The Problem of Other Minds

The philosophical problem of other minds goes like this.  I know that I have a mind, that is, feelings, sensations, thoughts and the like, in a very direct way. I am directly aware of what goes on in my own mind.  But how do I know that something like this goes on in other people?  

 

I am not directly aware of your thoughts and sensations. So how do I now that anything is going on in you, like what I know is going on in me, which I call “consciouisness” or “mind”.  And, just to be polite and assume you do have a mind, vice versa?

 

One thing is clear, this is not a practical problem.  No sane person doubts that others have minds.  

 

In fact our ability to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling, “mind-reading” as it’s sometimes called in cognitive science, is a deep-seated ability humans have, apparently wired in.

 

The problem isn’t whether we believe other people have minds. It is the basis for the belief. Is the belief rational? Is it really knowledge?

 

The traditional answer was formulated by J. S. Mill: the argument from analogy. You are a human like me, you behave a lot like me, you use language like me.  I have a mind; isn’t it rational to suppose that you have one too?

 

But it’s based on a pretty small sample, isn’t it?  One case. Imagine two hundred cars on the freeway. They all are very similar: four wheels, moving in response to the way the drivers steer, accelerate and brake. I notice that one has a box of Kleenex on the front seat.  So I infer the others do too.  Very weak inference.  

 

More promising is inference to the best explanation.  The box of kleenex I see in one car doesn’t explain anything interesting about it, or about the similarities we observe between in and the other cars.  But suppose we look under the hood and find an engine in the car.  We see that this explains why the car moves. Pretty good inference that the others have engines too. A much stronger inference, than one based merely on analogy.

 

That seems to be what we are doing with other minds.  I know my own mind explains a lot of my behavior, and also that it is affected by the external world, and that the way it causes me to behave is responsive to the information it picks up about the world.  Isn’t it overwhelmingly likely that other people work in basically the same way?

 

Still, suppose we grant that this ia a pretty good inference.  It isn’t the wort of inference that provides certainty.  After all, we might find that some cars have electric motors rather than gasoline engines.  We might find some of them were just rolling downhill, or being towed.  That wouldn’t be amazing. Our inference was probable, but not certain.  But we seem extremely confident that other people have minds, basically similar to ours. 

 

So perhaps something about the way we set up the problem is mistaken.  Philosophers as different as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Fred Dretske thought that this was so.  It’s one of these issues we’ll explore in the program.