Abstract
We tend to take for granted that we know what is involved in belief in other minds, and that the real problem lies in justifying that belief. By contrast, this chapter argues that we misunderstand what belief in other minds involves, and that the problem of other minds has its source in that misunderstanding. My aim is to rethink what belief in other minds involves in terms of what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’. Doing so not only undermines the problem of other minds as traditionally formulated, but also has significant consequences for our understanding of the mind itself. One such consequence is that ethical considerations have a much more fundamental role to play in thinking about the mind than is typically believed.
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- 1.
I will use these phrases as roughly synonymous throughout this paper. By contrast, Wittgenstein might be thought to use the term ‘soul’ (‘Seele’) partly in order to stress how different his subject matter is from the kind of thing usually discussed in connection with the term ‘mind’.
- 2.
I will consider the possibility that we do not believe in other minds, that ‘belief’ is the wrong way of characterizing our understanding of others’ as conscious beings rather than automata, below. For now at least, I want to take it for granted that there is something that may (and in fact does for many) make it seem obvious that we do; my question is, one could say, about what that something is.
- 3.
The following points might perhaps be brought out even more forcibly by a contrast between believing of someone that they have a mind and believing of someone that they have a car, for instance (I am grateful to Alois Pichler for suggesting this example). I stick with Wittgenstein’s contrast here, in part because it can help to bring out the sense in which believing in other minds is not simply a matter of attributing to someone a particular state of mind, and so that the claim that so-and-so has a mind does not simply follow from the claim that they are suffering, for instance. Something like that claim is, for instance, made by Quassim Cassam (‘we can come to know that there are other minds by seeing what others are thinking and feeling’ (2007, 159)) and, in my view, it misconstrues what is involved in belief in other minds. I try to give a more complex account of the relation between belief in other minds and beliefs about the specific states of minds of others in Sects. 4 and 5 of this chapter.
- 4.
I think that this is true even though I would not typically express my belief by saying ‘I believe that she is suffering’ rather than, more simply, by saying ‘she is suffering’, since the former expression might be taken to imply an element of doubt that is absent in the case I am imagining.
- 5.
Not every case of believing that someone is suffering looks like this, and in fact in some cases where we might be tempted to think that it is obvious that we believe of someone that they are suffering I think are much more suited to understanding in terms of attitudes along lines to be worked out in connection with belief in other minds below (as might perhaps be suggested by Wittgenstein, 1969b, §10).
- 6.
The word ‘belief’ is sometimes used in contrast with certainty in this kind of way, but it need not be used in such a way. Insofar as one might want to say, in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty (1969b), that what we call ‘belief’ in connection with other minds is a matter of being certain, not merely believing, it is not this kind of certainty that is at stake.
- 7.
As noted above (note 3), the claim that someone’s having a mind simply follows from their being in pain, for instance, seems to falsify this aspect of what is involved in believing of someone that they have a mind.
- 8.
I turn to the importance of what we do in terms of how it contributes to shaping what we can do in Sect. 5.
- 9.
If we try to do this, if we try to imagine a stone being in pain or having sensations, we will I think often find ourselves imagining changes in the way the stone can behave as a means of providing a grip for concepts such as pain. That, I take it, is part of the point of Wittgenstein (2009, §282), which begins as follows: ‘“But in a fairy tale a pot too can see and hear!” (Certainly; but it can also talk.)’
- 10.
Peter Winch makes the same point in his ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’ (1980–1981, p. 9).
- 11.
I develop this suggestion in Dain (2016b).
- 12.
This paper was written while I was a Leiv Eiriksson visiting researcher at the University of Bergen sponsored by the Research Council of Norway. I am very grateful to the Research Council of Norway and to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bergen for their generous support. Earlier versions of this material were presented at two workshops and a conference in Finland in 2014. I am very grateful to all the participants on those occasions, particularly David R. Cerbone, as well as to Reshef Agam-Segal, Lars Hertzberg and Alois Pichler for helpful comments and encouragement. An abridged version of this paper was presented at the X National/ VII International Wittgenstein Symposium in Campinas, Brazil in 2015, and published in the conference proceedings as Dain (2016a).
References
Cassam, Q. (2007). The Possibility of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Dain, E. (2016b). Do We Believe in Other Minds? Contributions of the International Wittgenstein Symposium, 39, 45–47.
Winch, P. (1980–1981). Eine Einstellung zur Seele. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 81, 1–15.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). Philosophical Investigations (3rd ed.). Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
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Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans., Rev. 4th ed.). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Dain, E. (2019). An Attitude Towards a Soul: Wittgenstein, Other Minds and the Mind. In: Backström, J., Nykänen, H., Toivakainen, N., Wallgren, T. (eds) Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18492-6_6
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