10 - Epistemic Privacy of Experience

Summary

Epistemic Privacy

You will often have heard someone on the radio say ‘Of course, it is impossible really to know what other people feel’. Neuroscientists, such as Colin Blakemore, observe that ‘Although I assume that other human beings think in much the same way as I do, I have no direct evidence about their conscious minds.’ Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate, wrote ‘Strictly speaking, each individual is certain only that he himself is conscious’ and cannot be completely certain about the consciousness of others. Benjamin Libet, another renowned neuroscientist, wrote: ‘Conscious experience, as an awareness of some thing or some event, is directly accessible only to the individual having that experience, not to an external observer.’ If you examine legal casebooks, you will find judges making remarks such as: ‘Neither you nor I can ever look into the mind of the accused person and say, with positive certainty, what his intention was at any particular time’ (R. v. Charlson [1955] I All E. R. 859, at 861). This very common conception, which I have called ‘epistemic privacy of experience’, is the doctrine that only I really know that I am having a given experience. Others can at best surmise but cannot really know that I am or cannot know it with the certainty with which I know it.

The doctrine of the epistemic privacy of experience is one of the legs of the three-legged stool of the idea of a private language – the others being private ownership of experience, which we discussed in the last lecture, and private ostensive definition, which I shall discuss in the next lecture. Today I will examine the widespread idea of epistemic privacy.

Wittgenstein introduces the theme in this passage:

In what sense are my sensations private? – Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. – In one way this is false, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word ‘know’ as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know if I’m in pain. – Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I’m in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain?