Remarks on Perception and Other Minds

Authors

  • Edmund Dain Providence College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.v6i2.3403

Keywords:

Mindreading, Other Minds, Perception, Seeing, Wittgenstein Ludwig

Abstract

It is a simple truth about the English language that we can see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling. But it is tempting to think that there is a deeper sense in which we cannot really see or hear or feel these things at all. Rather, what is involved must be a matter of inference or interpretation, for instance. In these remarks, I argue against a variety of ways in which that thought, the thought that we cannot really see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling, might be developed.

Author Biography

Edmund Dain, Providence College

Edmund Dain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Providence College. He has also taught at the University of Chicago and at Cardiff University, and held a Leiv Eiriksson visiting research fellowship at the University of Bergen. His research focuses on interpreting and applying the insights of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in connection with contemporary problems in ethics, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

References

Austin, J.L. 1946 “Other Minds”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, 20, 148-187

Cassam, Quassim 2007 The Possibility of Other Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Dretske, Fred 1973 “Perception and Other Minds”, Nous 7(1), 34-44

_____ 2000 “Simple Seeing”, in Perception, Knowledge and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 97-112

Goldman, Alvin 2012 “Theory of Mind”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, ed. Margolis, Samuels and Stich (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.402-424

McDowell, John 2001 “On ‘The Reality of the Past’”, in Mind, Knowledge and Reality (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), pp. 295-313

Overgaard, Søren 2015 “The Unobservability Thesis”, Synthese (Online Early: DOI 10.1007/s11229-015-0804-3), 1-18

Russell, Bertrand 1948 Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London: Allen and Unwin)

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1958 Philosophical Investigations, 3rd edition, trans. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell)

_____ 1969 On Certainty, ed. Anscombe and von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell)

_____ 1980 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I, ed. Anscombe and von Wright

_____ 1992 Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II, ed. von Wright and Nyman (Oxford: Blackwell)

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Published

2018-01-25

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 2 (2017): Volume 6 / Number 2 (December 2017) Volume 7 / Number 2 (December 2018) S. Säätelä, G. Bengtsson, T. Österman (eds.); A. Pichler (from the Archives); M. Gustafsson (book reviews)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright (c) 2018 Edmund Dain

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Vol. 1-3 used CC-BY-NC-SA. The collected works copyright ownership for Vol. 1-2 were shared by Nordic Wittgenstein Society and ontos Verlag/De Gruyter.