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Alexander Bogdanov had ventured farther afield, establishing his 1908 imagined socialist utopia on Mars..^§MS0.2.9a But Wittgenstein (at last) was certain, about the moon at least..^§MS2.3.2a

However, certainty in one moment does not preclude possibility in another. On Certainty was published in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, then in the following three years, eleven other men.

Every certainty can be undercut by other possibility, and this in turn may presage a new certainty. And when a new certainty arrives, there may still be doubt that may yet undo certainty, or not.

Here comes another philosopher, James H. Fetzer, Distinguished McKnight University Professor Emeritus in the philosophy of science at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He is the author of many books, including a 1981 book, Scientific Knowledge: Causation, Explanation, and Corroboration, published in the Springer series, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science. Also, a co-edited 2016 book, And I Suppose We Didn’t Go to the Moon, Either? Says the blurb of the more recent publication, “this book demonstrates – with scientific argument and empirical proof – that Man did not go to the Moon, that Paul McCartney was replaced after his death in 1966 and that the official narrative of the Holocaust cannot be sustained.”²⁴³

Those crystal clear, 6 cm x 6 cm film images of the moon taken on the best cameras money could buy in 1969, Hasselblad 500 EL/Ms – these, you might think, would be sufficient to clinch this matter, or the live television footage. But Fetzer, and 6 percent of his fellow Americans according to a Gallup poll,²⁴⁴ can’t believe what they have seen. Fetzer combs over a selection of the approximately 5,000 images taken during the Apollo moon missions between 1969 and 1972 in search of evidence that they were faked – the way shadows are cast, anomalous footprints, flags flapping when they couldn’t have been.²⁴⁵ A Wikipedia page earnestly goes over these images, as if the faking were possible.²⁴⁶

Fetzer also directs his reader to evidence of how the television images were doctored, a video on YouTube where the people on the film set of the fake landing have not been edited out. The video links to moontruth.com, and when you take the link we are directed to an advertising click validator. A DNS lookup tells us the domain name is owned by an Australian company, Fabulous.com Pty Ltd, a domain name registrar, and this company is in turn owned by Dark Blue Sea Pty Ltd, and this in turn by Photon Pty Ltd, a graphic design services company.

To prove the moon fakery, it is the photographs and video footage rather than words to which the conspiracy theorists dedicate their efforts. These days, there is more truth in images than words. Not so many people would just believe “NASA says … ”

If 94 percent of Americans end up certain about the moon landings, why is this? How do we end up knowing in the kinds of common sense ways suggested by G.E. Moore and more or less agreed by Wittgenstein in his last days? It is by virtue of the ordinary, everyday, incontrovertible materiality of our forms of meaning, the general reliability of their multimodal transpositions (where the words must be true if there are all these pictures), and the sociability of sense that is common. Together, these mean that some things are as good as certain, provisionally at least.

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²⁴² H.G. Wells, 1901, The First Men in the Moon, London, UK: George Newnes.

²⁴³ https://books.google.com/books/about/And_I_Suppose_We_Didn_t_Go_to_the_Moon_E.html?id=CdBljwEACAAJ&source=kp_cover

²⁴⁴ http://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/landing-man-moon-publics-view.aspx

²⁴⁵ https://archive.org/details/youtube-Fx4dOViBqe0 Also: https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?4948-Fetzer-Burton-Moon-Landing-Debate-Finale#.WgmN5oZrwUw

²⁴⁶ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examination_of_Apollo_Moon_photographs

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 257–258. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Possibility §MS2.3.3