Radical Conceptual Scepticism About Other Minds ( from book)
My aim in this essay is to resolve the conceptual problems of other minds, and in such a way as to accommodate rather than dismiss the kind of perplexity that is undiminished by solutions, this to be achieved by aligning it with an abiding sense of the ultimately mysterious.[i] Since we need the solution first in order to give shape to the mystery, let us discuss the problem. It concerns the everyday view that mental predicates are univocal irrespective of person, so that “pain”, for instance, means the same whether I say that I am in pain or that you are. This assumption of semantic identity is rejected by the radical conceptual sceptic, his basic argument running as follows: since the mental states I experience are necessarily mine, I cannot acquire the concept of a subject of consciousness other than myself.
In addressing this argument, I suggest that we defer for the moment any consideration of the deeper metaphysics of such radical scepticism, for on the one hand there is very little clarity at such depth, and on the other the surface features are in any case those of reductive behaviourism, whatever their submarine origins might be. This is to say that the conceptual sceptic has to give some account of his interactions with other people and his apparently attributing consciousness to them, and the only theory heaving into view, as far as I can see, is that of behaviourism. With regard to physicalism, for example, it concerns neural-mental identity rather than conceptual constraint; and functionalism, as usually understood, loosens the nexus between inner consciousness and outward behaviour but does not seek to equate them. Another reason for aligning the sceptic and the behaviourist, so that they sail in convoy, as it were, is that if radical conceptual scepticism entails behaviourism, then the converse also holds up to a point, so that they are indeed under the same command. We shall treat of the metaphysical question when we consider the detailed argumentation of the conceptual sceptic; but there are several ports of call before then — or perhaps only one, for we need to ask whether the waves created by the sceptical thesis are so disruptive of our system of interpersonal beliefs, thereby being strictly incredible, that any supporting arguments will always be washed overboard.
The
fact is, after all, that philosophers bring to the issue a distinction which
they, in common with everyone else, entirely take for granted, so that in that
sense they are convinced that it holds. They distinguish, that is, between
inner mental state and outward behaviour, a distinction they apply both to
themselves and to others. Since they are not going to sacrifice it on the altar
of radical scepticism unless there are compelling reasons, it is for the
sceptic to supply them if he wishes to convert us to the cause. Secondly, it is
arguable that such reasons cannot obtain, given the solipsistic implications of
the scepticism at issue. If I cannot conceive of others as being conscious,
then my ascription to them of mental states is to be equated with those
references to their behaviour on which it is normally taken to be based. This
is tantamount to psychological solipsism, the theory that all consciousness
resides in myself, since I can conceive of only myself as being conscious.
13.2: Serving Notice on the Psychological
Solipsist
Should the
psychological solipsist be taken literally? By way of answer, I shall
now try to render as vividly as I humanly can the reality of other minds, so
that we may realise how much is at stake when the sceptic denies that he can
conceive of others’ mental states. Suppose, assuming a moratorium on scepticism
in the present section, that another person and myself are looking at a
uniformly blue wall, and that the similarity between our colour experiences is
as great as possible. Then it is my contention that they may be exactly the same, and in the same way as my own
such experiences, so that they are qualitatively identical. To bring out the
essence of what this means, let us consider objections to it, one of which
concerns personal identity. The argument, or perhaps unwitting assumption, is
that even if my perceptual experience is the same as the other person’s, what
this could mean is constrained by the fact that we have separate identities, so
that for each of us our unique self runs through our own experiences like a
name through a stick of rock. To this it may be replied, following Hume, that I
am not acquainted with myself as a subject of whom experiences are predicated,
for the self is not an introspectible object. One could argue, too, that even
if it were such an object, the
experience of it could be both the same for all of us and distinguishable from
other kinds of experience, for instance that of blue. There is, of course, the
grammatical subject, as when one says “I am immersed in blueness”, but again
this reference to oneself may be exactly the same phenomenally as the other
person’s. And, too, a question may arise, courtesy of the work of Thomas Nagel,
of what it is like, if one has a particular experience, for one to have it.
Using an illustration from chiropterology, Nagel asked what it is like for a
bat when it deploys its echo-location sense, his point being that the answer
lies outside our cognitive purview, since we lack that particular sense. I
disagree, believing as I do that one cannot know what it is like for another
person, however close to us, to be that person, let alone for a bat to be a
bat; but also for oneself when younger to have been that younger self. If you
think this is going too far, take out an old photo or video of yourself and ask
yourself the question. The difficulty, in other words, inheres in the question
itself. What counts for now is that this emphasis on the felt quality of
experience precludes not at all the possibility of multiple slices of a single phenomenal cake,
or actual cake, eaten both by the same and by different individuals and always
tasting the same. That leaves dispositional differences, but there is no reason
why these, too, should not be similar. Again, then, we are back with my
experience of blue being qualitatively identical with the other person’s. It
follows that the felt reality of that experience may be the same for both of us.
This is a startling
result, and it does need to be emphasised, one reason for which is that in
everyday life we are all pragmatic behaviourists up to a point — or, better, we
are functionalists in our ordinary transactions with other people. That is, we
may care very little what experience another person has, for instance when serving
us at a counter, and even less what it is like for that person to have that
experience, the practical emphasis being on the associated behaviour and
action. Again, If a passenger in a car knows that the driver is colour blind,
her concern is with whether he stops at red and starts again at green, just as
it would be if she herself as a driver was afflicted in the same way; and in
both cases she need not know exactly what the visual difference consists in or
would consist in. This may be generalised, and there is much more that could be
said; but it will always fall short of the actual philosophical theory of
functionalism, if only for the reason that if I observe a person exhibiting
pain behaviour, and if everything points to her being in pain, perhaps because
the driver did not, after all, stop at red, then that is what I believe: that
she is in pain. The point is that I may not know exactly what she is feeling,
or remember exactly what I felt after my own traffic accident at some time in
the past, but I can conceive of her present and my past pain being exactly the
same, just as I can of any future pain of mine being exactly the same. And what
applies to sensations also applies to colours. That mentalistically we have so
much in common with others is, to repeat, an astonishing fact; and what it
shows is that there is not just a gap but a chasm between premiss and
conclusion when I infer to another’s particular conscious state; for its
existence is not demonstrable, the same being true of the blanket belief, as it
were, that consciousness, irrespective of its particular form, resides in this
other person, as also my belief that it resided in me in the past as it does at
present.
What we are trying to
establish is that since radical scepticism about conceiving of other minds is
counter-intuitive to an extreme, a question is raised as to whether we should take
it literally, the conceptual problem being, rather, an academic exercise in
which it is as if the sceptic’s
claims have literal meaning. This, in my view, points in the right direction,
albeit only as a first attempt, and certainly it is true that the present
sceptical problem is not in any straightforward way an academic exercise. I do
not betray a lack of understanding of the sceptic when initially I take him
literally, for what this boils down to is that I take him to mean what he says,
on which basis I argue against him that very likely he does not mean it, or not
unless cognitive dissonance is in play, in which case he should not expect to
be taken seriously. It would be in play because very likely the sceptic would
admit, when confronted, that of course he takes other people to be conscious
and therefore can conceive of it; and then, in philosophical garb, he would very
likely deny that this is the case.
Now consider the
following variation on cognitive dissonance: that the psychological solipsist
means quite literally that conceiving of other minds is impossible; but also,
that he acknowledges that he cannot help believing that he does conceive of
them — indeed that he goes beyond it and believes that other minds exist. It is
in a similar way, after all, that Hume, epistemologically rather than
conceptually is taken by some commentators to radically reject in theory the
scheme of reasoning by which in practice he survived from one day and one
moment to the next, for instance by electing to exit his house via the stairs
as opposed to the window. Nevertheless, it is not as if the sceptic is
admitting to a particular belief or set of beliefs that he recognises as being
irrational at the same time as he is unable to divest himself of them — or, in
Hume’s case, to defenestrate himself. If such recognition obtains, then the
sceptic and his critics are remarkably adept at dissembling on this point, for
they give not the slightest sign of struggling manfully with irrational belief,
neither in their interactions nor, indeed, in their philosophising. Believing
that one conceives of other minds is not a form of conceptual arachnophobia, as
if we are caught in a web of irrational thought; rather, it permeates the whole
system of beliefs, concepts, predictions and explanations, conditions and
connections by which we observe and interact
with other people and with ourselves.
What I have shown, I trust, is that the
sceptical treatment of the problem is very likely incoherent, the only coherent
approach being as follows: that if we assume that radical conceptual scepticism
is correct, which is to say that I am unique in being conscious, then this
constitutes a reductio ad absurdum argument
against that form of scepticism, which must therefore be rejected. That we are
on solid ground is evidenced by the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that
philosophers compartmentalise with admirable insouciance a very long train of
clearly connected problems, one that I have sought, throughout this book, to
run into the buffers of inconsistency.
But why, in that case, do we qualify the incoherence
as being very likely rather than state it as a fact? Because I was assuming, in
order to prove otherwise, that it is possible in theory that one might be a
genuine psychological solipsist, either unable to conceive of humanoid objects,
despite their behaviour resembling one’s own in so many ways, as being
conscious⸻ or,
inhering in that inability, not perceiving them as behaving similarly. Proving
otherwise, note first that this individual, who should never be invited to a
party, would have to be me, since I am conscious and consciousness is exclusive
to one individual; therefore it is myself. I should imagine, I suppose, that
the solipsistic argument convinces me, at which point I retrospectively
attribute it to the automaton Colin McGinn. This is not inconsistent, nor need
it be, for to refute the sceptic it suffices that I have to imagine that I am
that individual, contrary to the reality, which is that I believe that I can
conceive of others as being conscious, this arguably being an avowal on my
part: that I have that belief even after being exposed to the solipsistic
argument. [ii] Secondly,
suppose that my belief is overturned by the argument, perhaps elaborated in one
way or another; and now I say that I have always believed that others are
conscious; but that during a business lunch today I had a Damascene moment on
the road to, as has now become apparent, career catastrophe and marital misfortune.
The locks had been changed by the time I got home from the pub, where the
automatonic bartender banned me, just as the security robots refused to let me
back into the office. But now, is there not an incoherence here? How, after
all, would I describe the day’s momentous events in a journal? I would have to
say that during lunch, having encountered the solipsistic argument as bedtime
reading last night, I suddenly realised that the conceptual sceptic could not
be gainsaid, therefore I was the only conscious entity. At breakfast I took for
granted that my wife was conscious, implicit in which was my ability to
conceive of it; and the same for my colleagues at work. And then, during lunch,
the lightning struck, and it reduced other people to automata. One moment I
conceived of them as being conscious; and the next moment I was no longer able
to conceive of them as being conscious. But if I write this latter sentence
down, how can I say that I conceived of them as being conscious when I am
unable to conceive of them as being conscious? Wishing to avoid an intricate
discussion of the finer points of conceptual implication, I rest my case.
13.3: The Sceptical Arguments and Revision of
Theory
If psychological solipsism, otherwise known as
radical conceptual scepticism, is not to be taken seriously on its own terms,
then it is in this context that we now consider the particular arguments by
which the conceptual sceptic presents his thesis. Since we know in advance that
their intended sceptical conclusion is unsound, which must also be true of
themselves, our treatment of them will be in line with our being able to
conceive of others’ mental states. The place to start is with the views of
Colin McGinn, whom we have already encountered in connection with
intentionality being irreducible. In his contribution to a journal article on the
conceptual problem of other minds, McGinn relates it, via some remarks of Wittgenstein’s, to what is known as
Molyneux’ Question, which runs as follows.[iii] Suppose that a
congenitally blind person acquaints herself by touch with objects having a
square cross-section, so that she thereby acquires the concept, or at least the
tactual concept, of squareness. As the “at least” implies, the question is just
that of whether the woman, if newly sighted, would immediately be able to
recognise square objects without having to touch them first, thereby indicating
that she possessed that ability or disposition, albeit unrealised, when she was
blind. According to McGinn, the analogy here is with the question of whether
the concept of another’s pain, for instance, can be derived from that of one’s
own pain. We shall ask later whether this analogy is apt.
McGinn’s argument is that the concept of a particular mental state, or
the acquiring of it, is necessarily linked to one’s experience of it. This
brings to mind Nagel’s thesis, which I said that I disagree with, it being
enough for the moment to note that the present assumption is obscure as it
stands, inviting as it does a number of questions. How close, for instance,
must the connection be? Do I need to have had toothache in order to grasp the
concept of it? Suppose that the sceptic
concedes that I do not and grants that past experience of a headache may be a
suitable substitute, provided that it throbbed in a similar way to a toothache.
But in what way might that be, and how is one to form a judgement on the
matter? Not only that, but if this is a
prerequisite then by what criterion is felt pain location exempted? Perhaps we
should include it, in which case the concept-forming desiderata are as follows:
one is able to grasp the concept of toothache if one has had a toothache-like
throbbing pain phenomenally located in one’s tooth — in other words if one has
had toothache. We shall pass over the question of whether one’s previous
toothache would qualify only if the affected tooth was the same as the one at
the centre of one’s present pain. On second thoughts, let us not pass over it,
for by what metaphysical intuition do we dismiss it, whereas a similar question
about felt location is taken more seriously, despite our being free to answer
it as we like? But this is to imply that very little hangs on it.
To show just how little that is, imagine this
time that I have just eaten chocolate as a treat for my oral bacteria and that
I now anticipate the onset of toothache, perhaps because of my experience of
dental caries and perverse bacterial ingratitude. But if there is a necessary
connection between previous pain experience and my grasp of the concept of
toothache, then the claim is not that they are logically connected, presumably
by way of being analytic. This would be the claim if, for instance, the
contention was that one cannot have the concept of toothache if one does not
have the concept of pain. What this trades on is the fact that toothache is a
form of pain; and whether the contention is correct, if one can be bothered to
ask, will depend, uninterestingly, on this and that. The actual claim, however,
is that the necessary connection is not between concepts but between the experience
of pain and the concept of toothache; and the crucial point is that it would
have to be contingent. For if my previous experience of toothache, headache or
pain in general effects a concept-enabling change, which we may suppose to be
cerebral in character, whereby I now have the concept of toothache, then it is
possible that the resulting brain state obtain even in the absence of any
history of mental or physical suffering, this also being true of the prediction
of toothache that I make. There is, after all, nothing in the conscious
phenomena of my understanding of toothache to suggest that previous pain of any
kind is non-contingently — or even contingently in a different sense of
“necessary” — a necessary condition of my grasp of the concept. It is true that
understanding is dispositional as well as occurrent, but here again there is no
contradiction in supposing that the appropriate dispositions also obtain.
Note, too,
that naturalistically a similar point can be made. That is, it is arguable that in everyday reasoning we make
unwarranted assumptions about the closeness of the relation between
understanding and experiencing particular kinds of mental state. One example
would be that of what it feels like to give birth, which we are said to
appreciate only if we ourselves have had babies, it not being an acceptable
surrogate that mothers, however articulate, should describe their experiences
to us. That leaves witnessing the event at first hand, preferably while the
mother-to-be gives a running commentary on her feelings and sensations — but
this, too, would perhaps be regarded as failing to deliver the unique insight
that only experiencing childbirth for oneself can bring into the world.
Interestingly, I did experience childbirth for myself at one time, but I would
not say that it gave me any special insight into the feelings and sensations one
has while being born.
Let us now
consider whether the same reasoning holds for the cognitive circumstances of
the blind woman. It is a contingent fact, if it is a fact at all, that newly
sighted she will have to learn to associate the visual and the tactual, thereby
revealing this limitation on her previous grasp of shape concepts. But it is
easy to imagine otherwise, for instance that upon opening her eyes for the
first time she immediately recognises and identifies objects familiar to her
from touch, including square tables, round walking sticks and her husband.
Moreover, I am about to argue that the two scenarios are not mutually
exclusive. If this is correct, as also the claim about contingency, then why
exactly is the Molyneux problem thought to be of interest to philosophers? To
make the question clear, suppose that the woman is recovering from a successful
eye operation, the dressing having just been removed, and that she knows that
the person sitting in the chair next to her bed is her husband, having
recognised him by his voice. He is pointing at the object in his lap and
telling her that she has made daily use of it for years, hence his
disappointment at her failure to recognise it.
‘A failure easily rectified’, she thinks, whereupon she grasps the
object and immediately recognises it as her white walking stick. ‘So this is
what white looks look like’, she exclaims. Running her hand along the stick,
knowing in advance that it will feel the same for the whole of its length until
the tip is reached, she thereby associates that feeling with visual
straightness. Arriving at the tip, she visually identifies the ferrule before
touching it, because it looks different from the body of the stick. Should we
say, then, that the answer to Molyneux’s questions with regard to the ferrule
is that she can identify it by sight alone, whereas the stick itself had first
to be felt? Clearly, we can say it if we like, but we may also suppose that the
woman handles the ferrule first, thereby associating the look of it with the
feel of it, and that she then recognises the body of the stick by sight alone —
or, there again, that she immediately recognises both. The important point, as
always, is that perception and observation belong within a system, the present
case being such that the newly sighted woman immediately engages in a process
of incorporating the deliverances of a newly acquired sense into the dynamics
of her system of perceptual knowledge.
Why, to return to it, is Molyneux’ Question thought to be of
philosophical interest? Because the answer will indicate whether the woman had
visual identificatory ability when she was blind, this being a necessary
condition of her concepts of physical shape being visual as well as tactual.
If, as common sense would suggest, there is indeed such a condition, then the
conceptual sceptic would have to maintain, in allowing for the possibility that
the condition is fulfilled, that it is necessary but not sufficient; for his
thesis, after all, is that the blind woman’s grasp of the concept of physical
shape is purely tactual. But what, in that case, would the sceptic grant as a
sufficient condition? The answer cannot be given in terms of brain states or
dispositions, which contingently might obtain, whereas the sceptic’s thesis is
meant to go deeper; hence my reference to metaphysical truth. His claim is that
the woman’s experience of the physical world is purely tactual; therefore, on
that account alone, the same must be true of her conception of that world, this
being a non-contingent conclusion that is metaphysical in character. The
appeal, it might be said, is to our deepest empiricist intuitions.
To appeal to empiricism or conceptual foundationalism is not, however,
to terminate the discussion, as if it were the last port of call. Indeed, I now
propose to lead the sceptic into deeper waters, this time dropping anchor above
what appears to be the abyss which separates the phenomenal and the
intentional, this latter, or so I have argued, being irreducible within a
system. The fact is, after all, that the blind woman’s conception of squareness
is of square-shaped objects in a physical world which exists independently of
being perceived. This transforms the problem, for the three-dimensional world
inhabited by the blind woman is the same as that of sighted people, the
difference being that the woman cannot see it or any of it occupants. That, at
least, is what my deepest intuition tells me, and much of the earlier chapter
on perception would be relevant at this point.
If, armed
with the findings of that earlier chapter, we now return to the question of the
blind woman’s conception of a world visually perceived, then our conclusion is
that the different senses available to her reveal the same physical objects as
those that are seen. This is truistic at one level, for clearly the woman is
able to feel her stick when she touches it, to hear it when she taps it and to
see it and recognise it after the operation, either immediately or very shortly
after the other senses have been brought into play. If it turns out that this
latter is needed, so that before the operation she was not disposed to
recognise any objects by sight alone, then strictly speaking she did not
possess visual concepts. This, I suggest, is of no great import, the point
being that they are easily accommodated, a place already marked out for them,
in the system of empirical knowledge and observation by which her existing
senses are co-ordinated and function separately or in concert. They are
intentional in character and inform her of the presence of an independently
existing physical world.
If this is
correct, then the issue goes far beyond what should, strictly speaking, be
said, and, rightly or wrongly, it is metaphysical in the arguments deployed. It
concerns the relation, in terms of necessary and contingent, between the
concept and the experience of particular mental states; and noteworthy here is
that irrespective of the sense modality involved, very little that is at all
specific can be said, this being in itself a significant fact. That is, if
initially I posit a close connection between concept and experience, then I
still have to acknowledge that it is not so close that, for instance, I
understand toothache, or what it is like to feel it, only if I have actually
felt it myself. There is, as we have seen, a sense of “understand” such that
one knows what it is like to have toothache only if one has had it, the same
being true of labour pains, with half the human race thereby being cognitively
excluded. These combine into an even more exclusive club, the members of which
enjoy that esoteric insight vouchsafed only to those who have given birth in a
dentist’s chair. This is, it seems to me, a very confused and obfuscatory use
of the concept of understanding, which perhaps we should eschew not only in
philosophy but also in everyday discourse, where it lends itself, in this
latter case, to a particularly irritating form of life-event snobbery.
This returns us to the original question re-interpreted: not whether
one can ascribe consciousness to other people but how it is that certain
difficulties of conceptual analysis attending that ascription may be resolved.
And the answer is implicit in the arguments already presented. The question, it
may be recalled, was phrased as follows: how can one derive the concept of
another’s pain from one’s own pain experience? But this is to presuppose that
the relation at issue is that of derivation, and it is this implied metaphysical
thesis that I have attempted to overturn. If my own pain or ability to feel it
is not a necessary condition of my grasp of the concept of pain, which I may
possess even if I am not able to feel pain, provided that I am aware of that
mixed blessing, then the question of how I can ascribe pain to other people on
the basis of my own must lapse. This
terminates the voyage of the conceptual sceptic about other minds, who now
finds himself utterly capsized and all at sea.
13.4: Limitation and
Mystery
If the foregoing
arguments are correct, then it seems that the conceptual sceptic credits
herself with metaphysical access to fundamental laws governing the acquisition
and content of psychological concepts. Finding in my own case that the door is
always locked, I have tried to show that the positing of a very particular
metaphysical connection between experience and concept acquisition or
application is illegitimate. This is not to deny that there are metaphysical
constraints, just as there are necessary conditions; and both of these are
fundamental. But they and our understanding of them obtain within a system —
and intrinsic to the notion of a system is that of epistemic limitation of
metaphysical scope, beyond which there is only mystery. This notion of a system
is one that we shall now deploy against those who deny not that they can
conceive of other people but that they have any reason to believe that other
minds exist. Here, if anywhere, one’s inability to answer the sceptic may
momentarily chill into loneliness, as if a window suddenly opens onto winter
and is hastily slammed shut. But other people should be inside with us, not out
in the cold, the exception being the conceptual sceptic about other minds..
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