1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), § 115. Hereafter cited in the text as P. I.

2. Martine Aliana Rothblatt, The Apartheid of Sex: A Manifesto on the Freedom of Gender (New York: Crown, 1995). Like Anne Fausto-Sterling (cited below), Rothblatt (vice-chair of the Bioethics Subcommittee of the International Bar Association and herself a transsexual) argues that our two-sex system is too simplistic to accommodate the plurality of sexes and genders. She contests standard criteria for sex difference like chromosomal differentiation and genitals, which she finds as irrelevant to one's place in society as skin tone. The book argues for fundamental changes in our language and concludes with an International Gender Bill of Rights.

3. Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough,”The Sciences (March/April 1993): 20-5.

4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), §211. Hereafter cited in the text as O. C.

5. “But can't it be imagined that there should be no physical objects? I don't know. And yet `There are physical objects' is nonsense. Is it supposed to be an empirical proposition.” Ibid., §35.

6. This includes complex thinkers like Judith Butler, who explicitly states that she is not making antifoundationalist claims, for that would be to remain within “foundationalism and the skeptical problematic it engenders.” What she wants to interrogate, rather, is “what the theoretical move that establishes foundations authorizes, and what precisely it excludes or forecloses.”“Contingent Foundations,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 9. My argument is not that Butler is indeed making such claims but, rather, that her epistemic commitments are an obstacle to her political analysis. As I argue below, those commitments turn on the notion of certainty as a knowledge claim that must be and can be put into doubt.

7. Linda Nicholson calls this the “coat-rack view of self-identity.”“Interpreting Gender,” in Social Postmodernism: Beyond Identity Politics, ed. Linda Nicholson and Steven Seidelman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 39-69, 41. For a powerful critique of “the ostensibly natural facts of sex” that underwrite the sex/gender distinction, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 7.

8. Ibid., 4-5.

9. As Michael Williams observes, there is a difference in “emotional tone” between An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature. In the former (earlier) text, Hume views skepticism in its “academic guise as a theoretical insight, the recognition that our ordinary beliefs never really amount to knowledge”—an insight that is disappointing but not necessarily threatening. Skepticism is seen as “an epistemological thesis, not a state of mind.” In the latter (later) work, however, Humean skepticism reveals its more “Pyrrhonian” side. Now it is not simply a matter of our beliefs amounting to less than knowledge but also our sense that we no longer know what to believe. “For Hume, then, scepticism manifests itself as both a surprising epistemological thesis and a disturbing epoche. If Hume is more relaxed in the Enquiry, this is because academic scepticism is in the ascendant and it is easier to be ironic about an epistemological thesis than about chronic instability in one's beliefs.” I would say that the state of feminism after identity politics looks more like the latter. Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 356.

10. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 52. See also 136-8.

11. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1974), “Introduction to Part II,” xxxv.

12. The translator of The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley, rendered the French title of Book II, “L'expérience vécue,” as “Woman's Life Today,” thereby setting the stage for massive misinterpretations of Beauvoir's project.

13. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 20.

14. Beauvoir, Second Sex, xvii.

15. Ibid., xvi, xvii.

16. Beauvoir adds: “But I know that my only defense is to reply: `I think thus and so because it is true,' thereby removing myself from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: `And you think the contrary because you are a man,' for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong.” Ibid., xviii. In contrast to the woman, Beauvoir writes, “a man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man,” where the goes without saying refers to his unquestioned enunciative authority. Ibid., xvii.

17. Luce Irigaray, “Questions,” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 120, 122. Like Beauvoir, Irigaray recognizes that no one would ask a speaker: “Are you a man? In a way that goes without saying.” Ibid., 121.

18. Ibid., 148-9.

19. Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 153.

20. Irigaray, This Sex, 143.

21. Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 63.

22. As Richard Flathman interprets Wittgenstein on this point, “we must not `sublime' rules,” as if they were “ `strict calculi,' calculi that, by themselves or of their own accord as it were, do, could or should determine our actions.” To act as a standard, a rule has to be applied, and in the application are already decisions and choices. Richard Flathman. Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1998), 66.

23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 64e.

24. Irigaray, This Sex, 161, 163.

25. Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 52.

26. Wittgenstein does not take it for granted that reasonable must mean I do not doubt the existence of my hands or my body. Rather, he shows how what counts as reasonable, and as a reasonable person, will include not subjecting this sort of thing to doubt. Like doubting, acting reasonably is a language-game with certain conventions.

27. “I can imagine a man who had grown up in quite special circumstances and been taught that the earth came into being 50 years ago, and therefore believed this. We might instruct him: the earth has long... etc.—We should be trying to give him our picture of the world. This would happen through a kind of persuasion” (O. C., §262).

28. According to Avrum Stroll, “Wittgenstein's genius consisted in constructing an account of human knowledge whose foundations, whose supporting presuppositions, were in no ways like knowledge. Knowledge belongs to the language-game, and certitude does not.”Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 145. Thus, Stroll reads Wittgenstein as “a foundationalist of sorts,” but not the traditional sort for whom everything is knowledge, and knowledge of two kinds: noninferential (foundational) and inferential (non-foundational). Although I agree with Stroll's fascinating interpretation of the substance of Wittgenstein's intervention into the debate over epistemic justification, I am wary of taking Wittgenstein too far in the direction of what Stroll calls an “absolutistic” view of certainty. As I explain below, Stroll is right to argue that Wittgenstein develops an account of certainty in which what stands fast is the product not of intellect but of rote-training. But one should guard against turning Wittgenstein's river metaphor, cited below, into all hard rock and little sand or water.

29. David G. Stern offers an interesting reading of this metaphor as a way to make sense of the change in Wittgenstein's thinking from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. See Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. chap. 6.

30. A mistake belongs to the language-game. If I add up a list of numbers whose total is 1,253 but I give a calculation of 1,251, that is a mistake. If I give a calculation of 14, that is something altogether different. Likewise, if someone were to say that the earth is 2.5 billion years old and authorities on the matter say that it is 2.7 billion years old, that is a mistake. But if that person were to say that the earth is 5 years old, she or he is making no mistake but is outside the language-game. See Stroll, Moore and Wittgenstein, 150.

31. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 100.

32. Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud, 17.

33. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 85e. I think the German gives a somewhat different meaning, in which the temporality of the passionate decision does not take the form of a “before” and “after” (as is suggested in the English: “It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue”). Es wäre, als lieβe mich jemand auf der einen Seite meine hoffnungslose Lage sehen, und auf der andern stellte er mir das Rettungswerkzeug dar (“It would be as though someone were to let me see the hopelessness of my situation, on the one side, and, on the other, show me the means of rescue.”) I think the notion of before and after (first... and then) both gives the wrong sense of how one makes this sort of decision for a frame of reference and eliminates what for Wittgenstein is the crucial element of struggle. (“If you want to stay within the religious sphere you must struggle” [Ibid., 86e]. It is as problematic as Freud's comment about the difference between the little boy's and little girl's passionate decision in favor of the system of reference that goes under the name of the phallus: the boy is initially uninterested in the girl's lack of a penis until, under the threat of castration (let's call it “the hopelessness of his situation”), he comes to “believe in the reality of the threat” (i.e., that he too could lose what she must once have had), and, we could say, grasps hold of “the means of rescue,” which is the Name of the Father. “The little girl behaves differently. She makes her judgement and her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (Freud, “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love [New York: Collier, 1963], 187-8). I think that a reading of these well-known passages about sexual development would profit from considering them in relation to Wittgenstein's remarks about how one comes to religion. What does it mean to take up a position as a man or as a woman if not passionately to seize hold of, or commit oneself to, a system of reference?

34. The issue here is not whether hinge propositions can be stated but rather that they are, by and large, not stated. If stated, they are not posed as questions. There is nothing in Wittgenstein's account of these propositions that suggests that they are ineffable.

35. Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess,”differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 2.2 (1990): 105-25, 106.

36. Once again I think that the English translation leads us astray here. The German reads: “Die Schwierigkeit ist, die Grundlosigkeit unseres Glaubens einzusehen.” The verb “einsehen” is translated as “to realize.” Although einsehen can mean “understand,” or “recognize,” it also means “to see' (something) or “look into” (e.g., files) or “look at” (e.g., books). But “realize” is closer to the German begreifen or erkennenor (sich) klarwerden. It is perfectly possible for me to realize something without being able to see it or look at it. What one looks at, when one tries to look, is precisely the “picture” that, according to Wittgenstein, holds us “captive” and that lies in our language: the picture of a correspondence between our language, beliefs, knowledge, and the underlying structure of reality.

37. An important issue that I cannot address here is the way in which Wittgenstein resists both communitarian and transcendental notions of rule-following. The definition of correct rule-following is not what the community agrees to, but neither is it metaphysically guaranteed from above. Rules are our standards of correctness; still, if they were dependent on communal agreement, whatever the community agreed upon could count as following a rule. Likewise, if rules did not elicit our agreement, they would have no point: we would not follow them.

38. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations,” 7.

39. Although Monique Wittig offers a powerful critique of what she calls the political “category of sex,” she also recognizes that “sex” belongs to the “what-goes-without-saying” of the straight mind and that what sustains it is not, finally, a matter of knowledge. Sex is more like a “fetish,” as Wittig herself says, in that it is not in any way accountable to reality. See The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992). What undoes “sex” is not a feminist theory but an act of radical imagination. Hence, the power and the necessity of Wittig's utopic fiction (e.g., Les Guérillères and Le Corps Lesbien).

40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. 1, ed. G. H. von Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), §211.

41. On a related point, see Wittgenstein, P. I., §§139-40.

Doing Without Knowing

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