III—Other Minds and Embodiment

Abstract

Discussion of the problem of other minds begins with the familiar observation that I cannot feel another's pain. This assertion can be regarded as a device or gesture that serves to highlight the extraordinary character of the possibility that one subject should have the capacity to envisage the existence of another subject distinct from itself. The difficulty is brought out forcibly when the other is conceived, in broadly Cartesian terms, as having an inner or subjective dimension that constitutes a perspective on the world.1 How can one inner-endowed subject, for whom everything that is not itself is necessarily and blindingly outer, get so much as the idea of another inner? How could it grasp the existence of such a thing without, self-defeatingly, identifying itself with it? Consciousness of other minds would seem to involve a semimiraculous transcendence of perspective that only just falls short of contradiction, and in any case leads immediately to skepticism: if a metaphysical chasm separates self from other, then claims about other minds are problematic in a way that other ordinary knowledge claims about the external world are not.2 The Cartesian formulation of the problem of other minds captures something immediately and intuitively compelling about the