Social minds

European Journal of Philosophy, 2017

The 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.

This paper addresses the question whether introspection plus externalism about mental content warrant an a priori refutation of external-world skepticism and ontological solipsism. The suggestion is that if thought content is partly determined by affairs in the environment and if we can have non-empirical knowledge of our current thought contents, we can, just by reflection, know about the world around us – we can know that our environment is populated with content-determining entities. After examining this type of transcendental argument and discussing various objections found in the literature, I argue that the notion of privileged self-knowledge underlying this argument presupposes that we can learn, via introspection, that our so-called thoughts are propositional attitudes rather than contentless states. If, however, externalism is correct and thought content consists in the systematic dependency of internal states on relational properties, we cannot know non-empirically whether or not we have propositional attitudes. Self-knowledge (a propos-itional attitude) is consistent with us lacking the ability to rule out, via introspection, the possibility that we don't have any propositional attitudes. Self-knowledge provides us with knowledge of what is in our minds, but not that we have minds. Hence, the combination of externalism with the doctrine of privileged self-knowledge does not allow for an a priori refutation of skepticism and is therefore unproblematic.

Erkenntnis, 2003

Edmund Husserl's intersubjectivity and Merleau-Ponty's corporeity represent the traditional phenomenological solutions to verifying perceptions, but somehow solipsistic. However, by claiming that there are differences to be marked between veridical perceptions, illusions and hallucinations, Disjunctivism slashes the veil of perception, and thus makes other minds accessible. In this thesis we first analyze in what sense can Disjunctivism exceed the traditional phenomenology paradigm; then explain why Epistemological Disjunctivism is more convincing than a Metaphysical one; finally predict the mergence between phenomenology and philosophy of mind, with the aid of cognitive science to provide warrants for experience.

Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2017

It is a simple truth about the ways in which we speak about others that we can see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling. But it is tempting to think that there is a deeper sense in which we cannot really see or hear or feel these things at all. Rather, what is involved must be a matter of inference or interpretation, for instance. In these remarks, I argue against a variety of ways in which that thought, the thought that we cannot really see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling, might be developed.

Theoria, 2008

The notion of direct knowledge is central to John McDowell's philosophy. It is of importance not just for his account of empirical knowledge but also for his account of rule-following, singular thought, the past, ethics, and other minds. The reason McDowell appeals to the notion of direct knowledge is that he wishes to oppose certain inferential models that he thinks are pernicious and lead to skepticism. 1 For instance, in Mind and World he argues that unless we grant that there is a direct point of contact between our empirical judgments and the world, we will end up with a holism that threatens to undermine not only empirical knowledge, but also the very idea of empirical content. 2 McDowell's reliance on the notion of direct knowledge poses a certain challenge. The problem is to present an account of direct knowledge which is both epistemologically significant (for example, it should allow for an interesting distinction between knowledge that is direct and knowledge which is not) and, at the same time, makes it true that the kinds of knowledge he wants to construe as direct come out as such. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether McDowell can meet this challenge in the case of other minds. Is there a construal of direct knowledge which is both non-trivial and yet makes it true that knowledge of other minds is direct? The claim that knowledge of the external world is direct is relatively familiar, but the suggestion that we can know the mental states of others directly is less so and few people have been convinced by it. 3 Knowledge of other minds seems to be a prime example of inferential knowledge. However, McDowell argues that construing knowledge of other minds as indirect, inferential, leads to skepticism and fails to give a plausible account of our use of mental concepts. We must, he suggests, make a radical break with the traditional picture of the mind as 'inner' and hidden behind the 'outer', mere behaviour, and this requires saying that the fact that another person is in a certain mental state is open to direct 1 It should be noted that McDowell's goal is not so much to give a reply to the skeptic as to suggest a picture which makes the skeptical challenge lose its urgency. In Mind and World he says: "The aim here is not to answer skeptical questions, but to begin to see how it might be intellectually respectable to ignore them. "(1994, 113) 2 McDowell 1994. 3 For a critical discussion of McDowell on other minds see for instance Bilgrami 1992, Peacocke 1984, and Robinson 1991. observation: "On a suitable occasion, the circumstance that someone else is in some 'inner' state can itself be an object of one's experience." 4 My question, therefore, is whether McDowell is right to suggest that there is an interesting sense in which knowledge of other minds is direct. When people speak of direct knowledge, they typically have observational knowledge in mind, but this need not be so. For instance, if by 'direct' one simply means non-inferential it might also be argued that our knowledge of logical and mathematical axioms is direct, or that our knowledge of our own minds is direct. My concern here, however, will be with observational knowledge, since this is McDowell's main concern and it is the notion of directness that is relevant in the case of other minds. 5 My strategy is the following. I start, in sections 1 and 2, by trying my best to help McDowell meet the challenge. I suggest a construal of McDowell's account of direct or observational knowledge, based on his discussion in Mind and World, which does have epistemological significance and would, arguably, support the conclusion that knowledge of other minds is direct. Indeed, I suggest that this is the only way of making McDowell's claim that knowledge of other minds is direct plausible. In section 3 I turn to a critical examination

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.