Reading Doubt: Wittgenstein, Certainty, and Literary Interpretation

Wittgenstein on Certainty and the Grounds of Literary Interpretation links two familiar tensions: poems can matter without proving their meaning, and ordinary judgements rest on unacknowledged assumptions. Ordinary language philosophy asks what speakers do when something seems settled or beyond question. Literary interpretation becomes an inquiry into the practices that make reading possible.

Reading relies on shared grammar, background expectations and trust in other readers. These supports can be examined without declaring every interpretation arbitrary. Wittgenstein’s remarks on certainty show how doubts about the trivial presuppose things we do not justify; Cavell and Cora Diamond extend the inquiry into criticism, where textual force meets a claim upon our lives.

Certainty as a practical achievement

Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969) describes certain propositions as “hinges”: they support what can be doubted and argued rather than justify the world-picture with further premises. “The past has happened” need not be proved for reasoning to proceed, yet removing that support would unsettle the rules of judgement rather than replace one premise with another.

Doubt is therefore a relation among practices, not merely an error inside a mind. To doubt that the sun will rise tomorrow is to rely on inherited expectations about time, bodies and testimony. Literary reading has comparable supports: recurring images, narrative patterns and a language’s history help readers recognise what a passage does, but none supplies an infallible key.

Certainty appears as an achievement within a form of life rather than a possession of a mind. Its foundations are public without being merely consensual. A reading may survive disagreement because it remains answerable to textual detail, established usage and its consequences. This offers criticism a position between dogmatism and the claim that all interpretations are equally valid.

Grammar, rules, and the limits of method

Meaning emerges through language games and forms of life, terms that discourage the fantasy of a private code waiting to be cracked. Rules govern what counts as following them correctly, but their application is not mechanical: someone can follow a rule or merely act as though following one. Interpretation involves judgement exercised within shared practices.

Literary interpretation inherits both the attraction and the difficulty of this account. Invoking ordinary usage can expose an assumed meaning the text never supports, while authorial intention cannot automatically settle a line’s force. Yet meaning is use does not licence ignoring genre, history or politics. Textual claims remain testable against competing descriptions of what the words permit.

Cavell, Diamond, and reading as evidence

Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? reads philosophical claims as claims upon a shared life. His questions about what “our life in this word” might be shift attention from decoding sentences to the commitments they presuppose. Literature often performs this shift more immediately: a familiar expression acquires an unfamiliar edge, exposing a taken-for-granted form of life.

Cora Diamond develops a related approach in “Seeing and Saying” and The Spell of the Sensuous. She asks how philosophical claims about perception and language may overlook the concrete acts of seeing and saying from which they begin. A poem can expose this dependence by putting a familiar scene under pressure, making habits of recognition available for examination.

Their grounds are not private conviction but shared vocabulary, narrative conventions, publication institutions and the reader’s capacity to be surprised. Cavell’s emphasis on acknowledgment adds an ethical dimension: recognising an obligation in language means accepting that one’s own position is addressed.

Doubt, fiction, and rhetorical force

None of this guarantees certainty about a difficult work. Fiction distinguishes the narrator’s claim from the reader’s belief, and irony asks us to hold response and distance together. A reader can doubt the speaker while finding the line’s force unshakeable. Literary evidence has its own standards: rhetorical force, formal patterning and interpretive revisions are not empirical proof.

Foundational doubt can still be productive. A reading that reveals a suppressed convention shows that a supposedly natural response had conditions attached. Cavell’s claim of reason and Diamond’s attention to the ordinary expose exclusions without declaring all descriptions equally truthful. Scepticism becomes a discipline of exposure, not a licence to stop thinking.

Australian English makes this ordinary business of interpretation visible. “Arvo” may locate an event in an afternoon; “not” can register defiance rather than deny a factual proposition; “I reckon” may convey a tentative judgement. A Melbourne line about tram bells acquires meaning through local habits outsiders cannot infer from grammar alone. Such usages show how shared life enters language.

A disciplined method for contested readings

Wittgenstein’s work is most useful here when it supplies questions, not a mechanical method. Distinguish what a text asserts, what it assumes and what a reader supplies. Historical evidence can correct a reading of period usage; formal features can challenge a thematic account; performance can reveal conventions that print partly conceals. These forms of evidence answer different questions.

For a seminar or bibliography, the OLP online index offers routes into Cavell, Diamond and Wittgenstein, with relevant books, articles, archived posts, lectures and calls for papers. It connects these materials to interpretive problems rather than treating a canonical text as an answer without a question.

• Begin with the short entries in On Certainty, marking the hinge propositions that support a reading.
• Read Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? beside Diamond’s “Seeing and Saying” to connect ordinary language with literature.
• Ask what the text assumes, what it disturbs and what readers must know for its evidential claims to work.
• Keep close reading, historical research and performance in view, since each supplies different evidence.
• Distinguish persuasive agreement from justification, and identify unstated social conventions.
• Revise a reading when new details change the practice in which a passage acquires meaning.

A common discipline of attention

These conversations have recognisable Australian homes: seminar rooms at the University of Melbourne, reading groups near the ANU in Canberra, and shared tables in university libraries. Australian university presses such as ANU Press, Melbourne University Press and Sydney University Press circulate research through institutional subscriptions, print-on-demand and specialist booksellers, rather than depending only on bestseller sales.

Begin with a disputed passage and ask what assumptions make its apparent certainty possible. Take that question to a reading group or seminar, and contribute the resulting reading to the OLP community. Share it with other scholars and help keep the conversation rigorous without making it closed.