OTHER MINDS

in philosophy, the object of the commonsensical belief that others besides oneself possess minds and are capable of thinking or feeling somewhat as one does oneself. The philosophical problem arising from the difficulty of providing adequate justification for such a belief has been discussed within the British philosophical tradition and also by the existentialists, and in the 20th century it has provided a matter for dispute in epistemology, logic, and philosophy of mind. The traditional philosophical justification for belief in other minds is the argument from analogy, which, as cogently stated by John Stuart Mill, a 19th-century empiricist, in first-person terms, argues that because my body and outward behaviour are observably similar to the bodies and behaviour of others, I am justified by analogy in believing that others have feelings like my own and not simply the bodies and behaviour of automatons. This argument has been repeatedly attacked since the 1940s, although some philosophers continue to defend certain forms of it. Norman Malcolm, an American disciple of Ludwig Wittgenstein, asserts that the argument is either superfluous or its conclusion unintelligible to the person who would use it, because, in order to know what the conclusion that human figure has thoughts and feelings means, the I would have to know what criteria are involved in correctly or incorrectly stating that someone has thoughts or feelingsand knowledge of these criteria would render the argument from analogy unnecessary. Defenders of the argument have maintained, however, that, since both the I and others describe inner feelings in similar ways and seemingly understand each other, reference to a common language justifies the argument from analogy better than does observation of similarities of bodies and outward behaviour. Another objection to the argument is that it seems to assume that one in fact knows what it is to have feelings simply by introspection. This assumption has been objected to by followers of Wittgenstein, who think that it leads to the possibility of a private language to describe one's own sensations, a possibility that Wittgenstein rejected on various grounds. Such philosophers maintain that the I simply does not know what its own feelings are in a way appropriate to the argument until the I has learned from experience with others how to describe such feelings in appropriate language. Some philosophers have thought, however, that this situation leads to the conclusion that the I can be wrong when it says, My tooth aches in the same way that the I can be mistaken when the I says, John's tooth aches. This thesis is unacceptable to many, who hold that sincere first-person present-tense statements about sensations can only be true; i.e., they are incorrigible. Discussion of such problems tends to lead quickly into difficulties of providing an adequate analysis of statements about one's own sensations. The existentialist approach to the problem of other minds is exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre in a long chapter of L'tre et le nant (1943; Being and Nothingness).