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THREE PROBLEMS OF OTHER MINDS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2019

Chad Engelland
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Abstract

The traditional problem of other minds is epistemological. What justification can be given for thinking that the world is populated with other minds? More recently, some philosophers have argued for a second problem of other minds that is conceptual. How can we conceive of the point of view of another mind in relation to our own? This article retraces the logic of the epistemological and conceptual problems, and it argues for a third problem of other minds. This is the phenomenological problem which concerns the philosophical (rather than psychological) question of experience. How is another mind experienced as another mind? The article offers dialectical and motivational justification for regarding these as three distinct problems. First, it argues that while the phenomenological problem cannot be reduced to the other problems, it is logically presupposed by them. Second, the article examines how the three problems are motivated by everyday experiences in three distinct ways.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 18 , Issue 51 , Spring 2019 , pp. 63 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019 

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References

Notes

1 Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 19Google Scholar. See Avramides, Anita, Other Minds (London: Routledge, 2001), 217ffGoogle Scholar. On the conceptual problem, also see McGinn, Colin, ‘What is the Problem of Other Minds?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 58 (1984): 119–37Google Scholar.

2 Russell, Bertrand, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1948), 202Google Scholar and 504.

3 Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 19–20.

4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II, ed. Von Wright, G. H. and Nyman, Heikki, trans. Luckhardt, C. G. and Aue, M. A. E. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)Google Scholar, §170.

5 Avramides, Other Minds, 253.