Hanoch Ben-Yami

On On Certainty Ideas

4. Dezember 2026, 15.00-16.30, Hörsaal 2G

Abstract: On Certainty is one of the most important contributions to epistemology in the 20^th century. ‘It is not a selection’, wrote Anscombe of her edition of it; ‘Wittgenstein marked it off in his notebooks as a separate topic’ and ‘it constitutes a single sustained treatment of the topic’. That’s not the case. She made many editorial decisions and offered the public a selection that represented her understanding, and misunderstandings, of Wittgenstein. Even the title, ‘On Certainty’, is a misnomer: the book’s main topic is not certainty. In several ways, the new edition and translation by Peter Hacker (2025) is an improvement on the former one, as I shall explain. I shall then discuss ideas occurring in the book, also going beyond Wittgenstein in trying to assess the reasons various kinds of truths are removed from doubt. I shall also offer criticisms of some of these ideas.

Cecilie Eriksen

Close(d) Encounters: Wittgenstein, Løgstrup and the ethical shortcomings of public service bots

15. Januar 2027, 15.00-16.30, Hörsaal 2G

Abstract: In public sectors across Western democracies, authorities have for the last decades sought to automate public services. One increasingly popular form of this automation is the introduction of public service chat- and voice bots. Their purpose is typically to provide citizens and businesses with information on, e.g., services, rules and opening hours and help them navigate official webpages and book appointments. Today, these bots serve hundreds of thousands of citizens each year, and the hope of politicians is that the bots will be able to take on a growing share of front-line tasks, delivering high-quality public service that is also time- and cost-efficient.

NGOs, researchers and citizens have, however, identified a range of ethical problems arising in the use of public service bots, such as a lack of transparency, inadequate privacy protection, the use of flawed data, wrong or misleading bot answers, unclear accountability in the event of bot-failures, and problematic biases in the system design resulting in systemic discrimination against, for instance, disabled people, the elderly, and non-native speakers.

In this talk, I will use the later Wittgenstein’s work on certainty and the Danish philosopher K.E. Løgstrup’s work on spontaneous utterances of life to bring out further ethical shortcomings arising ‘when the state-bot meets the street’. In this case, the shortcomings are not caused by fixable flaws in the design of the digital system, rather, they arise as an inherent consequence of it being a meeting between a digital system and a human being.