1. If you do know that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Wittgenstein offers a conditional grant of knowledge based on knowing a simple fact.
- In plain terms
- If you know this is a hand, we accept everything else.
- What can you take from it?
- Basic certainties can support broader claims to knowledge.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- What do you know for sure?
- How do you justify knowledge?
Another view
Even basic facts like seeing a hand can be questioned in philosophy.
More from Ludwig Wittgenstein
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him (II, xi; p. 223 of the 1968 English edn.)
Permalink to quote #59 94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is th…
Permalink to quote #61 So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay. (470)
Permalink to quote #58
Related quotes
Mathematical knowledge may, just like our scientific knowledge, be deep and broad, it may be subtle and wonderfully explanatory, it may be uncontroversially ac…
David DeutschDavid Deutsch quote #12 Necessary truth is merely the subject-matter of mathematics, not the reward we get for doing mathematics. The object of mathematics is not, and cannot be, math…
David DeutschDavid Deutsch quote #13 It seems to me that science has a much greater likelihood of being true in the main than any philosophy hitherto advanced (I do not, of course, except my own).…
Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell quote #18