Knowledge Of Other Minds Research Articles

The point of view of shared agency

ABSTRACTThis paper introduces the special issue 'The point of view of shared agency', a collection of papers that develops, and critically assesses, a striking development in recent philosophy of mind, epistemology, and developmental psychology, that is, the fundamental reappraisal of the time-honoured distinction between a ‘first-person' and a ‘third-person perspective' on our mental lives. In recent years, the nature of the ‘second-person standpoint' has become a major focus of work across a range of disciplines. More recently, the idea of ‘first-person plural knowledge', has received some attention, for example in considering knowledge of what ‘we are doing’ when we are doing things together. This collection explores collective agency, self-knowledge, and knowledge of other minds, from this plural and relational point of view.

Natalie Duddington and perceptual knowledge of other minds

Natalie Duddington and perceptual knowledge of other minds

Xii—Knowing and Acknowledging Others

Abstract It is possible to tease out two questions in connection with the epistemological problem of other minds: (i) How do I know what others think and feel? and (ii) How do I know that others think and feel? Fred Dretske offers a perceptual account of our knowledge of other minds that yields an answer to (i) but not (ii). Quassim Cassam uses Dretske’s perceptual account to show how we can answer both (i) and (ii). In this paper I show how we can use Dretske’s work to understand some work by Stanley Cavell. I suggest that, where Dretske claims that we cannot answer (ii), Cavell holds that (ii) is a question that reflects a misunderstanding of our relations to others. In the place of asking how I can know that others think and feel, Cavell holds that I must acknowledge the other. And at the heart of this acknowledgment is an acceptance of others as separate from me. I must acknowledge the other as an other to me.

On being a lonely brain‐in‐a‐vat: Structuralism, solipsism, and the threat from external world skepticism

AbstractDavid Chalmers has recently developed a novel strategy of refuting external world skepticism, one he dubs the structuralist solution. In this paper, I make three primary claims: First, structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, even if it is combined with a functionalist approach to the metaphysics of minds. Second, because structuralism does not vindicate knowledge of other minds, the structuralist solution vindicates far less worldly knowledge than we would hope for from a solution to skepticism. For, solipsism threatens surprisingly vast swathes of worldly knowledge across multiple domains, including at least some knowledge about: political affairs, religious practices, artistic movements, historical events, and cultural trends. Third, the significance of these results exceeds their implications for the structuralist solution; these results suggest that no solution to external world skepticism which does not also solve the problem of other minds will ultimately yield the kind of solution we might have hoped for. Relatedly, these results suggest that the problem of external world skepticism should perhaps be construed as two different problems, since the problem might turn out to require two substantively different solutions, one for knowledge of the kind that is not dependent on other minds and one for knowledge that is.

The Sceptic, The Outsider, and Other Minds

The usual way with scepticism is to formulate a problem in connection with the external world and then apply this to other minds. Drawing on work by Stanley Cavell and Richard Moran, I argue that the sceptic misses an important difference in our concepts of mind and of body, and that this is reflected in the sceptic’s formulation of a problem regarding other minds. I suggest that an understanding of this important conceptual difference is also missing from the work of those who attempt to reply to (dismiss, or ignore) the sceptic. In this connection I discuss both inferential and perceptual accounts of our knowledge of other minds. I identify an error in these accounts that may be thought to arise from a lack of understanding of the important conceptual difference here, and then develop an understanding of this error that draws on the work of Edith Stein and Stanley Cavell.

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Other minds, other people, and human opacity

This paper explains the absence of the problem of other minds in ancient philosophy and links its rise in early modern philosophy with the distinction between primary and secondary qualities and the consequent veil of ideas. The futile struggles of early modern philosophers with the problems is delineated. So too are the incoherent theories of modern neuroscientists and psychologists. The sources of the manifold confusions are pinned down to use and misuse of the concept of mind, to misunderstandings about the nature of the human ability to say how things are subjectively with oneself, to misconstruals of the nature of introspection and self-knowledge, and to the misguided picture of the “inner” and the “outer”. Philosophical misunderstandings about knowledge of other minds has masked the genuine limitations on our knowledge and understanding of our fellow human beings. Some of these rest on ignorance, others on the constitutional indeterminacy of the mental.

Josiah Royce: A Neglected Figure and a Valuable Resource in Mining the Pragmatism/Phenomenology Interactions for Current Philosophical Inquiry

In asking to what extent the interaction between pragmatism and phenomenology offers a valuable resource for re-imaging the limits and potentialities of philosophical inquiry, one needs to acknowledge, first, that pragmatist philosophers, beginning with Josiah Royce, actively contributed to the re-elaboration of the issues and strategies of phenomenology in the American context. Secondly, it will be argued that the philosophies of the classical pragmatists, Peirce, Royce, James, and Dewey, contain important resources for creating a new understanding of the human self and of the role of philosophy. We will discuss contributing elements from each of the Classical Pragmatists but focus on the neglected contributions of Josiah Royce. We argue that Royce posits important theses that are valuable to our inquiry: his view of self as “expressive,” i.e. through facial and bodily gestures, through cooperative activities such as art, language, custom, religion, understood via a study of the “expressive signs of mental life”; his idea of science as a thoroughly human enterprise; his belief that habits are common to both physical and mental phenomena; his views on knowledge of other minds and how two minds can know the same thing; and his belief in the social grounding of physical knowledge.

Knowing Other Minds: A Scorekeeping Model

The prepositional ‘in’ and possessive pronouns, e.g., ‘my’ and ‘mine,’ in the context of attributions of mental states, such as “in my mind” or “in your mind,” threaten to confuse attempts to account for knowledge of other minds. This paper distinguishes proper from improper uses of such expressions. I will argue that proper use of the prepositional ‘in’ and possessive pronouns in the context of mental state attributions presupposes capacities to properly track and attribute what are really, in a sense to be specified, intersubjectively articulated and inferentially interrelated normative statuses. What we call “mental states” or “minds,” in as far as primarily cognitive states such as beliefs are concerned, are intersubjectively constituted. As opposed to being inner and private, something we must learn to intersubjectively discover, minds and mental states are intersubjectively articulated and we learn to attribute them as inner and private. A scorekeeping-model is used to illustrate how the privacy of mind presupposes intersubjectivity. Using that model, I argue that the traditional problem of knowing other minds can be re-framed as a problem of learning how to pursue intersubjective practices of acknowledging, attributing and undertaking mental states.

C.I. Lewis: Pragmatist or Reductionist?

ABSTRACT Despite its substantial influence, there is surprisingly little agreement about how to read C.I. Lewis’s Mind and the World Order. Lewis has historically been read as a reductionist attempting to ground knowledge in qualia, but more recently it has become fashionable to read Lewis as a pragmatist engaged in a non-reductive, transcendental project. In this essay, I argue that while Lewis does have pragmatist leanings, the way he defines the fundamental categories of “the given,” “meaning,” and “concepts” ultimately commits him to a narrow reductionism. This is because he regards philosophy as an individualistic practice whose categories are verifiable only in introspection. I show how this commits Lewis to reductionism by focusing on his trouble grounding ethics and knowledge of other minds. The upshot is that while Lewis often leans towards pragmatism, his metaphysical commitments force him towards reductionism.

Realisms Interlinked: Objects, Subjects, and Other Subjects, by Arindam Chakrabarti

Realisms Interlinked is a sublime work. It reanimates theoretical philosophy with a distinctive synthesis of ideas and methods drawn from the common-sense metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language of classical India (mainly via the Nyāya school) and twentieth-century analytic philosophy (mainly via Strawson). In pursuing this agenda, the book lights up a new possible future for the study of world and mind, rooted in a borderless history of philosophy that should hopefully be better known among coming generations of analytic philosophers. Partly for this reason, it provides a refreshing contrast to other recent metaphysical and meta-metaphysical atlases like Sider (2011), Chalmers (2012), Thomasson (2014), Hofweber (2016), and Bennett (2017). It deserves to be read alongside these works; while Chakrabarti doesn’t discuss them and they don’t discuss him, a conversation between the traditions would, I’ll suggest, prove illuminating. Before turning to a discussion of some key ideas in this wide-ranging book, let’s consider its overall shape. Although Chakrabarti is a realist, the primary goal of the book is to defend certain realism-links, which he first explored in his 1992 ‘I Touch What I Saw’ (which reappears as the first chapter). These links are neutral on the status of realism, serving instead to constrain one’s overall set of commitments, leading to consistent realism or anti-realism. Hence the book could have been given the clunkier title ‘(Anti-)Realisms Interlinked’. But while that alternative title would have better conveyed the primary goal, it would have failed to signpost the aims of many chapters, which are often friendlier to realism, and consistently opposed to subjective idealism. For besides defending metaphysical linking theses in chapters 7, 16, and 24, the book also supports key tenets of Naiyāyika and Strawsonian epistemology, and critically discusses non-realist classical Indian schools (especially Buddhism and Advaita Vedānta) and anti-realist British philosophers (especially Dummett). This current in the book includes chapters defending the outer-sense perceivability of properties (ch. 3) and the inner-sense perceivability of self and mental states (chs. 12-14), a chapter opposing dream-based arguments for idealism (ch. 8), chapters defending testimony as a basic source of knowledge (ch. 19) and non-inferential knowledge of other minds (ch. 17), a chapter containing an approving discussion of ‘Idealist Refutations of Idealism’ (ch. 6), and a chapter opposing Dummettian semantic claims from the case of our understanding of future-tense sentences (ch. 23). The book also features chapters friendly to Nyāya’s more surprising realist commitments, including realism about absences (ch. 25).

Scepticism About Other Minds: Propositional and Objectual

AbstractIn this paper, I distinguish between two kinds of knowledge of other minds: apropositionalkind, whereby one may say, for example, that “We can seethat he is in pain,” and anobjectual(object‐related) kind which seems to be presupposed by knowledge claims about, for example,his present feeling of pain. I will suggest that two sceptical problems arise in connection with these two kinds of knowledge, respectively. The burden of my argument will be to show that while scepticism about propositional knowledge may be amenable to a satisfactory solution, the only route to take with scepticism about objectual knowledge is dissolution.

Making sense of the subjective experience of others

In this article, we address some conceptual issues that are logically prior to the constitution of any psychopathology. We explore ontological and epistemological aspects of subjective experience, rejecting both Cartesianism and behaviorism, and favoring the Wittgensteinian notion of criterial support instead. Then, we discuss the disanalogy between knowledge of other minds and our knowledge of anything else. Based on the arguments by Eilan’s that the “communication claim” should replace the “observation claim,” we defend that there is a kind of knowledge that is irreducibly founded on intersubjectivity (that is, knowledge of persons is knowledge for two) and point out to implications it may have for psychopathology.

La Perspectiva de Segunda Persona de la Atribución de Estados Mentales: Una Revisión Sistemática de su Estado Actual de Desarrollo

In psychology and philosophy of mind, the problem of knowledge of other minds is a field of rich disputes. Running counter to the perspectives of first- and third-person mental attribution, which assume that minds are opaque and that access to them is inferential, the second-person perspective postulates the existence of a non-representational way of knowing other minds, which is presumed to emerge within early communicative exchanges in the form of natural, basic, and direct emotional involvement. In this systematic review article, 57 philosophy or psychology manuscripts were selected with the aim of analyzing and comparing them. This study makes it possible to assess: (a) the current status of the second person perspective, (b) its main findings in developmental psychology and psychopathology, (c) the methodological discussions that stem from its assumption, and (d) a set of internal and external criticisms and questions formulated with respect to it. It is concluded that the second person perspective has a heuristic value and would be remarkably enriched if it carefully addressed the criticisms leveled against it.

RADICAL ENACTIVISM AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE

ABSTRACT I propose a middle-ground between a perceptual model of self-knowledge, according to which the objects of self-awareness (one's beliefs, desires, intentions and so on) are accessed through some kind of causal mechanism, and a rationalist model, according to which self-knowledge is constituted by one's rational agency. Through an analogy with the role of the exercises of sensorimotor abilities in rationally grounded perceptual knowledge, self-knowledge is construed as an exercise of action-oriented and action-orienting abilities. This view satisfies the privileged access condition usually associated with self-knowledge without entailing an insurmountable gap between self- knowledge and knowledge of other minds.

Overthinking and Other Minds: The Analysis Paralysis

Although many cases of knowledge require careful, conscious deliberation, knowledge of other minds is different, for it requires in some sense that we not think too much about it. The primary way that we come to know what others are thinking is by interacting with them, and the interactive context requires real-time engagement such that conscious intellectual deliberation is disruptive in that it disturbs the flow of the interaction. Understanding that part of what we know when we know others comes from nonpropositional, noncognitive know-how in a joint context can help elucidate the common wisdom behind the claims about how we should not overthink our interactions with other people.

The Epistemological Problem of Other Minds and the Knowledge Asymmetry

AbstractThe traditional epistemological problem of other minds seeks to answer the following question: how can we know someone else's mental states? The problem is often taken to be generated by a fundamental asymmetry in the means of knowledge. In my own case, I can know directly what I think and feel. This sort of self‐knowledge is epistemically direct in the sense of being non‐inferential and non‐observational. My knowledge of other minds, however, is thought to lack these epistemic features. So what is the basic source of my knowledge of other minds if I know my mind in such a way that I cannot know the minds of others? The aim of this paper is to clarify and assess the pivotal role that the asymmetry in respect of knowledge plays within a broadly inferentialist approach to the epistemological problem of other minds. The received dogma has always been to endorse the asymmetry for conceptual reasons and to insist that the idea of knowing someone else's mental life in the same way as one knows one's own mind is a complete non‐starter. Against this, I aim to show that it is at best a contingent matter that creatures such as us cannot know other minds just as we know a good deal of our own minds and also that the idea of having someone else's mind in one's own introspective reach is not obviously self‐contradictory. So the dogma needs to be revisited. As a result, the dialectical position of those inferentialists who believe that we know about someone else's mentality in virtue of an analogical inference will be reinforced.

Seeing the Invisible: How to Perceive, Imagine, and Infer the Minds of Others

The psychology and phenomenology of our knowledge of other minds is not well captured either by describing it simply as perception, nor by describing it simply as inference. A better description, I argue, is that our knowledge of other minds involves both through ‘perceptual co-presentation’, in which we experience objects as having aspects that are not revealed. This allows us to say that we perceive other minds, but perceive them as private, i.e. imperceptible, just as we routinely perceive aspects of physical objects as unperceived. I discuss existing versions of this idea, particularly Joel Smith’s, on which it is taken to imply that our knowledge of other minds is, in these cases, perceptual and not inferential. Against this, I argue that perceptual co-presentation in general, and mind-perception in particular, yields knowledge that is simultaneously both perceptual and inferential.

Epistemic Elitism and Other Minds

Experiences justify beliefs about our environment. Sometimes the justification is immediate: seeing a red light immediately justifies believing there is a red light. Other times the justification is mediate: seeing a red light justifies believing one should brake in a way that is mediated by background knowledge of traffic signals. How does this distinction map onto the distinction between what is and what isn't part of the content of experience? Epistemic egalitarians think that experiences immediately justify whatever is part of their content. Epistemic elitists deny this and think that there is some further constraint the contents of experience must satisfy to be immediately justified. Here I defend epistemic elitism, propose a phenomenological account of what the further constraint is, and explore the resulting view's consequences for our knowledge of other minds, and in particular for perceptual theories of this knowledge.

“If Some People Looked Like Elephants and Others Like Cats”: Wittgenstein on Understanding Others and Forms of Life

This essay introduces a tension between the public Wittgenstein’s optimism about knowledge of other minds and the private Wittgenstein’s pessimism about understanding others. There are three related reasons which render the tension unproblematic. First, the barriers he sought to destroy were metaphysical ones, whereas those he struggled to overcome were psychological. Second, Wittgenstein’s official view is chiefly about knowledge while the unofficial one is about understanding. Last, Wittgenstein’s official remarks on understanding themselves fall into two distinct categories that don’t match the focus of his unofficial ones. One is comprised of those remarks in the Investigations that challenge the thought that understanding is an inner mental process. The other consists primarily of those passages in PPF and On Certainty concerned with the difficulty of understanding others without immersing oneself into their form of life. In its unofficial counterpart, Wittgenstein focuses on individuals, rather than collectives. The official and the unofficial sets of remarks are united in assuming a distinction between understanding a person and understanding the meaning of their words. If to understand a language is to understand a form of life, then to understand a person is to understand a whole life.