Ignorance and Other Minds

Ignorance and Other Minds

What do we know better—material objects or other minds? In the ordinary course of things, there is a lot about material objects of which we are ignorant: their insides, their chemical composition, their unseen side, their atomic structure, the nature of matter itself. They are often too distant to see well, indistinct, occluded, seen through a haze, seen with poor eyesight. We are largely ignorant of them; we tend to know only their superficial properties and their existence (a black cat on a white mat). You would never say you had complete knowledge of them; we could say we have “incomplete knowledge”—partial, superficial. But in the case of knowledge of other minds none of that is true: we are not ignorant of their insides, their chemistry, their unseen side, their intrinsic nature. We think we know them as they are, more or less completely (I am putting aside the mind-body problem). We don’t think of them as having an unknown nature; we think we know all about them. In fact, we think we know their nature as well as we know our own mental states: we think of them as being the same kind of thing as what we know from our own case. We don’t think of them as having a different nature when possessed by other people—as if they grow an inside or a reverse face or an atomic structure. We don’t think they differ ontologically from our own mental states; they are the same but elsewhere. So, we have a kind of privileged knowledge of these objects—a comprehensive knowledge. If material objects are opaque objects, then mental objects are transparent objects—limpid not cloudy, given not hidden. If we are blind to much of what constitutes a material object, we are clear-sighted about the nature of a mental object: we know what a pain is quite thoroughly, while we have only incomplete knowledge of a cat.

This means that we have superior knowledge of other minds compared to our knowledge of material objects. We already know that there are no visual illusions concerning other minds[1], so that this source of skepticism does not apply to them; now we see that there is a deep asymmetry with respect to the extent of our knowledge of the two. I know the nature of someone else’s mind better than I know their body: I have superficial knowledge of their body and deep knowledge of their mind—as I do of my own mind. I have perspectival knowledge of physical things, but non-perspectival knowledge of mental things. The nature of other minds is more open to me than the nature of material objects, less confined. I may not know what it’s like to be a bat, but I do know what it’s like to be another human—e.g., what it’s like to see red. I know minds better than I know bodies—in the ordinary course of events. If I’m having an ordinary conversation with you, I know what kind of thing is passing through your mind, fully and transparently; it isn’t like trying to see a distant cat in the mist with invisible insides. I am not faced with acres of ignorance; I know the mental lie of the land. It’s easier to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about other minds than it is to have that kind of comprehensive knowledge of the physical world. And if I am uncertain, I can simply ask you for a self-report and you can tell me. I’m not dealing with some sort of alien subject matter that resists full disclosure. The mind is really an open book to me not a locked safe. Just think how long it took for human beings to find out the internal anatomy of the human body, let alone is chemical composition. We didn’t have to do any dissection at all to find out the anatomy of the mind—it was right there on the surface. The mind isn’t a sort of buried treasure, like the internal organs, but more like the play of light on water—a known not an unknown. It is good to remember these truisms when pondering the classic problem of other minds; we don’t usually worry that we know nothing about what other people think and feel. We take it for granted that our knowledge is in good shape; we are not languishing in the dark. I know what’s on your mind as well as I know anything (so long as you are not trying to deceive me). My mind is in tune with yours. It isn’t trying to step outside of itself into an epistemic abyss. There is no need to get all hysterical about other minds.  Does this solve the other minds problem? Not exactly, but it does take the sting out of it, the sense of panic. We are not epistemically bereft. [2]

[1] See my “Illusions of Mind”.

[2] There is a commonsense problem of other minds that arises from the possibility of deception, but the philosophical problem is greatly exaggerated: other minds don’t pose a uniquely serious skeptical problem. The absence of other mind illusions and the identity of mental items across knower and known make the problem less severe than in the external-world case. In that case, we have the prevalence of visual illusions and the ontological gap between the knowing mind and the thing known. In the other minds case, there is a tendency to focus on the body and its behavior and ask how we can construct the mind on this exiguous basis; but that is not the situation, since we have our own minds to provide the conceptual materials and we can be said to see the minds of others not just infer them. It really does seem to me that you have a mind; I see you as minded. Other minds are not like the deep sea or remote galaxies. They aren’t complete mysteries. Of course, the whole problem of other minds is tangled and difficult, but we are not wallowing in total ignorance. I actually know my cat’s mind better than I know its body.