Skepticism About Other Minds Essay

Skepticism About Other Minds One of the core problems of skepticism is that of the existence of other minds. Do other minds exist and, if so, how do we know this? I posit that not only can we not understand other minds, but that other minds do not exist in the first place. This argument rests on the entertainment of several key presumptions. First, that we surely know our own minds, thoughts, and experiences. For example, I know when I am in pain, I know when I feel hungry, and I know when I feel happy. And second, that our experiences are unique (or ‘private’) to ourselves. Once we consider these premises, we arrive at the core argument - because we cannot have shared experiences and because our experiences are unique to ourselves, we cannot have the experiences of another and therefore, other minds cannot exist. A common refutation of the aforementioned argument is that the ability of humans to perform analogical inference points to the existence of other minds. For example, if I stub my toe, I will cry out in pain and recoil. When
Particular instances of individual experiences can be referred to as qualia. A tomato’s perceived redness or pain resulting from a needle pricking the skin are both examples of qualia. It is from here that some philosophers postulate that we internally attach labels such as ‘red’ to these qualia. John Locke states in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding that, “Words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them”. Because our experiences are unique, the words we internally attach to concepts are as well. Locke, however, recognizes that humans do communicate and puts forth the idea that individual experiences are understood among people through a common, shared language separable from that of the internal, private language. This lends credit to