The difficulties about other minds are deep and of central philosophical importance. This text explores attempts to apply Wittgenstein's concept of criteria in explaining how we can know other minds and their properties. It is shown that the use of criteria for this purpose is misguided.

On Being With Others is an outstanding and compelling work that uncovers one of the key questions in philosophy: how can we claim to have knowledge of minds other than our own? Simon Glendinning's fascinating analysis of this problem argues that it has polarized debate to such an extent that we do not know how to meet Wittgenstein's famous challenge that "to see the behavior of a living thing is to see its soul". This book sets out to discover (...) whether Wittgenstein's remark can be justified by drawing on both the analytic and continental traditions. (shrink)

A person skeptical about other minds supposes it is possible in principle that there are no minds other than his. A person skeptical about an external world thinks it is possible there is no world external to him. Some philosophers think a person can refute the skeptic and prove that his world is not the solitary scenario the skeptic supposes might be realized. In this paper I examine one argument that some people think refutes solipsism. The argument, from Wittgenstein, is (...) grounded in a thesis about language. Some people believe that in using language a person necessarily is linked to persons other than himself. Some people think a person can use the ‘communalist’ principle to refute forms of solipsism. I show that people do not refute solipsism with the Wittgensteinian, language-necessarily-is-shared principle. (shrink)

Many philosophers sharply distinguish emotions from feelings. Emotions are not feelings, and having an emotion does not necessitate having some feeling, they think. In this paper I reply to a set of arguments people use sharply to distinguish emotions from feelings. In response to these people, I endorse and defend a hedonic theory of emotion that avoids various anti-feeling objections. Proponents of this hedonic theory analyze an emotion by reference to forms of cognition (e.g., thought, belief, judgment) and a pleasant (...) or an unpleasant feeling. Given this theory,emotions are feelings in some important sense of "feelings", and these feelings are identified as particular emotions by reference to their hedonic character and the cognitive state that causes the hedonic feelings. (shrink)

People see five kinds of views in epistemology and ontology as hinging on there being words a person can learn only by private ostensive definitions, through direct acquaintance with his own sensations: skepticism about other minds, 2. skepticism about an external world, 3. foundationalism, 4. dualism, and 5. phenomenalism. People think Wittgenstein refuted these views by showing, they believe, no word is learnable only by private ostensive definition. I defend these five views from Wittgenstein’s attack.

Intersubjectivity, the cooperation of two or more minds, is basic to human behavior, yet eludes the grasp of psychiatry. This paper traces the dilemma to the problem of other minds assumed with the epistemologies of modern science. It presents the solution of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, known for his treatment of other minds in terms of human agreement in language.Unlike recent studies of Wittgenstein's psychology, this one reviews the Philosophical Investigations' private language argument, the crux of his mature views on mind. (...) It reads that argument as recording his shift from the modern egocentric paradigm of mind to an intersubjective one. (shrink)