Abstract
Doubts about the inner disposition of other people are seen in everyday life as a sign of arrogance or unremitting paranoia rather than as a serious attitude. Scepticism here seems academic, a pose and not a position. But recognition of the difference between a pose and a position still leaves a philosophical — and so theoretical — problem: what is our knowledge of other minds based on and in what way does it differ from knowledge of one’s own mind and physical reality? There is no reason to assume that this philosophical inquiry will help to ease contacts between men and women, therapists and clients, and people in general. Not that it will make contacts more difficult, although some people, after reading sceptical literature, may be more pessimistic about their ability to judge human character. Scepticism about our knowledge of other minds can take various forms: how can I know what you think or see, how can I know that you see what I see, or, worse, how can I know that you think at all, that you are a human being and not an automaton? In all these cases the sceptic is not so much concerned to show that our insight into human nature is false as to show that it is inadequate.
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Notes
James (1890, I, p. 197) appeals to this distinction when he warns against the ‘psychologists fallacy’, i.e. the assumption that an external observer has a grasp of a subject’s experiences that is superior to the subject’s own ‘direct acquaintance’ with that experience: ‘The mental state is aware of itself only from within; it grasps what we call its own content and nothing more. The psychologist, on the contrary, is aware of it from without…’ But Russell too appeals to the distinction between ‘introspection by acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge by description’. See Russell (1910–1911).
If any attention has been paid to this theme at all, it has mainly been on the basis of isolated aphorisms. See for instance Cavell (1979, pp. 431 ff.).
See RPP I, § 137–149; RPP II, § 586–737; LW, § 181–206, 224–271, 859–979.
Another manuscript from an earlier period which treats of the same problems is MS 123 (1940–1941).
For such reductionistic interpretations, see for instance Fodor (1967) and Fodor (1975, chapter 2).
Wittgenstein’s first explicit rejection of an introspective interpretation of first person utterances occurs in MS 113, pp. 102–105. Reference is usually made to Moore (1954, p. 12), but Moore’s notes give no datings and their content is only suggestive.
For a similar argument, see Don Locke (1968, pp. 46–47).
Variations of this remark can also be found in PI II xi, p. 224; PI, § 246; and LW, § 894, 963.
Austin (1964, p. 116) has a similar remark when he says: ‘… it does seem that philosophers, who are fond of invoking pretending, have exaggerated its scope and distorted its meaning.’
The concept of lying is also embedded in a language-game that is vertically related to ‘honest’ language-games, as can be seen from this remark: ‘To what extent can one say that the game of lying is based on the language-game without lying? Surely merely because we would not use the word lying for something that is not in a specific way an exception’ (MS 121, p. 29).
See Kripke (1981, p. 303, n. 21), who says that this slogan ‘sounds much too behaviouristic to me. I personally would like to think that anyone who does not think of me as conscious is wrong about the facts, not simply “unfortunate” or “evil”, or even “monstrous” or “inhuman”, in his “attitude” (Whatever that might mean).’ Had Kripke added ‘insane’ to this list, he would have shown more comprehension. The difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘certainty’ has escaped him completely. With his emphasis on the ‘facts’, Kripke wants to indicate that his idea that he and other people have an inner is fundamental. This fundamental character is not denied by Wittgenstein, but he does deny that it can be described in terms of ‘knowing’, for where ‘knowing’ is involved, there is also the possibility of falsification. But an ‘attitude toward an inner’ leaves room for neither disagreement nor agreement of opinion. In effect Wittgenstein thus indicates more correctly than Kripke in what way the ‘belief in an inner is so fundamental. The same statement has also given rise to religious interpretations. Translations — including the English ones — already take that direction by translating ‘seele’ as ‘soul’. The only correct translation is ‘inner’ or ‘psyche’, as appears from, among other things, the fact that Wittgenstein uses both terms interchangeably (‘a soul, something inner, is developing’ (LW, § 947)). Unbridled religious speculations are found in Dilman (1974). This article is illustrative of many others in which a deficient knowledge of Wittgenstein’s work is compensated by wide reading in another field. The author starts by quoting a few passages from Wittgenstein and fills the rest with digressions on authors with whom Wittgenstein supposedly has affinities. Wittgenstein is thus put in a tradition which runs as far as ‘from Plato through Kierkegaard to Simone Weil’ (Dilman, p. 191). Ignorance of the Nachlass takes its toll here too, witness the final sentence of the article: ‘Perhaps if he had lived longer he would have returned to them [i.e. the discussion about ‘seele’]. I do not know.’(p. 192) But we do know now: Wittgenstein was still to write extensively about ‘inner-outer’ and not in a religious sense, although he was not opposed to it (cf. RPP I, § 586).
Authors that have defended the argument by analogy are for instance Brentano (1971, I, p. 53) and Russell (1948, pp. 482–486).
This is an empirical objection also urged by Köhler: ‘… the whole theory seems to be an arbitrary construction, since no one explicitly draws such inferences by analogy in common life, though he may “understand” his fellow men to a considerable degree’ (1929, p. 182).
Köhler (1929) discusses the argument by analogy in chapter 7.
Hintikka (1986, pp. 273, 277) quotes this remark too and says that Wittgenstein also acknowledges basic physiological languages, but would have ‘preferred’ physiognomic language-games because he was a ‘closet Tolstoyan in his philosophy of language’ (p. 275). There are two objections to this: first, if Wittgenstein has been influenced here, it has not been by Tolstoy but by Köhler and Spengler. Spengler distinguishes between ‘Ausdruckssprache’ and ‘Mitteilungssprache’ (1923, pp. 693 ff.). The former is an ‘active transformation’ of physiognomical expression and cannot be learned, strictly speaking. However, it is the precondition for all manner of language learning. A similar view is found in Bühler (1934, p. 28), whom Wittgenstein knew very well (see Bartley, 1985, p. 128). Secondly, Wittgenstein did not simply ‘choose’; for if he could have chosen otherwise, this means he would have been able to describe a form of life which is completely different from ours. And that he could not do, on account of the ‘givenness’ of our form of life, which is not to say that our form of life could never change.
See Cavell (1979, p. 369) on the application of the concept of ‘aspect-blindness’ to the other minds problem.
See Hacker (1972, chapter 9) and Malcolm (1986, pp. 139–140).
See Culture and Value, p. 74.
On vagueness and determinacy of sense, see PI, § 75–87.
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Ter Hark, M. (1990). Other Minds: Third Person Statements. In: Beyond the Inner and the Outer. Synthese Library, vol 214. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2089-7_5
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