Other Minds

Abstract

There is a passage in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations¹ in which he compares an answer that may be given to a philosophical question about someone else’s pain with an answer that may be given to a question about the meaning of ‘It is 5 o’clock on the sun’. Wittgenstein does not compare other answers that may be given to the two questions. And he does not compare the questions themselves in respect of what lies behind them — making them ones which we can, or cannot, easily ‘see through’ — or in respect of how they should be answered. Yet there is material in what he says elsewhere in the Investigations and in other of his later writings² for a manysided and, I think, useful development of the comparison. Anyway, that is what I shall attempt in this lecture.³