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Existence of Other Minds, seems to dismiss it, but then employs it

himself, simply changing the terms of the analogy, claiming that we come

to believe in other minds through other humans? use of informative

language, not through their behaviour.

A.J. Ayer, in his essay One?s Knowledge of Other Minds, argues that the

belief in other minds is at least as justifiable as any other inductive

argument. When we refer to the mental states of others, the descriptive

content of that reference need not necessarily include any reference to

the possessor of that mental state. There is no contradiction in asserting

that I could have had that mental state. Implicit in this argument is

Ayer?s belief that a person is no more than the aggregate of all his

properties. Thus, as none of those properties are necessarily unavailable

to me, I make no contradiction when I say that I could have had them:

“But even if my friend has no properties which make him an exception to

the rule about feeling pain, may he not still be an exception just as

being the person that he is? And in that case how can the rest of us know

whether or not he really does feel pain? But the answer to this is that

nothing is described by his being the person that he is except the

possession of certain properties. If, per impossible, we could test for

all the properties that he possesses, and found that they did not produce

a counter-example to our general hypothesis about the conditions in which

pain is felt, our knowledge would be in this respect as good as his: there

would be nothing further left for us to discover.” (pp 213-4).

And thus, if I could have had the mental states in question, I could be

the person who had them. And if I could be that person, I could verify

whether that mental state actually exists or not. Ayer?s reasoning seems

valid enough, but it is hard to know precisely what he means. It seems

certain that in referring to mental states, it is implicit that someone

owns (or is) the mind in which those states are occurring. Although Ayer

is right in his claim that we need not refer to the ?owner? of the state

when we talk about the state itself, and therefore that the owner ?could?

be us, this doesn?t seem to address the issue at hand. The problem is one

of other minds, and we are, all of us, in a situation where we find

ourselves confronted with apparent minds other than our own which are

problematic.

>From the realisation that a belief in other minds can only arise through

observation of the behaviour of others arose the ?cul-de-sac? philosophy

of logical behaviourism. This theory, now largely discredited, holds that

all statements about mental states can be translated, without loss of

meaning, into statements about observable behaviour. Thus to say that

Jones is in pain is to say that (for instance) Jones is wincing, crying

out, grimacing etc. The statements are equivalent, and consequently the

problem of other minds is not so much solved by behaviourists as

dissolved. But the terminal problem for behaviourists lies in the case of

first-person psychological statements. We certainly don?t learn about our

own mental states by observing our own behaviour. When I say ?I have a

headache?, I don?t mean that I am clutching my head, that I am taking

aspirin etc. The feeling of the headache seems in some way to pre-empt all

of this behaviour, and generally to be the primary cause of it. The

behaviourists made a valiant attempt to solve the problem of other minds

by doing away with the asymmetry between my mental states (normally taken

to be learnt through introspection), and the mental states of others

(normally taken to be learnt through introspection), but they ultimately

failed because their account of first-person psychological statements was

utterly inadequate.

Wittgenstein, in his 1953 work Philosophical Investigations, attempted to

show that the construction of a private language (a language that no-one

other than the creator is logically capable of understanding) was

impossible because languages must follow rules, and it would be impossible

for a language with no external reference to follow rules. For instance,

if I have a certain experience x one day and call it ?pain?, and then have

another experience y the next day which happens to be different to the one

I had the day before but which seems to me identical, and so I also call

it ?pain?, how, as far a I am concerned would this situation differ from

one in which the second experience was actually x? It would not, so I

could conceivably be wrong in every statement I make regarding my own

mental states. The point Wittgenstein is trying to bring out is that,

contrary to the philosophies of Cartesianism and traditional empiricism,

the language we couch our mental statements in is a public language: the

words we use only acquire their meaning through public usage. And thus if

there were no other minds in the world other than our own, we could not

make publicly understandable statements about our mental states. This is a

powerful argument, although it is open to at least two criticisms.

Firstly, it is claimed by some philosophers that it leads inexorably to a

form of behaviourism in which my knowledge of my own mental states through

introspection is not accounted for. Secondly, the argument

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