Other Minds after Twenty Years

MIDWEST STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY, X (1986)

Other Minds after Twenty Years BRUCE AUNE

bout twenty years ago, the problem of other minds was a fashionable A topic in analytical philosophy. The most influential strategy for resolv- ing it was neo-Wittgensteinian, a key theme being that “an inner process stands in need of outward criteria.”’ This strategy seemed promising as a means of frustrating the skeptic, but it brought one uncomfortably close to the absurdity of analytical behaviorism. Today, Wittgenstein’s philosophy is out of fashion and the problem of other minds is rarely discussed. My aim in this paper is to reconsider the problem in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of mind and language.

The problem of other minds as it was understood in the 1960s was largely a problem about feelings, pain being a favorite topic of discussion. Although pains are dubious examples of mental states, at least if intentionali- ty is a mark of the mental, the epistemic problem I want to discuss is focused on them, and I shall therefore be concerned with them here. To tie my remarks more closely to the proper subject of other minds and to come to terms with problems that were not on the agenda twenty years ago, I shall also be concerned with the more complicated concept of belief. An alterna- tive title for my paper might be “Feeling and Belief.”

As everyone knows, the traditional problem about the feelings of others arises from just a few basic convictions. To begin with, we are directly aware of our own feelings, which we know to occur within us. If other people have feelings, their feelings are not open to our view: we can know of their existence only by some kind of inference. But there are just two kinds of inference: deductive and inductive. If an inference from P to Q is deductively valid, it is impossible for Q to be false when P is true. Obviously, this kind of inference cannot show us that other people have feelings, for everything we can observe about other people-everything we can detect in their behav-

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ior and external circumstances-is logically consistent with their not having any feelings at all. Thus, we can know that others have feelings only by some inductive inference. Yet an inductive inference is ultimately based on a generalization from experience, and we have no experience of the supposed feelings of others. Induction, therefore, is apparently as useless here as deduc- tion. What is to be done?

Although this line of reasoning involves a particularly crude conception of inductive inference, the criticism it received twenty years ago was focused on two different points. One was that we cannot presume to know what a feeling is “merely from our own case.”* When.we use an expression like “in pain” or “feels pain,” we are not speaking a private language; we are using expressions that we have learned in a social context and that we have applied, from the very beginning, to others as well as to ourselves. The other point was a development of the first one: the words we apply to feelings are governed by socially accepted criteria.3 Such criteria connect terms for feelings with terms for observable behavior, and they provide the basis for ascribing feelings to others. The connection between pain and pain behavior is not, therefore, merely contingent and known inductively. There is a “conceptual connection” between the inner and the outer, and this connection provides the basis for our conclusions about the sensory experiences of others.

The development of this last point is not very credible at a time when the doctrine of analytic truth is out of fashion, but it deserves to be rejected for a deeper reason. Consider the term “lunatic.” In its original sense this term meant “a person whose madness has a lunar cause.” In this sense of the term, there is conceptual connection between lunacy and the moon, one reflected in the conceptual truth that x is a lunatic just in case x‘s madness is caused by the moon. But if, in fact, the moon does not cause a kind of madness-as we now believe-there is no factual basis for applying the word “lunatic” to any person and, therefore, for using the world in its original sense. The same holds true for words such as “feels pain” or “is dizzy.” Even if we allow that there are “conceptual truths” involving such words-truths that relate certain inner states to outer criteria-there must be some factual basis for their use. We must, that is, have some empirical assurance that words involving such an assumed connection between inner and outer apply to something real. This assurance, being empirical, cannot be ascertained by mere conceptual analysis; it can be ascertained only inductively.

When Strawson discussed the problem of other minds in his book Individuals, he remarked that the skeptic wants to drive a wedge between the inner and the outer but that concepts such as depression “span” the relevant ‘‘gap.”4 Given such concepts, we must allow, he said, that observable behavior provides “logically adequate criteria” for the existence (or occurrence) of such experiences as depression. To refuse to accept such criteria is, as he put

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it, to refuse to accept the “structure of the language” in which we speak of a person’s mental or sensory states. It is clear that, as a resolution to the problem about other persons’ sensory experiences, this maneuver gets us nowhere, for it does not come to terms with the question whether words such as “depression” apply to anything real. In everyday life we may accept the presumed assumptions associated with words such as “depression” just as uncritically as people once accepted the causal hypothesis associated with the word “lunatic.” But the rational credentials of these assumptions remain in question; they are, one might say, the frog at the bottom of the beer mug labeled “the problem of other minds.”

As I see it, this last problem about criteria can be resolved only by an adequate theory of induction or experimental inference, one that does justice to the kind of reasoning common in theoretical sc ien~e .~ I shall pursue this subject a little later; I now want to say something about the other Wittgen- steinian assumption that was thought to undermine the traditional problem about the other minds-the assumption, namely, that we learn to describe our feelings in a social context and that we do not learn what feelings are merely from our own case.

Perhaps the first thing to say about this assumption is that it can actually be granted by a philosopher who is womed about our knowledge of other people’s experiences. The key point is that feelings, if they exist, have relational as well as nonrelational properties. Pains are generally believed to result from cuts, bums, and stubbed toes; they are also believed to result in characteristic forms of behavior. Even a skeptic can allow that we learn to identify these supposed causes and effects of pain in a social context. In reply to the claim that such causes and effects are incorporated into the concept of pain as relational properties of a typical feeling of pain, the skeptic can insist that we need some rational assurance that such properties are, in particular cases, actually attached to an appropriate inner state; and this assurance cannot be supplied by a mere verbal convention. Although I am not a skeptic, I have already made this point in commenting on alleged “outer criteria” for inner states. We may have to learn from others that this or that is thought to be a relational property of a certain inner state; but even if there is a conceptual connection between inner state and outer (or relational) property, we still need some rational assurance that such conceptual connections have a foundation in fact -in a corresponding natural regularity.

Wittgenstein, in his famous private-language argument, maintained that we do not merely learn of what I have called the extrinsic properties of feelings in a social context; he claimed that everything we know about our feelings has its sourse in such a context.6 We might suppose that we leam the intrinsic qualities of our feelings by mere inspection, but this supposition, he said, is incorrect. It is true that, when we are linguistically sophisticated, we can identify our feelings in words without attending to their external cause

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or effects. Yet our ability to do this is the result of training by others, and our confidence that the words we use are reliably correlated with appropriate feelings ultimately depends, Wittgenstein thought, on the corroborative tes- timony of others. Without the possibility of such corroboration we could draw no tenable distinction, he added, between correctly describing our feelings and merely thinking that we describe them correctly.

Wittgenstein’s insistence on the social basis for subjective reports goes too far, however. We may require some assurance that our use of a common language agrees with the practice of others, but the individual judgments we make do not always require the possibility .of an external corroborative check. As linguists emphasize, people who have learned a language not only have the ability to produce and understand countless sentences containing, for them and others, novel combinations of words; they also have the ability to describe novel objects in novel ways-using, if necessary, old predicates in new or extended senses. If such a speaker is presented with a special “object” to which other speakers lack access, there is no good reason to suppose that the description he or she confidently produces is any less reliable than the description of a less special object. In fact, the general linguistic competence of such a speaker provides an inductively plausible basis for the assumption that such a description, at least when candidly made and intelli- gently elaborated, is reliable or correct.

Opponents of Wittgenstein typically urge that the first-person reports in which such descriptions are included have a more secure basis than I am tacitly allowing here. According to some philosophers, such reports are, in fact, “in~orrigible.”~ They support their view by insisting that psychological states are “self-presenting” or that it “makes no sense” to say a person could be wrong about being in such a state.8 But these claims are fundamentally defective. The key consideration is this: A psychological state S is one thing, and a verbal report R is something entirely different. The assertion “If R is made, S occurs” is not, therefore, logically true. To argue that the conditional, though not logically true, is nevertheless analytic is tantamount to arguing that the gap between S and R can be adequately bridged by conceptual means. But this maneuver is, as I have shown, useless, since a conceptual bridge can be relied on only if it has a foundation in fact. In this case, the required fact is that reports like R are reliably associated with states like S. Such a fact, being patently empirical and also general, can be ascertained only by some inductive means.

Although the arguments supporting the view that psychological reports are infallibly true or incorrigible are seriously defective, there must be some basis for the widespread belief that such reports cannot err. Surely, it is absurd to suppose that everyone who holds the belief would subscribe to the reasoning I have just rejected. I think there is such a basis: it consists of a tacit inductive generalization. The inference is not a very strong one, but it accounts for the conviction in point.


Consider the case of pain. Most people who consider the matter will agree that, if we feel pain, we cannot fail to know what it is like. The claim is a very general one, and it is brought to mind only in the context of a philosophical discussion. What usually happens in such a discussion, at least in my experience, is something like this. People will imagine or recall some typical experience of being in pain and then ask themselves, “Could one have an experience like this and not know it?’ Considering the unpleasant character of the experience and the way it (as it were) calls attention to itself, they say, “No one could possibly have such an experience and not know it.” There is no surveying of possible cases here; there is immediate conviction. The conviction is a generalization, of course, and it is supported by a single case. The reasoning tacitly involved is, therefore, an instance of inductive generalization.

The claim that all sensory experiences yield infallible knowledge seems to be based, for most people, on a further generalization from a variety of experiences-from feeling pain, hearing the blast of a trumpet, seeing red, and so forth. This further generalization is weaker than the first one, for second thoughts intrude in many cases. If you hear a sound whose tone is C-sharp, must you realize that it is C-sharp? No. If you are visually aware of a spotty expanse, must you know how many spots you “see”? No. If you have a sinus headache, must you know that it feels like a sinus headache? No. Second thoughts of this kind bring out one important point: Knowing that an experience is like this or like that involves a comparison that, for some this’s and that’s, can easily be mistaken. Sensory knowledge is infallible, at best, only when special, minimal comparisons are involved.

Although the inferences I have spoken of account for a natural conviction about the certainty of some first-person reports, they also provide some evidence (at least) that the natural conviction is true. It is often said that inductive inferences of the kind I have described are inherently weak, involving an insufficiently varied evidence class. The force of such claims is easily exaggerated, however. For one thing, the pains one might recall or imagine in the sort of case I have described may be allowed to be typical of one’s own experience, and a generalization from a typical case is much stronger than one drawn from a special case. For another thing, the epistemological conclusion one amves at concerns another’s experience only in a hypothetical way. The idea is that if anyone has an experience like this, he or she could not fail to know what it is like (given a minimal parameter of likeness). This idea does not imply that anyone else ever has an experience “like this.”

Together with the inductively plausible assumption that sophisticated speakers can describe novel objects in reliable ways, the reasoning I have just described provides, as I see it, the only tenable basis for the common philosophical idea that sensory reports are “privileged.” The favored epistemic

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status of such reports does not rest on some kind of convention; not only does no such convention exist, but even if one did exist, it could not guaran- tee a connection between distinct existents. The idea that such a connection can be known by some kind of a priori intuition is equally unwarranted. A priori intuitions may conceivably have some validity in mathematics, but it is anachronistic to suppose that they can inform us about the reliability of a psychological mechanism-the one underlying first-person reports. Apart from this, the authority of psychological reports obviously varies with the language used and the comparisons made; as I mentioned earlier, the authority of a report is greatest when it involves minimal comparisons-a notion that is exceedingly difficult to capture in general terms. It seems obvious to me that the evidence supporting claims about privileged access to one’s feelings is not only limited and inductive, but it can be expected to change with the development of scientific knowledge.

Pains are generally called sensory “states,” but this terminology deserves more thought than it usually gets. Our talk of states of things is based on our subject-predicate discourse: we apply predicates to a thing, and some of these predicates are said to describe the thing’s “state.” If we say “That iron rod is hot,” we use “hot” to describe the rod’s thermal state; if we say “Jones is in pain,” we use “in pain” to describe Jones’s sensory state. Al- though in describing Jones this way we are treating him as a unitary subject, we know that he is a complex thing-on one level of analysis, a system of living cells. We also know that his sensory state is, in some sense, a state of his nervous system; but we do not know, at least at the present time, just what this state involves. We lack a detailed knowledge of what it is and of how, exactly, it is related to the state of his brain that gives rise to the verbal report “I am in pain.” The knowledge we lack here is philosophically important because it may affect what we shall want to say in problem cases that, as matters stand now, are hard to settle. People “hurt” in athletic contests may report feeling no pain even though they have been limping or clutching a damaged hand. Our usual evidence conflicts in such cases, the limping at odds with the report; a better knowledge of the physiology of pain may allow us to describe them with greater confidence or less dogmatism.

The claims I have made support the following picture. Although we learn to identify and describe sensory experiences in a social context, our most secure convictions about the sensory states of others are rationally defensible only on some kind of inductive grounds: an appeal to “outer” criteria ultimately requires empirical support. The inductive reasoning we can use to support our convictions here is, no doubt, fundamentally the same in basic structure as that by which “theoretical” hypotheses are supported in science. (But more on this in a moment.) As we master our language, we become capable of indentifying and describing our own feelings. Our access to our own feelings is direct in the sense that, when we wish to identify or


describe them, appropriate words quickly come to mind. Such words often take the form of “reports” and they are, to some extent, privileged, though they are not “incomgible.” Their degree of reliability can be estimated only indirectly -by comparing them with other evidence bearing upon the occurrence of the states they indicate (such as our nonverbal behavior) and by taking into account the sort of comparisons we are tacitly making, the general reliability of our verbal habits, our apparent mental clarity or confusion, and so on.

I would like to be able to give a precise account of the kind of inductive reasoning by which statements about feelings are appropriately defended, but the subject is excessively complicated. ‘Philosophers of science used to offer a fairly simple model of hypothetico-deductive (or HD) inference, one in which statements about unobservables are confirmed by skitements about observables. This simple model is energetically disputed today,g but its ap- plication to the problem of other minds always seemed questionable in post-Wittgensteinian discussions. The trouble is that, epistemically speaking, one’s own feelings are neither fish nor fowl from one’s own point of view- that is, neither standard observables nor standard unobservables. The HD model seemed appropriate for the case of others; but when doubts are raised about one’s own “inner identifications” (as they were by Wittgen- stein), the model seemed utterly inappropriate and unhelpful.

About twenty years ago, I decided that the logic of scientific inference is obfuscated rather than illuminated by an emphasis on the distinction between observables and unobservables.’O I was led to this view by the following considerations. In scientific investigation and even everyday life, observation claims are not always accepted uncritically. When they are evaluated, four sorts of things are ideally taken into account: the character of the observer, the means of observation, the nature of the object supposedly observed, and the circumstances under which the observation occurs. Clearly, all four are important for sound observations, and all four should be consid- ered when an observation claim is evaluated. Yet these factors all involve theoretical components. The conclusion to be drawn from this is: Every observation claim must ultimately be evaluated by some background theory or theories.

The background theories relevant here cannot be purely metaphysical because they concern specific forms of observation, the actual character of observers, particular facts about the conditions of observation, and the like. Thus, although we may, in practice, speak of testing theoretical claims by observational data, such testing is merely conditional: the claims may be credible, or probable, to a certain degree given the data, but the acceptability and even the interpretation of the data are dependent on a further level of theory.” When this further level of theory is made explicit, we find that we are actually relating theory to theory, and the credibility of a particular claim is ultimately owing to the character of our total theoretical structure.

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This holist view of empirical confirmation is helpful for thinking about the problem of other minds. The claim that another person feels pain may be highly credible given (a) a certain conception (or tacit commonsense theory) of pain and (b) certain observations of that person’s behavior and circumstances. But this conception of pain and the assumptions tacitly made in accepting the observations are also subject to critical evaluation in the light of total theory. This total theory is crucial for the interpretation and evaluation of our first-person reports, when we confidently affirm “I feel pain.” The vaunted asymmetry in first- and other-person psychological statements appears somewhat superficial at this leyel. Given a significant degree of linguistic maturity and the formation of appropriate habits, candid verbal responses such as “I feel pain” are about as reliable (as apt to be true in the mouth of a normal speaker) as a comparable utterance of “That is red” or “That’s a dog.” Yet the background considerations relevant to the interpretation and evaluation of such reports are closely related to-they are part of the same theoretical system as- the background considerations relevant to the interpretation and evaluation of “She feels pain.” As I mentioned earlier, some of these background considerations may be altered as we learn more about the neurophysiology of sensory distress and of our ability to monitor our sensory experiences.

The basic claims I have been making about sensory states such as pain also apply to cognitive states, or attitudes, such as believing and desiring. These latter states raise special problems, however. A belief that p is generally said to involve a relation to a proposition, and a satisfactory philosophical account of belief as a cognitive state must come to terms with the supposed relation and the so-called propositional object. As I indicated at the beginning of this paper, my remarks on cognitive states will be restricted to the special case of belief.

As I see it, a good way to get a handle on the concept of believing that p is to begin with the notion of saying something. Viewed in a highly general way, saying something is a verbal act, one accomplished by making an utterance. If we know the words Jones uttered on a certain occasion, we can describe him as saying what he did in a direct way by saying, for example, “Jones said ‘Snow is white’.” In this case, we convey what Jones said by giving the words he uttered. It is, however, possible to describe what someone said in a less direct way by employing the device of indirect quotation, as in “Jones said that snow is white” or “Jones said that he would come tomorrow.” In indirect quotation we do not claim to be giving the words the speaker actually used, though we might actually do so. Our aim, generally speaking, is to display words in our that-clause that are related to the speaker’s words in a special way. In some cases, the words we display are a translation of the speaker’s words; in other cases, they are what might be called a “differently indexed equivalent” to those words. If yesterday Jones actually


said, “I will come tomorrow,” we can report what he said by using the words “He said that he would come today.” Indirect discourse is, however, a very flexible device; in some cases, we feel entitled to use words that agree with those of the speaker only in denotation, as when we say “He said he would come Friday”-using “Friday” in place of his “a week from today.’’

Believing something is, of course, very different from saying or even thinking something, for you can believe that snow is white even when you are asleep. Still, as Peirce and Ramsey emphasized, a belief is something on which one is prepared to act-the strength of the belief being shown by the risks one will take in thus acting.I2 To be sure, a belief in this last sense is something believed; thus the idea is more accurately expressed by saying that one who actually believes that p is prepared to act on the “proposition” that p (given a certain parameter of risk). The idea I want to develop here is that acting on a proposition is acting on some mental formula and that the propositional clause in the context “S believes that p” can reasonably be understood as an indirect quotation of the formula on which the subject, if truly described as believing that p , is prepared to act. The first step in developing this idea is to explain what is reasonably meant in spealung of action on a formula.

As I argued in my book Reason and Action, the most general thing one can say about acting on a formula F is this: S acts on F in doing A just when S does A as the result of a line of practical reasoning that psychologically explains his doing A and that contains the formula F as a premise or tacit premise.’’ Thus, if Jones in shooting Smith’s dog acted on the idea (or formula) that wolves should be exterminated, then Jones’s action is psychologically explainable by reference to a line of practical reasoning in which this idea or formula occurred as a premise or tacit premise. Ideally, practical reasoning leads to action by generating a decision that the action carries out. Such reasoning need not be valid, for fallacious reasoning can lead to action just as well as valid reasoning. It must, however, actually take place if it provides an acceptable explantion of a person’s action.

If believing something can usefully be characterized by a formula on which the believer is prepared to act, the notion of acting on the formula must be adequately describable in terms other than “a formula the person accepts or believes.” This can be done. The premises or verbal formulas involved in a person’s reasoning may be mere suppositions or assumptions, but the ones that lead her to act (particularly in the face of some risk) are the ones that characterize a belief that she has. Disbelief that p is characterized by an unwillingness to act (or make decisions) on the basis of reasoning in which a formula indirectly quoted by “p” is a significant premise. Thus, if we are confident that someone acts as a result of reasoning in which a formula indirectly quotable by I ) ’ ’ actually occurs, we can confidently say that the person believes that p .

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Two important questions arise at this point: What can we mean in speaking of covert (or unobservable) reasoning in which a formula F is featured? And how can we know, or provide a reasonable defense for the idea, that such reasoning actually takes place on this or that occasion? These are difficult questions that require delicate answers; here I can only try to say enough to make my general position intuitively plausible.

From one point of view, the concept of silent or covert reasoning is, as Sellars argued nearly thirty years ago, a common sense theoretical ~0ncept . l~ We conceive of such reasoning as a sequence of covert acts that is formally analogous to a sequence of utterances having.the structure of an argument, that is, having various premises and a conclusion. The covert acts may be called “acts of thought”; they have the semantical properties of assertions, which are utterances with (roughly) sense, reference, and assertive force.15 We normally conceive of thoughts as mental occurrences that can be overtly “expressed” in assertions. The notion of expression here is clearly metaphor- ical, suggesting that an utterance is a thought pressed out of the mind or head; but this suggestion can be eliminated if we think of expression merely as a relation between thought and utterance characterized (on first approxima- tion) as follows: For every utterance u, there is an E-correlate t that has the same semantical properties, that is a causal factor in the production of zi

when u is an assertion, and that is governed by a set of habits on the part of the thinker-speaker that are analogous to his inferential-observational habits with respect to u.

This last sentence can be elaborated into a surprising powerful theory. Consider the matter of semantical properties. If an utterance u is true just when p , then the thought E-related to u, E(u), is also true just when p . Furthermore, if u implies u’, then E(u) implies E(u‘); and if u is true just when p is true and q is true, then E(u) is true just when E(p) is true and E(q) is true. As for the relevant verbal habits, if the speaker-thinker S has the habit of inferring q from - p and @ V q), S also has the habit of inferring E(q) from E(-p) and E(p V q). Again, if S has the habit (or propensity) of responding to red objects with the utterance “That’s red” (gven a certain mental set), S will also have the habit (pen a related set) of responding to red objects with the thought E(“That’s red”). The importance of these habits is obvious: they permit us to provide psychological explanations for a large range of 5”s behavior. If S behaves in a way that requires some calculation-some weighing of information, as in a chess game-we can work out plausible psychological explanations for such behavior. Such explanations can be defended, or supported, in a variety of ways, but more on this in a moment.

I said above that the concept of covert reasoning is, from one point of view, a common sense theoretical concept. This point of view is, obviously, that of the other person. When we reflect on our own thinking, we do not regard it as something merely theoretical. Normally, we can simply say what


we are thinking-no inferring is required. Even so, our thoughts do not (at least usually) have a phenomenal character: they are not present to our consciousness as a feeling is. This does not limit our ability to avow what we are thinlung about, nor does it prevent us from vividly remembering what we thought about on this or that occasion. We do, of course, encounter some problems in avowing our thoughts. One such problem is owing to the fact that, when we are thinking, we are generally thinking about some other subject-something other than our own thinking. When, therefore, we begin to think about our current thinking, we mentally change the subject and thus have to remember what we were thinking. Usually we can do this, but our memorj of what we were thinking is no better-in fact, it is sometimes worse-than our memory of what we were saying. One reason we have trouble recalling our thoughts is that we think (or process information) so quickly. Speaking and writing seem to slow us down mentally and help us keep better track of what we are doing. But the difficulty of monitoring our silent thoughts should not make us skeptical about their existence. On most days I spend the morning hours by myself, thinking out the lectures I shall give in the afternoon. Some of the words I later utter actually came to mind in these early hours.

If we think of an observarion statement as Feyerabend once did- roughly, as a contingent singular statement that is quickly decidable with a minimum of inferencelb-then statements about our present and very recent thoughts will be, for us, observation statements. But this terminological decision has very little epistemological significance. In fact, as I emphasized when I discussed sensory states, the acceptability and even the proper interpretation of an observation statement (and this holds for observation statements in Feyerabend’s sense) are always conditional on some background theory. If a person sincerely says, “I was just thinking of Socrates’ criticism of Polemarchus,” we are generally entitled to accept her remark as true-but we do so only on the assumption that the speaker knows the language and that an appropriate connection has been established between her spontane- ous reports about her thoughts and the cognitive states, or acts, that they represent. The commonsense theory of thoughts to which others tacitly appeal in ascribing this or that thought to me supplies the basic framework, the background theory, by reference to which my avowals are interpreted and assessed.

Earlier, I remarked that the psychological explanations we might offer for a person’s behavior can be defended, or supported, in a variety of ways; but I did not back up my remark with any details. One way of obtaining favorable evidence is to ask the person whether he reasoned as we say he did. Of course, his words are not absolutely conclusive evidence: he might be a liar, he might be confused, he might suffer from self-deception, or he may have forgotten why he acted as he did. Sometimes the best corroboration we

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can offer is fairly high level: a person with that information, those aims, and that character is bound to reason in somewhat the way we say he reasoned. To be sure, we may be wrong here; but sometimes the explanations we offer can be defended only on grounds of general plausibility. It goes without saying that in such cases we should take our explanations with a grain of salt. Certainty is not always possible, particularly in psychological matters. When it can be attained, it always based, at least tacitly, on holistic considerations and some background theory.

As in the case of reports about sensory experiences, it is often said that people’s reports about their beliefs are highly privileged; in fact, some philosophers insist that beliefs are “self-presenting states” and that belief reports, at least when candidly made, are inherently credible.” This view strikes me as naive. Self-deception is ubiquitous in everyday life, and people who are deceived about their personality or character are usually deceived about many of their beliefs. For many people, beliefs seem to define the person: having the right religious, political, or professional beliefs (on how, for example, to “do” philosophy) is very important for being a certain kind of person and for belonging to a certain group. Avowing this or that belief is thus, for many, an expression of group identity and may have little relation to their actual conduct. Jones may be convinced, for example, that he values each person “as an end in himself,” yet treat people with indifference or contempt; and Smith may shirk challenges after avowing that meeting them is what makes her life worthwhile. The point is not just that people may be deceived about, or unwilling to accept, the kind of people they actually are; they may be unwilling to acknowledge-to express in words-the beliefs on which they frequently act. Their self-esteem often seems to require the thought, “I am not just a good person; I actually believe what I am supposed to believe.”

When I discussed sensory experiences, I remarked that we can expect to learn more about them as our knowledge of neurophysiology increases. Does an analogous point hold for beliefs and other propositional attitudes? I think yes. Although beliefs are understood as cognitive “states” of single subjects, persons, these subjects are complex objects whose brains are enor- mously complex molecular structures. The information storage and process- ing associated with the “state” of believing and the process of infemng are still badly understood; and our conception of believing and inferring is bound to be improved when we understand what goes on in the brain of a person when these conceptions are truly applicable to him or her. If believing that p is associated with a certain means or mode of storing infomation, our knowledge of the relevant neural mechanism may make it easier for us to understand how self-deception occurs and what its limits are.

I want to conclude this paper with some observations on a problem that is raised for belief by Quine’s thesis of translational indeterminacy.lB If, as I have suggested, the propositional clause in a true sentence of the form “ S


believes that p” is an indirect quotation of a formula on which the subject is prepared to act, and if the formula is conceived of as, roughly, a mental counterpart to some utterance (or assertion) that the subject might use to express it, then to describe someone as believing that p is implicitly to interpret an utterance she might produce. If, further, the interpretation of an utterance is subject to the indeterminacy that Quine emphasized, the interpretation of a given belief is subject to a similar indeterminacy. Yet if this is so, the concept of belief is a very peculiar-perhaps even an anomalous- empirical concept. One might wonder whether, in attributing a particular belief to someone, one is actually making an empirical claim at all.

To resolve the puzzlement that arises from this issue, one should bear in mind certain points about indirect quotation. When we quote someone’s words indirectly, we display words of our own that are semantic counterparts, at least, of the words he used. Such counterparts need not, as wholes, be synonymous with, or good translations of, the speaker’s words; but they are more than just material equivalents of his words: usually, they contain parts that are translational equivalents of some of his words. In some cases, of course, the words we display are, as wholes, translational equivalents for his words; to explore the bearing of Quine’s thesis on the subject of belief, we can suppose that all cases are like this.

According to Quine, a scheme of translation for a system of verbal behavior V (another person’s language) is provided by a manual that corre- lates recurrent segments of Vwith words of a home language L. An appropriate correlation is based on various constraints; but no matter how carefully the constraints are specified, more than one such correlation is always possible for Vand L. Different correlations meeting the relevant constraints yield different translation manuals, no one of which is any more correct than the others. If we have adopted a particular manual M for V and L, we may say that a certain utterance belonging to V is correctly translated by an expression E of L: the translation is correct relative to M. If no such manual is specified, the notion of a translation of E is indeterminate. Absolutely speaking, there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect translation of E.

Suppose that Quine is wholly correct about translation as, in main lines, I think he is.19 It remains true that, if we adopt a manual m for another person’s language or system or verbal behavior, we ideally base our accept- ance of m on observable regularities in that behavior. If the manual is an acceptable one, the regularities we observe are characteristic of the relevant behavior, and the manual is applicable to that behavior only so long as these regularities occur. Although some of these regularities are largely phonetical, allowing us to identify recurrent utterances, others fall into three important groups; in Wilfrid Sellars’s suggestive terminology, they are word-word, world- word, and word-world regularities.20 The first sort is exemplified in the inferences a person draws; the second sort is exemplified in observation

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reports; and the third sort is exemplified in decisions to act. I call attention to these regularities because we commonly appeal to them when we attempt to explain someone’s behavior by reference to his or her beliefs, intentions, and related practical reasoning.

If equally acceptable but significantly different manuals of translation are possible for Vand a home language L, then different word-word, world- word, and word-world regularities of a suitable complexity must be discem- ible in V, How is this possible? The answer is given by Quine in his defense of the indeterminacy thesis. For my present purposes, it is perhaps sufficient to say that, according to Quine, different “segmentations” of Vare possible- and different objects or semantical values can be assigned to these various segments. If, according to a manual rn, u is an utterance that, by virture of an appropriate semantical interpretation, is acceptably translated by “Snow is white,” then u-utterances must bear a systematic relation to snow and to white things. If a different translation for u is equally acceptable (relative to a different but equally acceptable manual), then u-utterances must also be systematically related to objects of a different sort- perhaps to snow-stages and white-stuff-stages. The crucial point is that, if the thesis of translational indeterminacy is correct, the regularities needed to justify these different translation manuals must actually exist.

Suppose, now, that I attribute to another person the belief that snow is white. In doing this, I am in effect claiming that she is prepared to act on a formula that I translate by “Snow is white.” Even if other translations for what I single out as the relevant formula are possible, it does not follow that that formula-that “mental” occurrence-is not real or that, if it is real, it is not associated with habits that are reasonably interpreted as pertaining to snow. The analogy between thought and utterance is instructive here. Just as the reality of an utterance is not undermined by the fact that it can, in principle, be “segmented” and interpreted in different ways, so the reality of a thought or mental formula is not undermined by the fact that it can be conceptually segmented and interpreted in different ways. The point can be generalized: Just as the thesis of translational indeterminacy does not undermine the reality of the word-word, word-world, and world-word regularities associated with what are, according to a certain acceptable manual, assertions that snow is white, so the thesis does not undermine the reality of the regularities assumed by the claim that a person has a propensity to act on (to reason in accordance with) what is, according to a certain commonsense theory, a certain thought or formula. In particular, the thesis does not undermine the reality of the mental regularities to which we refer in explaining a person’s behavior by reference to her beliefs and intentions.

Philosophers who object to “metaphysical realism” often suppose that, if the words we use or the conceptions we employ are humanly invented tools and not mere labels that we attach to an antecedently distinguished “ready-


made world,” then our words or conceptions do not correspond to “real” objects.21 This supposition is, I believe, a mistake. As Leibniz put the point in his Nouveuux essuis, “No matter what rules men make to goven how things are named and what entitlements go with names, provided that the system of rules is orderly (that is, interconnected and intelligible) it will be founded in reality”; and “whatever we truthfully distinguish or compare is also distinguished or made alike by nature.”2z If the world is such that it is truly describable by a system ofconcepts C, then it really contains the things or sorts of things that those concepts describe; if it is also truly described by a different system of concepts C, it really contains other thngs or sorts of things as well. Generally speaking, objects may be singled out in reality for different purposes and from different points of view; yet if they are singled out, they must be there to be singled out. This does not in any way imply that reality, in itself, is indeterminate. Quite the contrary: reality is perfectly determinate, but its determinateness consists in its being such that determinate concepts apply to it.

My principle claim in this paper is that the traditional problems about other minds cannot be resolved by the analytical strategies popular twenty years ago. Insofar as they are epistemological problems about the feelings and beliefs of others, they are ultimately problems about inductive inference and, in the case of belief, about inductive inference and verbal interpretation. As such, these problems do not presuppose a special subject, the philosophy of mind; they are, broadly speaking, problems of applied logic and semantics.

Notes 1. See Norman MaIcolm’s influential essay, “Knowledge o fo the r Minds,” in his Knowl-

2. See ibid., 136f. 3. On this see Malcolm, “Review of Wi ttgenstein’s Philosophicallnvestig~garions. ”in Knowl-

4. See P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London, 1959). 106-1 I . 5. I use Hume’s term “experiental inference” faute de mieux. The term “induction” often

has the narrow sense of “inductive generalization,” but the nondeductive or “ampliative” inferences common in science are not restricted to mere generalizations from experience. In what follows, I shall use “induction” in a broad sense to include all inferences of this ampliative kind.

6. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Ans- combe (Oxford, 1953), sect. 243-308 and passim.

7. See Malcolm, “Direct Perception,” in Knowledge and Certainty, 9 1. 8. See Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1977),

26, 33. 9. See Wesley Salmon, The Foundations of Scientific Inference (Pittsburgh, 1967), 108-32

and 1421f; Clark Glymour, Theory and Evidence(Princeton, 1980), chap. 1-4; and John Earman, ed., Testing Scientific Theories: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 10 (Minne- apolis, 1983).

10. See the concluding remarks in my Knowledge, Mind, and Nature (New York, 1967),

edge and Certainty (EnglAvood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), 130-40.

edge and Certainty, 96-129

263-69.

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11. Bayes’s Theorem provides a natural pattern for this kind of testing; see Salmon, Foundations of Scientific Infireme.

12. See C. S. Peirce, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear,’’ in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, edited by Philip P. Weiner, (New York, 1958), 112-36; and Frank P. Ramsey, “Truth and Probability,” in his The Foundations of Mathematics (London, 1931), 156-98.

13. See Reason and Action (Dordrecht, 1978), chap. 2. By a “tacit” premise, I mean a premise one reasons “in accordance with.” Jones reasons in accordance with “All whales are mammals” when he infers “This is a mammal” from “This is a whale,” “That is a mammal’’ from “That is a whale,” and so on. His tacit premise in such reasoning is, then, “All whales are mammals.”

14. See Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy ofScience, vol. I, edited by Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (Minneapolis,

15. See Michael Dummett, “What Is a Theory of Meaning? (11);’ in Truth and Meaning, edited by Gareth Evans and J. M. McDowell (Oxford, 1976). 67-139.

16. Paul Feyerabend, “An Attempt at a Realistic Interpretation of Experience,” Proceed- ings of the Aristotelian Society 58 (1958): 143-17.

17. See Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge. 18. See W. V. 0. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), chap. 2; and “Onto-

logical Relativity,” in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), 26-68. 19. 1 discuss Quine’s argument for translational indeterminacy in “Quine on Translation

and Reference,” Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 221-236. 20. See Wilfrid Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games,” in his Science, Perception,

and Reality (New York, 1964), 321-50. 21. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge, 1981), chap. 3. The

metaphsyical realism I defend here differs from the metaphysical realism Putnam attacks is one important way: his version of the thesis involves the claim that there is “exactly one true and complete description of‘the way the world is’ ” (see p. 49). I cannot see why a serious metaphysical realist-one holding that objects of successful reference really exist-should want to make this dubious claim.

22. See G. W. Leibniz, New Essays on the Human Understanding, translated by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge, 198 I), 310f.

1956), 253-329.

Other Minds after Twenty Years

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