"doctrines seen as facts"

I'm continuing to explore the reasons why, in certain debates, people holding different positions cannot give up the view that their opponent can only be dishonest, ignorant, or irrational. Certainly there are dishonest, ignorant, and irrational people out there but there is something more to this dynamic than this assessment suggests. Here are some ideas I came across in reading Anthony Thiselton's Two Horizons. Thiselton is discussing some ideas by G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein (On Certainty):

"Cultural presuppositions, Hulme declares, become so much a part of the mind of the people of the given culture 'and lie so far back, that they are never really conscious of them. They do not see them, but other things through them.' They constitute 'doctrines seen as facts.' In due course we shall compare the idea of cultural presuppositions with some of Wittgenstein's observations in his last writing On Certainty, on what G.E. Moore had regarded as certainties of 'common sense.' They are certainties, Wittgenstein argues, in the sense that they are like hinges on which all our every day presuppositions turn. They perform a logical role not unlike that of the theological assertion 'it is written.' Such a proposition, Wittgenstein explains, 'gives our way of looking at things...their form...'" (P.74)

"They articulate 'the scaffolding of our thoughts'." (P 392)

"Within certain communities they have become virtually unquestioned or even unquestionable axioms; they function 'as a foundation for research and action,' but are often simply 'isolated from doubt, though not according to any explicit rule.' Wittgenstein seems to suggest that in any culture, including our own, 'all enquiry...is set so as to exempt certain propositions from doubt...They lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry.' In due course, an axiom may become 'fossilized.' It is removed from the traffic. It is so to speak shunted onto an unused siding.' But it does not thereby lose its significance; rather, its significance has changed into that of a grammatical proposition. 'Now it gives our way of looking at things, and our researches, their form. Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our thoughts.'" (P392-393)

"Thus, as in the case of ordinary grammatical statements, if someone challenges an unshakable 'hinge' proposition from within the community or culture in question. 'I would not know what such a person would still allow to be counted as evidence and what not.' 'What counts as a test?' The decisive point is that 'our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings.'" (P. 393)

"Wittgenstein remarks that one thinks one is looking at the nature of something, but 'one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.' It is in this context, and in this sense, that he observes, 'The problems are solved not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.'" (P. 404)

"The picture and the grammar which it suggests 'commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter.' It is only by breaking the spell of a misleading picture that Wittgenstein can 'show the fly the way out of the bottle.'" (P. 404)

"More recently, special attention has been given to the far-reaching role of paradigms in the sciences, especially by Thomas S. Kuhn. Kuhn argues, for example, that the men who called Copernicus mad because he claimed that the earth moved were not 'just wrong.' The point was that 'part of what they mean by 'earth' was fixed position.' If 'earth' was a pardigm-case of fixity, Copernicus seemed to be making a self-contradictory claim. Only by changing their way of looking at things, and substituting a new paradigm, could the way be opened for an acceptance of his claims." (P. 405)

Our opponent can seem to be making a simple grammatical error, a basic blunder of logic, because our picture of reality and our language used to describe it already settles the case. I cannot even understand someone who disagrees with such a basic conception of the facts. He must be a simpleton!

Philosophy can help us become more adept at "breaking the spell" of these underlying conceptual structures, or at the very least can help us to bring them into the light.