Certainty

Is it that Wittgenstein wants to eliminate talk of certainty as being focused on some metaphysical fact or object? In Kenny's chapter Scepticism and Certainty Wittgenstein seems to dismiss the idea that our being certain about something is based on anything other than our unflinching, undoubting belief in such a thing or state of affairs.

For Wittgenstein, our certainty comes about through experience:

This system is something that a human being acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say 'learns:' After he has seen this and this and heard that and that; he is not in a position to doubt whether...(244).

With his final comment in this section we see that Wittgenstein indeed does want to eliminate talk of certainty as some complex concept. Wittgenstein insists, as he does with other concepts such as the inner/outer and necessity, that certainty is nothing more than part of a language game. Our certainty is nothing more than what we've learned from experience, and what our experience has taught us couldn't possibly be any other way:

They [people] have always learnt from experience; and we can see from their actions that they believe certain things definitely, whether they express this belief or not. By this I naturally do not want to say that men should behave like this, but only that they do behave like this.

And here we also see Wittgenstein's insistence on philosophy's task to be one of describing rather than explaining. Philosophers have been asking too many questions about what certainty is, how anyone can actually have certainty, when all it is, according to Wittgenstein, is the way we use it: certainty is just what we have no reason to doubt, and can think of no reason to doubt. To solve philosophical problems, we need to stop looking for the complex sorts of solutions philosophers have been worrying about and just look around us at the real world.