Abstract
This paper concerns the Russian émigrée translator and philosopher Natalie Duddington (1886–1972). By establishing Duddington’s dependence on Nicholas Lossky (1870–1965), the paper argues that Duddington formed a unique synthesis of Russian intuitivism and British realism in her essay ‘Our Knowledge of Other Minds’. Despite the historical significance of Duddington’s work, it will be concluded that her synthesis succumbs to the most recent criticism which has been posed against perceptualists such as Fred Dretske (1932–2013). Russian ‘intuitivism’ is understood here as the school of thought that was first developed by Lossky and subsequently inherited by Duddington. ‘Perceptualism’ will be understood as the broad claim that we perceive the contents of another mind in an immediate way rather than infer them.
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Notes
Duddington most likely learned some German at the women’s courses she attended in St Petersburg, where German was offered (Feodosova 1980, p. 77). Her knowledge of other German philosophers, however, seems to be scarce. Aside from some superficial references to Fichte in some other papers (1926b, p. 377), Duddington does not seem to have engaged seriously with German philosophy. It thus seems that, overall, Duddington’s knowledge of German philosophy was limited to Lipps, who seems to have attracted her precisely because of his work on knowledge of other minds. Any further acquaintance with German philosophy would have been via Lossky, who himself had a much more extensive knowledge of German philosophy (Nemeth 2017, pp. 314–321).
Duddington’s theory could also be compared here with a particular approach to the so-called ‘descriptive’ problem of other minds. The descriptive problem looks at empirical data to understand how we come to acquire the ability to ascribe mental states to others. This problem differs from the normative problem which asks, for example, how we are justified in knowing other minds (both their contents and that they exist) (Avramides 2019a). It was, of course, the normative problem which occupied Duddington. However, one particular approach to the descriptive problem bears some resemblance to Duddington’s theory. Shaun Gallagher rejects the two prevalent accounts of how infants begin to interact with others, the first suggests we theoretically postulate the mental states of others (theory theory), the second claims we simulate another’s mind using our own mind as the model (simulation theory). Gallagher (2001), however, shows that for both of these processes to take place, a complex ‘background understanding’ (p. 86) of the other is already required, we have to have some idea of the other as a subject (otherwise there is nothing to theorise about or simulate). He thus favours a less inferential model, which is comparable with Duddington’s perceptualism: ‘The action of the infant and the perceived action of the other person are coded in the same “language”, a cross-modal system that is directly attuned to the actions and gestures of other humans’ (p. 87).
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Moore, H.J. Natalie Duddington and perceptual knowledge of other minds. Stud East Eur Thought (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09592-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-023-09592-4