Wisdom, John - Other Minds I

03/21/2014

Other Minds, by John Wisdom, Chapter 1: Basil Blackwell (pub), 1965

[This is a brief summary]

While this is the first chapter of a book, each unit was also published in Mind sequentially starting from Vol 49, No 196 (which is where this chapter appeared). This paper starts with the problem of other minds, taking as a starting point a concern from Isaiah Berlin about two kinds of questions one could apply to whether S believes that P. The first is whether S really believes that P. The second is whether S really truly believes P (or anything else), even given outward signs of believing P. This second interest, one dubbed "philosophical doubt" is discussed at length by author. Author acknowledges influence from Wittgenstein, and proceeds to discuss the weirdness of skepticism of the following kind: I know that S shows all signs of believing P, and that there are no further tests we could conduct to determine whether S believes P, but still I doubt or wonder whether S has a belief that P (or any belief at all). Author considers this kind of doubt not meaningless, but a "dead doubt" (pg7).

During this paper, author introduces what he considers an analog to consider: that there are leprechauns in some grandfather clocks that sing fairy songs and disappear on midsummer evenings. Upon opening such clocks, leprechauns are discovered. Now imagine some watches also behave similarly, but when opened, reveal no leprechauns. In this circumstance it seems reasonable to claim there are invisible leprechauns within the watches, even though the operator "invisible" would otherwise signal a weird kind of assertion. An expansion of the analogy is whether there is a difference asserted that instead of invisible leprechauns, there are invisible brownies within the watches. Is this difference in assertions meaningful? Author seems to want to agree that two different images can be conjured. But, that doesn't mean the difference, or the assertion of a difference, isn't "idle" (pg13).