He left his initial notes at the home of Elizabeth Anscombe, who linked them by theme with later passages in Wittgenstein's personal notebooks and (with G. H. von Wright), compiled them into a German/English parallel text book published in 1969.

The genesis of On Certainty was Wittgenstein's "long interest" in two famous papers by G. E. Moore, his 1939 Proof of the External World and earlier Defence of Common Sense (1925).

Apparently at the instigation of his close friend Norman Malcolm in mid-1949, Wittgenstein began to draft his response on loose sheets, probably while staying in Vienna in late 1949 and early 1950.

He returned to the subject twice more before a fourth and final, highly energetic six week period immediately before his death, when more than half of On Certainty was written.

A week and a half earlier he had written a similar note before OC471: "Here there is still a big gap in my thinking.