Review of Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty by Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (2007)(Review Revised 2019)

Abstract

Wittgenstein (W) is for me easily the most brilliant thinker on human behavior and this is his last work and crowning achievement. It belongs to his third and final period, yet it is not only his most basic work (since it shows that all behavior is an extension of innate true-only axioms and that our conscious ratiocination is but icing on unconscious machinations), but as Daniele Moyal-Sharrock has recently noted, is a radical new epistemology and the foundation for all description of animal behavior, revealing how the mind works and indeed must work. The "must" is entailed by the fact that all brains share a common ancestry and common genes, and so there is only one basic way they work, that this necessarily has an axiomatic structure, that all higher animals share the same evolved psychology based on inclusive fitness, and in humans this is extended into a personality based on throat muscle contractions (language) that evolved to manipulate others (with variations that can be regarded as trivial). This book, and arguably all of W's work and all useful discussion of behavior is a development of or variation on these ideas.

Keywords: wittgenstein, daniele moyal-sharrock, metaphysics, metaphilosophy, searle, realism, idealism, naturalism, nativism, innateness, skepticism, two systems of thought, dual systems of thought, reasoning, thinking, propositions, dispositions, language, mind, knowing, truth, believing, understanding