How To Get To Know One’s Own Mind: Some Simple Ways

Abstract

One’s own mind should be contrasted, one would think, with others’ minds, just as one’s own body contrasts with other people’s bodies. But in our philosophical tradition we have this odd phrase ‘other minds,’ which recurs in discussions of our access to facts about minds. In John Stuart Mill’s presentation¹ of the infamous argument from analogy (although he does not characterize the argument as one employing analogy), we find ‘other sentient creatures,’ and ‘other human beings,’ not ‘other minds’. F. H. Bradley has ‘other selves’ and ‘foreign selves,’ and Bertrand Russell has ‘other people’s minds.’ ‘Other minds’ is found in A. J. Ayer, C. I. Lewis, C. D. Broad, John Wisdom, J.L. Austin, Alvin Plantinga, and a host of others.² My guess is that ‘other minds,’ like Bradley’s ‘other selves’ is a secularization of George Berkeley’s phrase ‘other spirits,’ used when he presents what, as far as I know, is the first version of the infamous argument. He is mainly concerned to present a vindication of that really other super-spirit, the Berkeleyan God, but along the way grants that we know not just ourselves as active spirits, making and unmaking ideas at our pleasure, but, less immediately, ‘other spirits’ who are ‘human agents’. We know of them, Berkeley says ‘by their operations, or the ideas of them, excited in us. I perceive several motions, changes, and combinations of ideas that inform me there are certain particular agents, like myself, which accompany them and concur in their production.’³ Presumably for Berkeley, as before him for Descartes,⁴ speech is a very important case of such a recognizably spirit-expressing operation, but he would have problems distinguishing the easily intelligible speech of his fellow-Britishers from the less easily decoded language of the ‘author of nature,’ seen or heard as much in ideas which get interpreted as human speech or other expressive human behavior as those which get interpreted as animal, vegetable or mineral changes.