If You Know That Here Is One Hand
“If you know that here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest.” This deceptively simple proposition opens On Certainty by engaging with G.E. Moore’s famous “proof” of the external world. Moore claimed to know with certainty that “here is one hand” — but Wittgenstein asks: what does such knowledge really rest upon? The statement functions as a conditional surrender — if we accept certain basic propositions as known, the entire edifice of knowledge follows. But this reveals that our knowledge system requires starting points that are not themselves justified by other knowledge. ...