On Certainty, Change, and “Mathematical Hinges”

The rejection of a "characterless" moral self is central to some of Bernard Williams' most important contributions to philosophy. By the time of Truth and Truthfulness, he works instead with a model of the self constituted and stabilized out of more primitive materials through deliberation and in concert with others that takes inspiration from Diderot. Although this view of the self raises some difficult questions, it serves as a useful starting point for thinking about the process of developing an authentic moral point of view in the context of contemporary living. In what follows, I begin to fill out and extend this picture of the self and its related notion of authenticity by exploring some of the "technologies of the self" at play in Rachel Cusk's recent work (primarily, the Outline trilogy, Coventry, Second Place, and "The Stuntman") that ask us to rethink the possibility and importance of stability; seek a way of constituting oneself and one's values outside the confining structures of traditional narrative (focusing instead on a framework that might be provided by the visual arts); and give a different role to the sort of internalized other Williams sees as being at work in the mechanisms of shame.

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Against a global conception of mathematical hinges

Fairhurst,

Pérez-Escobar,

Sarikaya

2024

The Philosophical Quarterly

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Epistemologists have developed a diverse group of theories, known as hinge epistemology, about our epistemic practices that resort to and expand on Wittgenstein's concept of ‘hinges’ in On Certainty. Within hinge epistemology there is a debate over the epistemic status of hinges. Some hold that hinges are non-epistemic (neither known, justified, nor warranted), while others contend that they are epistemic. Philosophers on both sides of the debate have often connected this discussion to Wittgenstein's later views on mathematics. Others have directly questioned whether there are mathematical hinges, and if so, these would be axioms. Here, we give a hinge epistemology account for mathematical practices based on their contextual dynamics. We argue that 1) there are indeed mathematical hinges (and they are not axioms necessarily), and 2) a given mathematical entity can be used contextually as an epistemic hinge, a non-epistemic hinge, or a non-hinge. We sustain our arguments exegetically and empirically.

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On Certainty, Change, and “Mathematical Hinges”

Cited by 4 publications

References 37 publications

Hinges in the knowledge economy. on greco’s common and procedural knowledge

Hinges in the knowledge economy. on greco’s common and procedural knowledge

Williams and Cusk on Technologies of the Self

Against a global conception of mathematical hinges

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