Tuesday, October 23, 2007

5.1363 If it does not follow that it is true from a proposition’s being obvious to us, then obviousness is also no justification for our belief in its truth.

True, but we will believe what is obvious to us, won’t we? Justified or not. Cf. On Certainty.

See Marie McGinn pp. 64-68 on the importance of self-evidence for Frege and Russell. “Wittgenstein believes that the problem with any account of logic that treats the propositions of logic as substantial truths, in the way that Frege and Russell do, is that it is forced to rely on a notion of self-evidence to explain our a priori knowledge of their truth. And the problem with any appeal to a notion of self-evidence as a justification for acknowledging a proposition as true is that the truth of a proposition does not follow from its seeming to us to be self-evident.” (pp. 66-67)

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