Hinge commitments: the restrictive reading

Wittgenstein’s posthumously published work, On Certainty, has had a radical effect on contemporary epistemology. Since this text is composed of four notebooks that Wittgenstein wrote just before he died, and hence had no opportunity to edit, it is natural to suppose that the idea of a definitive overarching reading of this work that is supported by the text is chimerical. I want to propose, however, that a close reading of these notebooks reveals that this is not the case. In fact, I want to argue that Wittgenstein is progressively closing in on a particular account of the special kind of hinge certainty—what I call hinge commitment—that interested him, and which plays a framework role in our system of rational evaluation. Crucial to this interpretation is the idea that many of the certainties that Wittgenstein discusses in On Certainty are not hinge commitments. Accordingly, I call this account the restrictive reading.