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Criteria, Perception, and Other Minds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
In the first section of this paper I will look briefly at one of the reasons why criteria do not provide a quick solution to the problem of other minds. I will then develop a more illuminating account (for epistemological purposes) of the relationship between the behavior and minds of others. In the final section I will attempt to supply what needs to be added to any account of this relationship to solve the epistemological problem.
By the “problem of other minds” I mean the skeptical questions as to how and whether we know that others are having certain thoughts, experiencing certain feelings or emotions, in one or another mental state, and so on. Suppose that:-
A baseball player has just been called out on strikes. The game is the most important one of the year for the team and the player's performance will have a direct bearing on the outcome of his contract negotiations for the following year.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1976
Footnotes
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I am grateful to the editors of The Canadian Journal of Philosophy for criticism and encouragement.
References
1 The “argument from analogy” in some more or less sophisticated form. See Plantinga, A. God and Other Minds (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1967), pp.187–244Google Scholar, for a recent discussion and defense of this inference. Since much of the strength of the inference seems to depend on its being the best we can do, and since I hope to show that we can do better, I will not go into it here.
2 This is often accompanied by an argument purporting to show that such analogical inference is either useless or impossible. For examples of appeal to “criteria” in response to the skeptic, see Malcolm, N. “Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations” in Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 113–114Google Scholar; and Albritton, R. “On Wittgenstein's Use of the Term ‘Criterion’,” journal of Philosophy, 56 (1959), pp. 854–856CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I do not mean to attribute such a position to Wittgenstein, who, I think, was sensitive enough to the force of the skeptic's position to realize that “criteria” would not settle his doubts.
3 Austin, J. “Other Minds” in Philosophical Papers, ed. Urmson, J. and Warnock, G. (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1961), pp. 76–77Google Scholar; Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI) tr. Anscombe, G.E.M. (New York: Macmillan, 1953)Google Scholar, para. 244 and para. 245.
4 Wittgenstein, L. The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 57Google Scholar.
5 I think this point can be made even granting the case against “private languages” and in spite of the related “transcendental arguments” against the skeptic. But this cannot be pursued here.
6 The volume of literature on these issues has already reached incredible proportions. The extended version of the Albritton paper cited above in Wittgenstein, ed. Pitcher, G. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar seems still to be about the best that can be done on the first question. Canfield, J. “Criteria and Rules of language,” Philosophical Review, 83 (1974), pp. 70–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, catalogs a number of current views on this issue. On the second question see especially Rorty, R. “Criteria and Necessity,” Nous, 7 (1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 I am indebted to Thompson Clarke for the following analysis of perceptual concepts. See his “Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects” in Philosophy in America, ed. Black, M. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1965)Google Scholar.
8 The model here is obviously visual, but an analogous case can be made for the sense of touch and, with great difficulty and certain reservations, for the other senses as well.
9 Moore, G. Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953), pp. 33–34Google Scholar; Broad, C. The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925), pp. 148–149Google Scholar.
10 Chisholm, R. Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1957), pp. 155–156Google Scholar; lean, M. Sense Perception and Matter (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), p. 68Google Scholar.
11 Or, rather, if it is at issue it becomes so in virtue of the object's “having parts” in the “conceptual” sense ߝ that is, it is at issue only secondarily.
12 This distinction between the extensional and intensional uses of “seeing” may be marked in ordinary language by the grammatical distinction between “seeing” and “seeing that” ߝ for an analysis of this distinction, see Dretske, F. Seeing and Knowing (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969)Google Scholar.
13 See Clarke, T. “The legacy of Skepticism,” journal of Philosophy, 64, 1972Google Scholar, for an analogous response to skeptical doubts which focus on dreams, hallucinations and illusions.
14 PI, para. 303. It is in the face of such doubts that Wittgenstein suggests we simply “shut our eyes.” PI, para. 224. And it is apropos of such doubts (as well as those of Version III below) that he says that imagining a doubt is not enough to make a normal person doubt in such a situation. PI, para. 84.
15 Admittedly, this is no more than a reading of our intuitive response at this point. The rationale behind this response will emerge when we examine Version Ill and assimilate this version to it.
16 Perhaps this is the import of Wittgenstein's remarks to the effect that our understanding of the context or situation is not related to the certainty of our knowledge claims in the way that a presupposition is ordinarily related to the certainty of conclusions which depend upon its truth. PI, pp. 179–180.
17 In addition, the standard Cartesian arsenal contains a number of counterpossibilities which claim to preclude such checking.
18 Analogously, some of the findings of our earlier perceptual investigation have been used to separate ordinary “seeing” from the philosopher's “seeing” (i.e. “seeing every bit of”). Such a separation is as illegitimate and unilluminating as is the suggested separation of senses of “knowing.”
19 This can also be said of the doubts of Version I. It is the lack of concrete motivation, not the apparent lack of content, which accounts for our intuitive reaction to the skeptic's suggestion.