Rethinking other minds: Wittgenstein and Levinas on expression

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1994

McDowell motivates a disjunctive conception of experience in the context of other-minds skepticism, but his conception of other minds has been less frequently discussed. In this paper, I focus on McDowell's perceptual account of others that emphasizes the primitivity of others' bodily expressivity and his defense of a common-sense understanding of others. And I suggest that Husserl's subtle analysis of bodily expressivity not only bears fundamental similarities with McDowell's but also helps to demonstrate the sense in which McDowell's emphasis on bodily expressivity can remove some of the grounds for other minds skepticism. I argue that the other's behavioral manifestation is first and foremost perceived in a salient Gestalt and social perception is inherently infused with a constitutive propensity with which we normally take the other as human person in the first place. In this light, I show that Husserl's account can better elucidate human expressivity and its intrinsic features, thereby helping to remove some of the props of other-minds skepticism. As a result, I believe it proves fruitful to juxtapose McDowell's and Hus-serl's account of bodily expressivity, so as to alternate the Cartesian picture of other-minds that engenders skeptic anxiety and to secure a common-sense understanding of other people.

In opposition to mainstream theory of mind approaches, some contemporary perceptual accounts of social cognition do not consider the central question of social cognition to be the problem of access to other minds. These perceptual accounts draw heavily on phenomenological philosophy and propose that others' mental states are “directly” given in the perception of the others' expressive behavior. Furthermore, these accounts contend that phenomenological insights into the nature of social perception lead to the dissolution of the access problem. We argue, on the contrary, that the access problem is a genuine problem that must be addressed by any account of social cognition, perceptual or non-perceptual, because we cannot cast the access problem as a false problem without violating certain fundamental intuitions about other minds. We elaborate the fundamental intuitions as three constraints on any theory of social perception: the Immediacy constraint; the Transcendence constraint; and the Accessibility constraint. We conclude with an outline of an account of perceiving other minds that meets the three constraints.

McDowell motivates a disjunctive conception of experience in the context of other minds skepticism, but his conception of other minds has been less frequently discussed. In this paper, I focus on McDowell’s perceptual account of others that emphasizes the primitivity of others’ bodily expressivity and his defense of a common-sense understanding of others. And I suggest that Husserl’s subtle analysis of bodily expressivity not only bears fundamental similarities with McDowell’s but also helps to demonstrate the sense in which McDowell’s emphasis on bodily expressivity can remove some of the grounds for other minds skepticism. I argue that the other’s behavioral manifestation is first and foremost perceived in a salient Gestalt and social perception is inherently infused with a constitutive propensity with which we normally take the other as human person in the first place. In this light, I show that Husserl’s account can better elucidate human expressivity and its intrinsic features, thereby helping to remove some of the props of other-minds skepticism. As a result, I believe it proves fruitful to juxtapose McDowell’s and Husserl’s account of bodily expressivity, so as to alternate the Cartesian picture of other minds that engenders skeptic anxiety and to secure a common-sense understanding of other people.

Philosophical Psychology, 2014

In opposition to mainstream theory of mind approaches, some contemporary perceptual accounts of social cognition do not consider the central question of social cognition to be the problem of access to other minds. These perceptual accounts draw heavily on phenomenological philosophy and propose that others' mental states are "directly" given in the perception of the others' expressive behavior. Furthermore, these accounts contend that phenomenological insights into the nature of social perception lead to the dissolution of the access problem. We argue, on the contrary, that the access problem is a genuine problem that must be addressed by any account of social cognition, perceptual or nonperceptual, because we cannot cast the access problem as a false problem without violating certain fundamental intuitions about other minds. We elaborate the fundamental intuitions as three constraints on any theory of social perception: the Immediacy constraint; the Transcendence constraint; and the Accessibility constraint. We conclude with an outline of an account of perceiving other minds that meets the three constraints.

The main purpose of this paper is to deal with the problem of 'knowing other minds'. The problem of other minds is the question of how we can know that there are minds other than our own. It is a common feature of our life that the knowledge of other people's minds (if there is any such knowledge), is very different from our own mind. I can neither have any phenomenological experience of other people's mental states; nor know them through introspection. The reason for analyzing this problem is that it concerns any philosophical theory, as it raises a particular challenge-if minds and bodies are entirely independent, then how can I infer from seeing a body that there is a mind 'attached' to it? Also, other 'people'other bodies -could all be machines, programmed to behave as they do, but with no minds. This paper highlights Wittgenstein's theory of language as a tool to show that there is no epistemic problem about the knowledge of other minds and their identity either, because for Wittgenstein it is in fact a 'pseudo problem'.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2006

Humana.Mente, Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol 12 No 36 (2019): Beyond the Self: Crisis of Disembodied and Individualistic Paradigms , 2019

In this paper I will examine the embodied dimension of emotions, and of inner life more generally, according to Wittgenstein's anti-subjectivistic account of expression. First of all, I will explore Wittgenstein's critique of a Cartesian disembodied account of the inner life, and the related argument against the existence of a private language. Secondly, I will describe the constitution of inner life as the acquisition of embodied ways of expressing oneself and of responding to others within a shared context, against the background of an inherited weave of cultural expressive practices. Here, I will analyze Wittgenstein's embodied account of expression, the 'modified concept of sensing' and 'seeing' which is involved in seeing the emotions of others as their expressions, and consequently Wittgenstein's critique of an epistemological account concerning our 'knowledge' of others' minds. Finally, with reference to Cavell's and Mulhall's readings, I will reflect on the figure of the 'aspect-blind', one who 'just knows' the emotion of others but cannot acknowledge it, and accordingly is not able to see it as the embodied expression of the other's inner life. In this way, I wish to argue that Wittgenstein not only calls into question a disembodied account of the inner life from a theoretical point of view, but also shows the ethical consequences of a disembodied account of self through the figure of the aspect-blind.

This paper investigates the relation between pretence, social experience, and the knowledge of self and of other. Traditionally, sceptical arguments concerning both the existence and the knowledge of other minds have been developed on the basis of the remarks concerning the possibility of pretence, and particularly of deceptive pretence. Combining Wittgenstein’s approach to pretence, as it is particularly developed in Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, with a phenomenologically grounded conception of pretence and intersubjective experience, I aim at circumscribing the meaning of the question concerning our possible knowledge of ourselves and others. After a critical assessment of the implications of the sceptical arguments based on pretence, I argue that the concept of ‘knowledge’ underlying such sceptical challenges is misleading. Subsequently, I develop a phenomenological inquiry into the relation between experiencing and expressing, and show how the results of such an inquiry fruitfully complement Wittgenstein’s and Cavell’s observations about “knowledge” and ‘acknowledgement’. I finally return to pretence and its implications for social experience and understanding. I argue that the revised conception of knowledge of self and other developed in the previous sections allows us to dismiss the understanding of pretend actions and behaviour as something that undermines the possibility of social understanding. On the contrary, such a conception of knowledge of self and other brings to the fore the constitutive social nature of pretence.

Theory & Psychology, 2016

According to direct perception theory (DPT) people understand each other’s minds by way of perceiving each other’s behavioral engagements in the world. I argue that DPT admits of two interpretations. One interpretation is found in Searle’s social ontology. The other interpretation departs from an enactivist account of social cognition. Both can make sense of what it is to perceive other minds, but in two different ways. The first claims that people can directly perceive states of mind shared in a community. In contrast, the second interpretation allows for direct perception of particular individuals’ states of mind in the context of participation in social practices. The two interpretations are argued to be compatible. People can perceive communal states of mind in another’s responsiveness to action possibilities in social environments, not only the particular other’s states of mind.