Wittgenstein and the groundlessness of our believing

In his final notebooks, published as On Certainty, Wittgenstein offers a distinctive conception of the nature of reasons. Central to this conception is the idea that at the heart of our rational practices are essentially arational commitments. This proposal marks a powerful challenge to the standard picture of the structure of reasons. In particular, it has been thought that this account might offer us a resolution of the traditional scepticism/antiscepticism debate. It is argued, however, that some standard ways of filling out the details of this proposal ultimately lead to an epistemology which is highly problematic. The goal here is to present a more compelling version of Wittgenstein’s account of the structure of reasons which can evade these difficulties. 0. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Wittgenstein’s final notebooks—published as On Certainty—are fragmentary affairs, unedited by the man himself for public consumption and almost certainly concerned in places with distinct (though superficially similar) philosophical issues. There is thus a limit to the extent to which we can reasonably extract an argument from these remarks which we can attribute with full confidence to Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, there is one particular train of thought in On Certainty that can be delineated and which we could plausibly claim is a Wittgensteinian proposal, and that is a radically new conception of the structure of reasons. Many have seen in this proposal a way of dealing with the problem of radical scepticism. The problem, however, is to spell-out this account of the structure of reasons in such a way that it doesn’t generate unwelcome epistemological