Worlds Apart: The Logic of Conversion in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

This paper evaluates Pritchard’s account of religious conversion as a quantitative process along which gradual shifts in our system of empirical beliefs lead to a new, holistic view of the world. Wittgenstein’s own presentations of transition, including religious transitions, help us to challenge Pritchard’s conception of conversion. It is shown that Wittgenstein was aiming at doing justice to the tension between continuity and discontinuity which is intrinsic to cases of transformative change. The main thrust of Wittgenstein’s view of conversion in On Certainty departs from a gestalt shift model that is complemented by a hermeneutical, imaginative model of reasoning. For this reason, we contend that hinge epistemologists are mainly blind to informal modes of reasoning and apprehension which are neither logical nor grounded in evidence. This, in turn, is a reminder of how Wittgenstein called attention to the importance of the imagination in the process of conversion, and of his remarkable appreciation throughout On Certainty of imaginative activity for genuine understanding. Wittgenstein’s logic of ‘internal understanding’ clearly challenges some widely assumed representations of Wittgenstein’s last notes.