problem of other minds the question of what rational basis a person can have for the belief that other persons are similarly conscious and have minds. Every person, by virtue of being conscious, is aware of her own state of consciousness and thus knows she has a mind; but the mental states of others are not similarly apparent to her.
An influential attempt to solve this problem was made by philosophical behaviorists. According to Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949), a mind is not a ghost in the physical machine but (roughly speaking) an aggregate of dispositions to behave intelligently and to respond overtly to sensory stimulation. Since the behavior distinctive of these mentalistic dispositions is readily observable in other human beings, the so-called problem of other minds is easily solved: it arose from mere confusion about the concept of mind. Ryle’s opponents were generally willing to concede that such dispositions provide proof that another person has a ‘mind’ or is a sentient being, but they were not willing to admit that those dispositions provide proof that other people actually have feelings, thoughts, and sensory experiences. Their convictions on this last matter generated a revised version of the otherminds problem; it might be called the problem of other-person experiences. Early efforts to solve the problem of other minds can be viewed as attempts to solve the problem of other-person experiences. According to J. S. Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), one can defend one’s conviction that others have feelings and other subjective experiences by employing an argument from analogy. To develop that analogy one first attends to how one’s own experiences are related to overt or publicly observable phenomena. One might observe that one feels pain when pricked by a pin and that one responds to the pain by wincing and saying ‘ouch.’ The next step is to attend to the behavior and circumstances of others. Since other people are physically very similar to oneself, it is reasonable to conclude that if they are pricked by a pin and respond by wincing and saying ‘ouch,’ they too have felt pain. Analogous inferences involving other sorts of mental states and other sorts of behavior and circumstances add strong support, Mill said, to one’s belief in other-person experiences. Although arguments from analogy are generally conceded to provide rationally acceptable evidence for unobserved phenomena, the analogical argument for other-person experiences was vigorously attacked in the 1960s by philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953). Their central contention was that anyone employing the argument must assume that, solely from her own case, she knows what feelings and thoughts are. This assumption was refuted, they thought, by Wittgenstein’s private language argument, which proved that we learn what feelings and thoughts are only in the process of learning a publicly understandable language containing an appropriate psychological vocabulary. To understand this latter vocabulary, these critics said, one must be able to use its ingredient words correctly in relation to others as well as to oneself; and this can be ascertained only because words like ‘pain’ and ‘depression’ are associated with behavioral criteria. When such criteria are satisfied by the behavior of others, one knows that the words are correctly applied to them and that one is justified in believing that they have the experiences in question. The supposed problem of other-person experiences is thus ‘dissolved’ by a just appreciation of the preconditions for coherent thought about psychological states.
Wittgenstein’s claim that, to be conceivable, ‘an inner process stands in need of external criteria,’ lost its hold on philosophers during the 1970s. An important consideration was this: if a feeling of pain is a genuine reality different from the behavior that typically accompanies it, then so-called pain behavior cannot be shown to provide adequate evidence for the presence of pain by a purely linguistic argument; some empirical inductive evidence is needed. Since, contrary to Wittgenstein, one knows what the feeling of pain is like only by having that feeling, one’s belief that other people occasionally have feelings that are significantly like the pain one feels oneself apparently must be supported by an argument in which analogy plays a central role. No other strategy seems possible.
See also BEHAVIORISM , PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT , WITT — GENSTEI. B.A.