Certainty

This paper marks an attempt at coming to grips with the notion of certainty and degrees thereof. Where certainty has to do with propositional truth, we have become aware of hefty criticism by philosophers critical of analytic philosophy, most prominently Richard Rorty (1967 in “The Linguistic Turn”). Our discussion turns in particular to linguistic pathways (something that even Rorty also welcomed, arguing that the dead alleys of epistemology were obviated by the focus of philosophical thinking turning to linguistic behavior). However, we avoid Rorty’s radical option of storytelling as coming to grips with certainty, or, better, with subjective certainties. We shall see that the notions developed in modern linguistics and formal semantics help us to avoid a non-committal, non-truth functional semantics.