, even though these latter games may have nothing in common between them.

This explains the relevance of intermediate links for Wittgenstein (PI 122). Like the intermediate links in a chain connect separate links, which do not touch each other in any point, intermediate instances of a concept C serve to unite instances that may have nothing in common between them, and they do so by means of having (at least) one feature in common with each of these separate instances, though not the same one(s).

One might then think that if something is a game then it must be an enjoyable activity for those who engage in it. Surely, this is often the case, but it need not be. That is, there are games which people play even if they don’t find them enjoyable, and there are many activities people enjoy doing that aren’t games.

The difficulty here is to fully grasp the idea that, from a metaphysical point of view, there are no barriers to inclusion within a family-resemblance concept, at least in principle. Still, this does not mean that, in practice, ‘anything goes’. For the process will be driven by our actual needs. Thus, it is unlikely that, say, we will want to include tables and chairs under the concept woman, while it is more likely that, if AI keeps developing at the rate it does, and if our lives will be more and more intertwined with those of robots, we might have to consider the issue of their inclusion within such (and related categories) in a not-too-distant future.

This more inclusive account of family resemblance is important for several reasons. First, as anticipated, it avoids the idea that one should count as a woman only if certain traits are shared, and connectedly, that there would be individuals who would be more of a woman than others, if they shared more of these traits or more of the ‘heavy-weight’ ones. Thus, contrary to prototype theories of concepts, not having some ‘heavy-weight’ traits shared by focal members of a class, does not determine exclusion from it, even if it may explain why it may take us longer to subsume those instances under the relevant concepts.

Secondly, family resemblance clarifies in what sense concepts are open-ended. Since inclusion within a concept does not depend on sharing a specific set of predetermined features, but only resemblance in some respect, it is possible to include new elements, as long as they resemble already included ones. Thus, one important aspect of family resemblance is that it allows for the extension of the concept to new cases, in potentially unpredictable ways.

Thirdly, family resemblance should not be conflated with vagueness. That is, the proposed account of woman does not depend on the fact that biologically there may be human beings that fall in between male and female, or have some biological features of both, such that the concept woman would not be a clear-cut one.Footnote ⁴⁵ The point, rather, is that if woman works by family resemblance, the criteria for inclusion within the class of women – however subject to vagueness they might be – may expand over time to become more inclusive.

Finally, the concept woman, on this proposal, remains one, while evolving through time. That is, no replacement of meaning/concept is affected simply by adding new criteria for membership within the concept. Rather, the concept woman would be a potentially open-ended, revisable overlap of features that have entered the concept through time (PI 67–68). Our definitions, therefore, would only be snapshots of moments in the life of the concept – corresponding to (sometimes overlapping) temporal stages of one single concept. They may serve very useful purposes, like in the legal or scientific context, but context and purpose are inevitably historically determined. Thus, we should not mistake the concept in its entirety with any of its temporal stages. Furthermore, the open-endedness of the concept leaves room for its extension to new cases which are not presently considered simply because they may not be salient at this time in history. In fact, the criteriaFootnote ⁴⁶ for inclusion within the class determined by the concept may be expanded. In that sense, the very same concept would be changed, just like an individual, thought of as a spatio-temporal worm, can change its properties while remaining one and the same.

Importantly, these more inclusive criteria would not necessarily entail identity in function – be it ‘natural’ or ‘social’. Thus, on a Wittgensteinian approach, we could still have the same concept woman and yet ameliorate it, in the sense that, for instance, we would be expanding it to new cases such as trans women. We would be doing so while keeping the same concept: simply, new cases that were not initially considered to fall under that concept are now considered to be included under it.

A Wittgensteinian approach not only makes sense of the idea of ameliorating our existing concept, instead of simply replacing it,Footnote ⁴⁷ but is also politically apt. For activists in favour of considering trans women women are fighting for including the former into that very concept. They are not asking us to consider them women in a different sense.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Talia Mae Bettcher puts it (Reference Bettcher, Power, Halwani and Soble2012: 233): ‘Being a trans woman is not a strange type of woman, but a woman, period’.Footnote ⁴⁹ In this sense, a Wittgensteinian conception of woman allows us to redress forms of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2007, but see also Coliva Reference Coliva2025c) which don’t permit trans people to make sense to themselves and/or others of their lived experience, due to identity prejudice against them.

According to a Wittgensteinian model, conceptual amelioration does not work by having philosophers dictate new meanings for our old words. Rather, the Wittgensteinian approach would enjoin to fight on the rough ground of ‘serious politics’, as Naomi Scheman (Reference Scheman2011: 17–18) calls it, so that even if a person whose natal sex was male, they would count as a woman, once they have undergone the transition (or even when they simply self-identify as such). As remarked, this change in the relevant concepts would not consist in substituting new concepts for our old ones, but rather in extending the existing concepts to cover new, not previously envisaged cases, by expanding the criteria for inclusion within the relevant class. If we want our concepts to be more inclusive, we need to ‘shift the ground’, as Scheman puts it (Reference Scheman2011: 35), from which they arise.

Of course, from a Wittgensteinian perspective (Reference Wittgenstein1953: 67–68) we may always redescribe the situation by saying that a nativist concept woman has been replaced by a more inclusive one. Yet, this should not obscure the fact that these would be just temporal stages of a single, evolving concept, that we may want or need to latch onto for pragmatic purposes.

Still, the extension of the relevant concepts to new cases is made possible and brought about by certain changes in the social and political world, effected by serious political activism, where the agents are, typically, stakeholders and those of us who, while not being directly affected, share the hopes for a better future for marginalized members of our society.

Furthermore, this is not just how, typically, conceptual amelioration occurs – after all, characteristically even the law follows practice by updating according to relevant societal pressures. Rather, this is how amelioration ought to occur. For this mode of amelioration is of a piece with a democratic, non-authoritarian and non-paternalistic conception of how society works and improves itself.

5.2 ‘I Am a Woman’

There are two other important tools in a Wittgensteinian toolkit to be used in connection with issues about gender. First, the idea of an avowal, and the nature of the first-personal authority attached to it; second, the idea of a personal hinge. The former, as we saw in Section 1, consists in recognizing that it is by dint of the grammar of our language that we accord first-person authority to avowals of sensations and other mental states. Thus, we take subjects at their word when they avow pain or other mental states. Obviously, this does not mean that their avowals cannot ever be defeated, but only that, in the normal run of cases, when the subject is sincere and conceptually competent, we don’t question their avowal of pain, or of a toothache, any more than we question a cry after an injury.Footnote ⁵⁰

Conversely, in the normal run of cases, third-personal doubts about avowals are legitimate only if there is reason to think that a subject is being insincere or lacks competence in using the relevant psychological vocabulary. Moreover, in the case of avowals of intentional mental states, such as beliefs and desires, self-deception may be another avenue for challenging first-personal authority.Footnote ⁵¹ Barring these cases, however, the onus is on the doubter to explain why their doubt is legitimate. In fact, it may easily turn out that it isn’t. For instance, Borgoni (Reference Borgoni2019) discusses cases where a sexist co-worker challenges a woman’s colleague’s claim ‘I believe that A is the best candidate for the job’. In such cases, the problem isn’t that a woman’s belief may be false because A may not be the best candidate for the job. Rather, it’s to deny that she genuinely holds the belief she avows. However, given that, ex hypothesi, she is conceptually competent, sincere and not self-deceived, a grammatical account of first-personal authority can effectively explain why such challenges are not only morally problematic, as they are based on sexist prejudice, but also epistemically so, thus representing forms of testimonial injustice (Fricker Reference Fricker2007). For the speaker isn’t accorded the credibility she deserves with respect to her own mind. Moreover, the hearer isn’t acquiring knowledge (about their colleague’s attitude regarding the candidate, and possibly her reasons for it) which would be at their disposal, if they weren’t prejudiced. Finally, given that, ex hypothesi, there are no objective reasons for the hearer to doubt the speaker’s sincerity, her linguistic competence, or lack of self-deception, their doubt is groundless and a manifestation of irrationality on their part.

Furthermore, in On Certainty, Wittgenstein allows for personal hinges, like ‘My name is LW’ (OC 328, 425, 470, 490–1, 567, 628, 656), or ‘I am in England’ (OC 420–423). That is, propositions which go without saying for each of us, and that share the characteristics of the more general hinges we discussed in Section 2, like the fact that ‘I know’ with respect to them plays a grammatical role and that doubt is excluded with respect to them. Clearly those statements aren’t hinges for other people, who may be uncertain about our name, or our location.Footnote ⁵² Yet, the fact that they are hinges for us is reflected in the fact that, in the normal run of cases, other people neither do, nor ought to challenge our pronouncements (assuming sincerity and conceptual mastery).

Now, psychological avowals and personal hinges aren’t identical. For, at the very least, their subject-matter is different. Yet, they have certain features in common, for Wittgenstein, like the fact that ‘I know’ with respect to them plays a grammatical role (Section 1.2), and connectedly, that doubts about them would be excluded in the normal run of cases, albeit for only partially related reasons.Footnote ⁵³

Interestingly, among personal hinges Wittgenstein mentions ‘I am a man/woman’, OC 79–83:

Hence, ‘I am a man’, for Wittgenstein himself, is a hinge. That is, even if it has an empirical content, at least in context, it plays a rule-like role (OC 95), for him and his community. That is, qua hinge, a doubt about it would reveal a lack of understanding of the term ‘man’ and could not be supported by reasons.Footnote ⁵⁴

Still, it is part and parcel of Wittgenstein’s views about hinges that they may be subject to change. This, arguably, is also the case with personal hinges related to one’s gender. Thus, it may be that through a process of self-discovery, during which ‘I am a man/woman’ is very much like an ordinary empirical proposition for the subject, one ends up embracing a different hinge, in which one’s avowed gender differs from one’s natal sex. In other cases, in contrast, one’s avowed gender may indeed be different from one’s natal sex from very early on and this, in turn, may be a bedrock certainty for the subject (Moyal-Sharrock and Sandis Reference Moyal-Sharrock and Sandis2024). The important point is that once ‘I am a man/woman’, based on self-identification, becomes a personal hinge, it is indubitable for the subject. That is also why, if spoken out loud by someone for whom it is a hinge, it would resemble an avowal, from a first-personal point of view.

The next point to consider, however, is whether at the societal level ‘I am a woman/man’, based on self-identification, is treated as a hinge, such that subjects are accorded authority over their self-identifications, even when different from one’s natal sex (granted sincerity, conceptual mastery, and lack of self-deception). Clearly, up until recently, and certainly at the time when Wittgenstein was writing, this wasn’t the case.

Now, for Wittgenstein, ‘what counts as an adequate test of a statement belongs to logic’ (OC 82).Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, precluding one’s own self-identification from being an adequate test of whether one is a man or a woman (or belongs to any other non-cis category), amounts to normatively excluding it from playing a role in the determination of a person’s gender. It also precludes the self-identification from being taken at face value – just like a psychological avowal, in the normal run of cases – by other members of the community.

Armed with this idea we can now reframe current debates about the extension of woman to trans women, and/or about non-binary identities as debates about renegotiating the hinges – that is, the rules of evidential significance – that will have to be operative when we are answering questions regarding a person’s gender. On the one hand, there is a traditional hinge ‘Gender is binary and coincident with one’s natal sex’, such that only the observation of genitalia at the time of birth counts in answering the question whether a person is a man or a woman. On the other hand, there is the more progressive hinge ‘Gender isn’t binary and isn’t determined solely by one’s natal sex’, such that also non-cis self-identifications are allowed to play a role in answering that kind of question.

A hinge disagreement of this kind would involve which judgements would count as paradigmatically correct applications of that concept, and whether we take self-identifications to have the kind of authority we typically ascribe to psychological avowals and to socially recognized personal hinges. Furthermore, this will also impact various downstream judgments, such as deeming individuals who don’t identify with their natal sex as having a psychiatric disorder; or else, accusing those who don’t take self-identifications at face value, as a valid factor in determining gender, of being prejudiced against non-cis people, and thereby perpetrating a form of testimonial injustice by not taking these self-identifications at face value.

Importantly, it is noticeable that we are already operating differently from an epistemic point of view than in the past. At the time when Wittgenstein was writing, only the conservative hinge was operative, and there was no practice of asking people which pronoun others should use to refer to them. Nowadays, things have changed or are changing – surely not without opposition – especially in some Western societies. What used to be a societal hinge – the conservative one – is being demoted, and is highly contested, if not altogether replaced by the more progressive one.

5.3 Conclusions

As anticipated in Section 1.3, philosophers moved by the desire to ameliorate society, qua philosophers, are often bothered by Wittgenstein’s alleged quietism – that is, the view that we can only describe our communal use of words. On this reading of Wittgenstein, it would not be appropriate for philosophers to engage in these battles, qua philosophers, and there wouldn’t be anything specific that they could bring to the cause of ameliorating society.

It’s doubtful that this is the correct description of what Wittgenstein was after. His quietism is much more apparent than real. In fact, if he was against theory, it was only in a specific sense of ‘theory’, mostly to be found in metaphysics and in foundationalist projects in epistemology. Roughly, Wittgenstein was against the kind of theory, as applied to philosophy – not to science – that vertically tries to ground more complex truths on a limited set of more fundamental ones, and that aims to unveil the hidden essence of phenomena (Coliva Reference Coliva2021b, Reference Coliva2024d). Moreover, his descriptivism, as we have been seeing, is only inimical to the idea that philosophy should (or could) revise or regiment linguistic uses.

However, Wittgenstein was not against a kind of theory, in philosophy (but also in anthropology or sociology) that tries to give us a perspicuous and synoptic presentation of the complex interrelations of our concepts and that brings to light differences which may go unnoticed under the superficial similarity of the words we use.

Furthermore, Wittgenstein coined or inspired several philosophical notions, such as ‘family resemblance’, ‘language-game’, ‘form of life’, ‘hinge proposition’, ‘world-picture’, and so on which, albeit not explicitly defined by him, do serve the theoretical purpose of understanding phenomena such as meaning, concepts, rules, justification, knowledge, and so on.

If the arguments in this section are roughly on the right track, notions like family resemblance, first-person avowal (with its inherent first-person authority), and of (personal) hinge proposition can serve as valuable theoretical tools for understanding conceptual change, particularly around the concept woman. These conceptual tools can also shed light on debates about the role of self-identification in discussions of gender, while promoting epistemic justice – both hermeneutical and testimonial – by allowing individuals to use concepts (such as woman) that better capture their lived experiences (when this is in fact the case), or to be taken at face value when they express their gender identity, irrespective of their natal sex. Clearly, a Wittgensteinian approach to these societal issues has much to recommend it.