Solipsism is sometimes expressed as the view that "I am the only mind which exists," or "My
mental states are the only mental states." However, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might
truly come to believe in either of these propositions without thereby being a solipsist. Solipsism
is therefore more properly regarded as the doctrine that, in principle, "existence" means for me
my existence and that of my mental states. Existence is everything that I
experience -- physical objects, other people, events and processes -- anything that would
commonly be regarded as a constituent of the space and time in which I coexist with
others and is necessarily construed by me as part of the content of my consciousness. For
the solipsist, it is not merely the case that he believes that his thoughts, experiences, and
emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only thoughts, experiences, and
emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no meaning to the supposition that there could
be thoughts, experiences, and emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist
understands the word "pain," for example, to mean "my pain." He cannot accordingly conceive
how this word is to be applied in any sense other than this exclusively egocentric one.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. The Importance of the Problem
No great philosopher has espoused solipsism.
As a theory, if indeed it can be termed such, it is clearly very far
removed from common sense. In view of this, it might reasonably be asked
why the problem of solipsism should receive any philosophical attention.
There are two answers to this question.
First, while no great philosopher has explicitly
espoused solipsism, this can be attributed to the
inconsistency of much philosophical reasoning.
Many philosophers have failed to
accept the logical consequences of their own most fundamental commitments
and preconceptions. The foundations of solipsism lie at the heart of
the view that the individual gets his own psychological concepts (thinking,
willing, perceiving, and so forth.) from "his own cases," that is by abstraction from
"inner experience."
This view, or some variant of it, has been held
by a great many, if not the majority of philosophers since Descartes
made the egocentric search for truth to the
primary goal of the critical study of the nature and limits of knowledge.
In this sense,
solipsism is implicit in many philosophies of knowledge
and mind since Descartes and any theory of knowledge that adopts
the Cartesian egocentric approach as its basic frame of reference is inherently
solipsistic.
Second, solipsism merits close examination
because it is based upon three widely entertained philosophical presuppositions,
which are themselves of fundamental and wide-ranging importance. These
are: (a) What I know most certainly are the contents of my own mind
- my thoughts, experiences, affective states, and so forth.; (b) There is no
conceptual or logically necessary link between the mental and the physical.
For example, there is no necessary link between the occurrence of certain conscious experiences or mental
states and the "possession" and behavioral dispositions of a body of a
particular kind; and (c) The experiences of a given person are necessarily
private to that person.
These presuppositions are of unmistakable Cartesian
origin, and are widely accepted by philosophers and
non-philosophers alike. In tackling the problem of solipsism, one
immediately grapples with fundamental issues in the philosophy
of mind. However spurious the problem of solipsism per se may strike
one, these latter issues are unquestionably important.
Indeed, one of the merits of the entire enterprise is the extent
that it reveals a direct connection between apparently unexceptionable
and certainly widely-held common sense beliefs and the acceptance of solipsistic
conclusions. If this connection exists and we wish to avoid
those solipsistic conclusions, we shall have no option but to revise, or
at least to critically review, the beliefs from which they derive logical
sustenance.
2. Historical Origins of the Problem
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|
René Descartes |
In introducing "methodic doubt" into philosophy, Descartes created the
backdrop against which solipsism subsequently developed and was made to
seem, if not plausible, at least irrefutable. For the ego that
is revealed by the cogito is a solitary consciousness,
a res cogitans that is not spatially extended, is not necessarily located in any body, and can be assured
of its own existence exclusively as a conscious mind. (Discourse
on Method and the Meditations). This view of the self is intrinsically
solipsistic and Descartes evades the solipsistic consequences of his method
of doubt by the desperate expedient of appealing to the benevolence
of God. Since God is no deceiver, he argues, and since He has created man
with an innate disposition to assume the existence of an external,
public world corresponding to the private world of the "ideas" that are
the only immediate objects of consciousness, it follows that such a public
world actually exists. (Sixth Meditation). Thus does God bridge the chasm between the solitary consciousness revealed
by methodic doubt and the intersubjective world of public objects and other
human beings?
A modern philosopher cannot evade solipsism under the Cartesian picture of consciousness without accepting the function attributed
to God by Descartes (something few modern philosophers are willing to do).
In view of this it is scarcely surprising that we
should find the specter of solipsism looming ever more threateningly in
the works of Descartes' successors in the modern world, particularly in
those of the British empiricist tradition.
Descartes' account of the nature of mind implies that
the individual acquires the psychological concepts that he possesses "from
his own case," that is that each individual has a unique and privileged access
to his own mind, which is denied to everyone else. Although this view utilizes
language and employs conceptual categories ("the individual,"
"other minds," and so forth.) that are inimical to solipsism, it is nonetheless
fundamentally conducive historically to the development of solipsistic
patterns of thought. On this view, what I know immediately and with
greatest certainty are the events that occur in my own mind - my thoughts,
my emotions, my perceptions, my desires, and so forth. - and these are not known
in this way by anyone else. By the same token, it follows that I
do not know other minds in the way that I know my own; indeed, if I
am to be said to know other minds at all - that they exist and
have a particular nature - it can only be on the basis of certain inferences
that I have made from what is directly accessible to me, the
behavior of other human beings.
The essentials of the Cartesian view were accepted by
John Locke, the father of modern British empiricism. Rejecting Descartes'
theory that the mind possesses ideas innately at birth, Locke argued
that all ideas have their origins in experience. "Reflection" (that is introspection
or "inner experience") is the sole source of psychological
concepts. Without exception, such concepts have their genesis
in the experience of the corresponding mental processes. (Essay Concerning
Human Understanding II.i.4ff). If I acquire my psychological
concepts by introspecting upon my own mental operations, then it follows
that I do so independently of my knowledge of my bodily states. Any correlation
that I make between the two will be effected subsequent
to my acquisition of my psychological concepts. Thus, the correlation between bodily and mental stated is not
a logically necessary one. I may discover,
for example, that whenever I feel pain my body is injured in some way,
but I can discover this factual correlation only after I have acquired
the concept "pain." It cannot therefore be part of what I mean by the word
"pain" that my body should behave in
a particular way.
3. The Argument from Analogy
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| John Stewart Mill | Bertrand Russell |
What then of my knowledge of the minds of others? On Locke's view there
can be only one answer: since what I know directly is the existence and
contents of my own mind, it follows that my knowledge of the minds of others,
if I am to be said to possess such knowledge at all, has to be indirect
and analogical, an inference from my own case. This is the so-called "argument
from analogy" for other minds, which empiricist philosophers in particular
who accept the Cartesian account of consciousness generally assume as a
mechanism for avoiding solipsism. (Cf. Mill, J.S., James, W., Russell,
B., Ayer, A.J.).
Observing that the bodies of other human beings behave as my body does
in similar circumstances, I can infer that the mental
life and series of mental events that accompany my
bodily behavior are also present in the case of others. Thus, for example,
when I see a problem that I am trying unsuccessfully to solve,
I feel myself becoming frustrated and observe myself acting in a particular
way. In the case of another, I observe only the first and last terms of
this three-term sequence and, on this basis, I infer that the "hidden" middle
term, the feeling of frustration, has also occurred.
There are, however, fundamental difficulties with the argument from
analogy. First, if one accepts the Cartesian account of consciousness,
one must, in all consistency, accept its implications. One of these implications,
as we have seen above, is that there is no logically necessary
connection between the concepts of "mind" and "body;" my mind may be lodged in my body now, but this is a matter of sheer contingency.
Mind need not become located in body. Its nature will not be
affected in any way by the death of this body and there is no reason in
principle why it should not have been located in a body radically
different from a human one. By exactly
the same token, any correlation that exists between bodily behavior and
mental states must also be entirely contingent; there can be no
conceptual connections between the contents of a mind at a given time and
the nature and/or behavior of the body in which it is located at that
time.
This raises the question as to how my supposed analogical inferences
to other minds are to take place at all. How can I apply psychological
concepts to others, if I know only that they apply to me?
To take a concrete example again, if I learn what "pain" means by reference
to my own case, then I will understand "pain" to mean "my
pain" and the supposition that pain can be ascribed to anything other
than myself will be unintelligible to me.
If the relationship between
having a human body and a certain kind of mental
life is as contingent as the Cartesian account of mind
implies, it should be equally easy - or equally difficult - for me
to conceive of a table as being in pain as it is for me to conceive of
another person as being in pain. The point, of course, is that this is not so.
The supposition that a table might experience pain is a
totally meaningless one, whereas the ascription of pain to other human
beings and animals that, in their physical characteristics
and/or behavioral capabilities, resemble human beings is something which
even very young children find unproblematic. (Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical
Investigations, I. § 284).
How is this to be accounted for? It will not do, in this context,
to simply respond that a table does not have the same complex set of physical
characteristics as a human body or that it is not capable of the same
patterns of behavior as a human body. Because the Cartesian position implies that there is no logical
connection between the mental and the physical, between the possession
of a body of a particular kind and the capability for consciousness.
Physical differentiation can and must be acknowledged,
but it can play no role in any explanation of what it is to have a mental
life.
I am surrounded by other bodies, some of which are similar to mine,
and some of which are different. On Cartesian principles such similarities
and such differences are irrelevant. The question as to whether
it is legitimate for me to ascribe psychological predicates to entities
other than myself, which the argument from analogy is designed to address,
cannot hinge on the kind of body that I am confronted
at a given time. (Malcolm, N. (a)).
Assuming the validity
of the Cartesian position, we have to infer that it makes as much or a
little sense, on these premises, to attribute any psychological predicate
to another human being as it does to attribute it to a table or a rock.
On these premises, it makes no sense to attribute consciousness
to another human being at all. Thus on strict Cartesian principles,
the argument from analogy will not do the work that is required of it
to bridge the gulf between my conscious states and putative conscious
states that are not mine. Ultimately, it must be confessed that
on these principles I know only my own mental states and the supposition
that there are mental states other than my own ceases to be intelligible
to me. It is thus that solipsism comes to seem inescapable.
If the above argument is valid, it demonstrates that the acceptance
of the Cartesian account of consciousness and the view that
my understanding of psychological concepts derives, as do the concepts
themselves, from my own case leads inexorably to solipsism. However, it
may fairly be said that the argument accomplishes more than just this.
It can, and should, be understood as a reductio ad absurdum refutation
of these Cartesian principles. Viewed from this perspective, the argument
may be paraphrased as follows:
If there is no logical connection between the physical and
the mental, if the physical forms no part of the criteria that govern
my ascription of psychological predicates, then I would be able to conceive
of an inanimate object such as a table as having a soul and being conscious.
But I cannot attach any intelligibility to the notion of an inanimate object
being conscious. It follows therefore that there is a logical connection
between the physical and the mental: the physical does form part
of the criteria that govern my ascription of psychological words.
4. The Physical and the Mental
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|
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
What then is this logical connection between the physical and the mental?
This question can best be answered by reflecting, for example, on how a
cartoonist might show that a particular table was angry or
in pain. As indicated above, it is impossible to attach literal
meaning to the assertion that a given inanimate object is angry or
in pain, but clearly a certain imaginative latitude may be allowed for
specific purposes and a cartoonist might conceivably want to picture a
table as being angry for humorous reasons.
What is significant in this connection, however, is that to
achieve this effect, the cartoonist must picture the table as having human
features - the pictured table will appear angry to us only to the extent
to that it possesses the natural human expression of anger. The concept
of anger can find purchase in relation to the table only if it is represented
as possessing something like a human form. This example demonstrates a
point of quite fundamental importance: so far from being acquired by abstraction
from my own case, from my own "inner" mental life, my psychological concepts
are acquired in a specifically intersubjective, social, linguistic context
and part of their meaning is their primary application to living human beings. To put this slightly differently, a person is
a living human being and the human person in this sense functions as our
paradigm of that which has a mental life; it is precisely in relation
to their application to persons that we learn such concepts as "consciousness,"
"pain," "anger," and so forth. As such, it is a necessary
and antecedent condition for the ascription of psychological predicates
such as these to an object that it should "possess" a body of a particular
kind.
Wittgenstein articulated this point in one of the centrally important methodological tenets of the
Investigations:
Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like)
a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind;
hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (I. § 281).
Consequently, the belief that there is something problematic about the
application of psychological words to other human beings and that such applications
are necessarily the products of highly fallible inferences to the "inner"
mental lives of others, which require something like the argument from
analogy for their justification, turns out to be fundamentally confused.
The intersubjective world that we live with other human beings and the
public language-system that we must master if we are to think at all are the primary data, the "proto-phenomena,"
in Wittgenstein's phrase. (I. § 654) Our psychological and non-psychological concepts alike
are derived from a single linguistic fountainhead. It is precisely because
the living human being functions as our paradigm of that which is conscious
and has a mental life that we find the solipsistic notion that other human
beings could be "automatons," machines devoid of any conscious thought
or experience, bizarre and bewildering. The idea that other persons might
all in reality be "automatons" is not one which we can seriously entertain.
5. Knowing Other Minds
We are now in a position to see the essential redundancy of the argument
from analogy. First, it is a misconception to think that we need any inferential argument to assure us of the existence
of other minds. Such an assurance seems necessary only so long as it is
assumed that each of us has to work "outwards" from the interiority
of his/her own consciousness, to abstract from our own cases to the "internal"
world of others. As indicated above, this assumption is fundamentally
wrong - our knowledge that other human beings are conscious and
our knowledge of their mental states at a given time is not inferential
in nature at all, but is rather determined by the public criteria that
govern the application of psychological concepts. I know that a person
who behaves in a particular way - who, for example, gets red in the face,
shouts, gesticulates, speaks vehemently, and so forth - is angry precisely
because I have learned the concept "anger" by reference to such behavioral
criteria. There is no inference involved here. I do not reason "he
behaves in this way, therefore he is angry" - rather "behaving in this
way" is part of what it is to be angry and it does not occur to
any sane person to question whether the individual who acts in this way
is conscious or has a mental life. (Investigations, I. § 303;
II. iv., p. 178).
Second, because the argument from analogy treats the existence of
the mental lives of other living human beings as problematic, it seeks
to establish that it is legitimate to infer that other living human beings
do indeed have mental lives, that each one of us may be said to be justified
in his confidence that he is surrounded by other persons rather than "automatons."
The difficulty here, however, is that the argument presupposes that I can
draw an analogy between
two things, myself as a person and
other living human beings, that are sufficiently similar to permit the
analogous comparison and sufficiently different to require it.
The question must be faced, however, is how or in what respects am I
different from or similar to other human beings? The answer
is that I am neither. I am a living
human being, as are these others. I see about me living human beings and
the argument from analogy is supposed to allow me to infer that these are
persons like myself. However, the truth is that I have no
criterion for discriminating living human beings from persons, for
the very good reason that persons are living human beings - there
is no conceptual difference between the two. Since the argument acknowledges
that I know living human beings directly, it thereby implicitly acknowledges
that I know other persons directly, thus making itself functionally redundant.
(Malcolm, N. op. cit.).
A final, frequently-encountered objection to the argument from analogy
derives from the work of Strawson and Malcolm: the
argument attempts to move inferentially from my supposed direct knowledge
of my own mental life and "inner" states to my indirect knowledge of the
mental states of others. It thus presupposes that I know what it means
to assign mental states to myself without necessarily knowing what it means
to ascribe them to others. This is incoherent. To speak
of certain mental states as being mine in the first place is to
discriminate them from mental states that are not mine and these,
by definition, are the mental states of others. It follows, therefore,
that in a fundamental sense the argument from analogy cannot
get off the ground: one cannot know how to ascribe mental states to oneself
unless one also knows what it means to ascribe mental states to others.
Plausible as this objection seems at first sight, it is (ironically,
on Wittgensteinian criteria) quite mistaken. For it is not the case that
when I am in pain I first identify the pain and subsequently come to
recognize that it is one that I, as distinct from someone else,
have. The personal pronoun "I" in the locution "I am in pain" is not the
"I" of personal individuation - it does not refer to me or discriminate
me as a publicly situated person as distinct from others. (The Blue
Book and Brown Books, pp. 67-69; also Investigations, I. §
406). The exponent of the argument from analogy is not guilty of
the charge of presupposing the very thing that he is endeavoring to demonstrate,
as both Strawson and Malcolm suggest. Wittgenstein in fact considered that
there is a genuine asymmetry here, in relation to the ascription of psychological
predicates to oneself and to others, which is dimly perceived but misrepresented
by those who feel the need of the argument from analogy. Whereas
one ascribes psychological states to others by reference to bodily and
behavioral criteria, one has and requires no criteria at all to self-ascribe
or self-avow them. (Investigations, I. § 289-290).
Thus the exponent of the argument from analogy sees, quite correctly,
that present-tense, first-person psychological assertions such as "I am
in pain" differ radically from third-person psychological predicate ascriptions,
but thinks of the former as descriptions of "inner" mental states to which
he alone has a privileged access. This is crucially wrong. Such uses of the word "I" as occur in present-tense, first-person psychological
assertions do not identify a possessor; they do not discriminate one person
from amongst a group. As Wittgenstein puts it,
To say "I have pain" is no more a statement about a
particular person than moaning is. (The Blue Book and Brown Books,
p. 67; also Investigations, I. § 404.).
To ascribe pain to a third party, on the other hand, is to identify
a concrete individual as the possessor of the pain. On this point alone
Wittgenstein concurs with the exponent of the argument from analogy. However,
Wittgenstein here calls attention to the fact that the asymmetry is not
one that exists between the supposedly direct and certain knowledge that
I have of my own mental states as distinct from the wholly inferential
knowledge which, allegedly, I have of the mental states of others. Rather,
the asymmetry is that the ascriptions of psychological predicates
to others require criterial justificatory grounds, whereas the self-avowals
or self-ascriptions of such predicates are criterionless. It thus transpires
that the argument from analogy appears possible and necessary only to those
who misapprehend the asymmetry between the criterial bases
for third-person psychological predicate ascription and the non-criterial
right for their self-ascription or self-avowal for a cognitive asymmetry
between direct and indirect knowledge of mental states. The Cartesian egocentric
view of the mind and of mental events that gives rise both to the specter
of solipsism and attempts to evade it by means of the argument from analogy
has its origins in this very misapprehension.
6. The Privacy of Experience
What then of solipsism? To what extent does the foregoing undermine it
as a coherent philosophical hypothesis, albeit one in which no-one really
believes? Solipsism rests upon certain presuppositions
about the mind and our knowledge of mental events and processes. Two of
these, the thesis that I have a privileged form of access to and knowledge
of my own mind and the thesis that there is no conceptual or logically
necessary link between the mental and the physical, have been dealt with
above. If the foregoing is correct, both theses are false. This leaves
us with the final presupposition underlying solipsism, that all experiences
are necessarily (that is logically) private to the individual whose experiences
they are. This thesis - which, it is fair to say, is very widely accepted
- also derives from the Cartesian account of mind and generates solipsistic
conclusions by suggesting that experience is something that, because of
its "occult" or ephemeral nature, can never literally be shared. No two
people can ever be said to have the same experience.
This again introduces the problem of how one person can know the experiences
of another or, more radically, how one can know that another person has
experiences at all.
Wittgenstein offers a comprehensive critique of this view.
He attacks the notion that experience is necessarily private. His
arguments against this are complex, if highly compressed
and rather oracular. (For more detailed accounts, cf. Kenny, A., Malcolm, N. (b), Vohra,
A.).
Wittgenstein distinguishes two senses of the word "private" as it is
normally used: privacy of knowledge and privacy of possession. Something
is private to me in the first sense if only I can know it; it is private
to me in the second sense if only I can have it. Thus the thesis that experience
is necessarily private can mean one of two things, which are not always
discriminated from each other with sufficient care: (a) only I can know
my experiences or (b) only I can have my experiences. Wittgenstein argues
that the first of these is false and the second is true in a sense
that does not make experience necessarily private, as follows:
Under (a), if we take pain as an experiential exemplar, we find that the assertion
"Only I can know my pains" is a conjunction of two separate theses: (i)
I (can) know that I am in pain when I am in pain and (ii) other people
cannot know that I am in pain when I am in pain. Thesis (i) is, literally,
nonsense: it cannot be meaningfully asserted of me that I
know that I am in pain. Wittgenstein's point here is not that
I do not know that I am in pain when I am in pain, but rather that the
word "know" cannot be significantly employed in this way. (Investigations,
I. § 246; II. xi. p. 222). This is because the verbal locution "I
am in pain" is usually (though not invariably) an expression of pain -
as part of acquired pain-behavior it is a linguistic substitute for such
natural expressions of pain as groaning. (I. § 244). For this reason
it cannot be governed by an epistemic operator. The prepositional function
"I know that x" does not yield a meaningful proposition if the variable
is replaced by an expression of pain, linguistic or otherwise. Thus to
say that others learn of my pains only from my behavior is misleading,
because it suggests that I learn of them otherwise, whereas I don't
learn of them at all - I have them. (I. § 246).
Thesis (ii) - other people cannot know that I am in pain when I am in
pain - is false. If we take the word "know" is as it is normally
used, then it is true to say that other people can and very frequently
do know when I am in pain. Indeed, in cases where the pain is extreme,
it is often impossible to prevent others from knowing this even when one
wishes to do so. Thus, in certain circumstances, it would not be unusual
to hear it remarked of someone, for example, that "a moan of pain escaped
him" - indicating that despite his efforts, he could not but manifest
his pain to others. It thus transpires that neither thesis (i) nor (ii)
is true.
If we turn to (b), we find that "Only I can have my pains" expresses
a truth, but it is a truth that is grammatical rather than ontological.
It draws our attention to the grammatical connection between the personal
pronoun "I" and the possessive "my." However, it tells us nothing specifically
about pains or other experiences, for it remains true if we replace the
word "pains" with many other plural nouns (e.g. "Only I can have my blushes").
Another person can have the same pain as me. If our pains have the
same phenomenal characteristics and corresponding locations, we will quite
correctly be said to have "the same pain." This is what the expression
"the same pain" means. Another person, however, cannot have my pains.
My pains are the ones that, if they are expressed at all, are expressed
by me. But by exactly the same (grammatical) token, another person cannot
have my blushes, sneezes, frowns, fears, and so forth., and none of this can be
taken as adding to our stockpile of metaphysical truths. It is true that I may deliberately and successfully keep an experience to
myself, in which case that particular experience might be said to be private
to me. But I might do this by articulating it in a language that
those with whom I was conversing do not understand. There is clearly
nothing occult or mysterious about this kind of privacy. (Investigations,
II. xi, p. 222). Similarly, experience that I do not or cannot keep to myself is not private. In
short, some experiences are private and some are not. Even though some experiences are private in this sense, it does not follow that
all experiences could be private. As Wittgenstein points out, "What
sometimes happens could always happen" is a fallacy. It does not follow
from the fact that some orders are not obeyed that all orders might never
be obeyed. For in that case the concept "order" would become incapable
of instantiation and would lose its significance. (I. § 345).
7. The Incoherence of Solipsism
With the belief in the essential privacy of experience eliminated as false,
the last presupposition underlying solipsism is removed and solipsism is shown as foundationless, in theory and in fact.
One might even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for
to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist
would implicitly have to affirm the very thing that he purportedly
refuses to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria and
a public, extra-mental world. There is a temptation to say that solipsism
is a false philosophical theory, but this is not quite strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is
incoherent. What makes it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist
requires a language (that is a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic
thoughts at all. Given this, it is scarcely surprising that those philosophers
who accept the Cartesian premises that make solipsism apparently plausible,
if not inescapable, have also invariably assumed that language-usage
is itself essentially private. The cluster of arguments - generally referred
to as "the private language argument" - that we find in the Investigations
against this assumption effectively administers the coup de grâce
to both Cartesian dualism and solipsism. (I. § 202; 242-315). Language
is an irreducibly public form of life that is encountered in specifically
social contexts. Each natural language-system contains an indefinitely
large number of "language-games," governed by rules that, though
conventional, are not arbitrary personal fiats. The meaning of a word is
its (publicly accessible) use in a language. To question, argue, or
doubt is to utilize language in a particular way. It is
to play a particular kind of public language-game. The proposition
"I am the only mind that exists" makes sense only to the extent that
it is expressed in a public language, and the existence of such language
itself implies the existence of a social context. Such a context exists
for the hypothetical last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, but not for
the solipsist.
A non-linguistic solipsism is unthinkable and a thinkable
solipsism is necessarily linguistic. Solipsism therefore presupposes the
very thing that it seeks to deny. That solipsistic thoughts
are thinkable in the first instance implies the existence of the public,
shared, intersubjective world that they purport to call into question.
8. References and Further Reading
Ayer, A. J. The Problem of Knowledge. Penguin, 1956.
Beck, K. "De re Belief and Methodological Solipsism," in Thought
and Object - Essays in Intentionality (ed. A. Woodfield). Clarendon
Press, 1982.
Dancy, J. Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Blackwell,
1985.
Descartes, R. Discourse on Method and the Meditations (trans.
F. E. Sutcliffe). Penguin, 1968.
Devitt, M. Realism and Truth. Blackwell, 1984.
Hacker, P.M.S. Insight and Illusion. O.U.P., 1972.
James, W. Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe. E.P.
Dutton, 1971.
Kenny, A. Wittgenstein. Penguin, 1973.
Locke, J. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. A.C. Fraser).
Dover, 1959.
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