ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein does not say much about different kinds of hinge certainty; Duncan Pritchard has noted that some hinges are absolute whereas others are context-relative. This chapter argues that some things are absolute non-hinges, in the sense that they are constitutively unsuitable to serve as hinge certainties. Someone’s sexual fidelity is a case in point: the reason for this, it is suggested, is that the institutions that are presupposed to concepts like chastity and marriage come relatively late in human evolution and in particular in the development of the language-game, and so are essentially non-fundamental from a metaphysical point of view (however socially important they may be). This gives us a way of expressing Othello’s epistemological mistake: he treats as a hinge certainty something that is unsuitable for that role. Comparisons with other Shakespearean tragic heroes suggest themselves here, especially Hamlet, Lear, Timon, and Troilus. The case of Troilus is briefly considered, and it is contended that he makes a similar, but deeper, kind of mistake to Othello’s: Othello makes a mistake about Desdemona’s nature, whereas Troilus makes a mistake about human nature.
