Hi I’m Mason Westfall.
I teach philosophy at the University of Toronto,
and today I want to talk to you about the problem of other minds.
The problem of other minds asks: how can we know
that others have experiences like we do.
In the last video, we considered skepticism about other minds —
the view that knowledge of other minds is impossible.
In this video, we’ll consider four responses to the problem of other minds.
One reply to the problem of other minds is behaviourism.
Behaviourists say that mental states are tendencies or patterns of behaviour.
Tendencies aren’t always immediately observable:
think about the property of fragility, or having a tendency to break easily.
A fragile object could look robust at first,
but it will break if struck firmly.
Similarly, according to behaviourism, being in pain is tending
to engage in pain behaviour like wincing and saying ‘ouch’.
Someone who is in pain might look OK at first, but if you look closely,
maybe when he doesn’t know you are looking, you will see his pained expression.
Behaviourism could be helpful because it shrinks the gap
between behaviour that you can see and mental states themselves.
If mental states are ultimately just how you tend to behave, then seeing
behaviour seems like a stronger basis for attributing mental states.
Attributing mental states on the basis of behaviour
is like thinking a glass is fragile because you saw it break.
The problem with behaviourism is that it appears to us that mental
states are internal causes of behaviour, not just patterns of behaviour.
Here is one example that illustrates this problem:
Someone might have the tendency to behave as though they are in pain —
maybe I offer them a million dollars if they can
trick people into thinking that they are in pain —
and yet not be in pain.
But if being in pain is just the tendency to behave as though you are in pain,
then offering someone a million dollars like this is a way to cause pain.
So although it might help with the problem of other minds,
most philosophers agree that behaviourism is not an attractive view.
Another reply is the argument from analogy.
According to this reply, we observe a correlation
between our own minds and behaviour.
Then, when we observe others’ behaviour, we reason that
they must be undergoing analogous (or similar) experiences.
Philosophers disagree about whether this is a good reason
to believe others have minds like ours.
On the one hand, if we have access to our own minds and behaviour,
and others’ behaviour,
reasoning by analogy seems sensible.
On the other, generalizing from a single case -
your own — isn’t the strongest argument.
What if others are different from you?
So if the argument from analogy is our justification
for believing in other minds,
maybe we shouldn’t be nearly as confident as we actually are.
A third kind of reply
questions the assumptions that generated the skeptical problem.
Here are a couple ways of doing so:
Maybe we were too quick to assume that we never see others’
mental states, and could only see their outward behaviour.
Recall that emotions, in particular,
often have characteristic expressions.
Some philosophers argue that in these cases,
we are literally seeing others’ emotions.
If they are right, then we have a neat solution to the problem of other minds.
We know about other minds in the same way we know
about our physical environment — perception.
Or, maybe we should think a bit more about how
perception affects what we can know about the world.
I’ve never seen Mt. Fuji, or an electron,
and yet, most of us would agree that I know
that Mt. Fuji is the tallest mountain in Japan,
and electrons have a negative charge.
Perception is part of the story, but I know
lots of things that I can’t directly perceive.
It seems like I know that Mt. Fuji is the tallest
mountain in Japan because people told me it is.
Philosophers call this ‘testimony’.
And it seems like I know that electrons have negative charge
because the theory involving electrons explains lots of observations we make.
Perhaps other minds fall into one of these categories.
Maybe we know that others have minds because they tell us about their minds,
or because the theory that others have minds
explains lots of observations we make.
More generally, we might consider other ways in which perception
can contribute to knowledge of things we can’t perceive.
But wait,
how do any of these replies address the skeptical challenge we started with?
Couldn’t other people still be robots?
Couldn’t we still be wrong?
These replies are more modest.
They are replies that address the idea that skepticism about other minds
is especially worrisome, because we can’t see them.
These replies suggest that knowledge of other minds
may not be so different from other sorts of knowledge.
We often come to know about things beyond what we can directly perceive.
We might still have skeptical worries about knowledge in general
but maybe we shouldn’t be more worried about knowledge of other minds
than we are about other sorts of knowledge.
In the next video, we’ll consider an especially tricky
kind of knowledge of other minds, called common knowledge.