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Can justice be done to the special status of knowledge of our own minds without making it impossible to know anything about the minds of others?

To consider whether justice can be done to the special status of our knowledge of our own minds, it is necessary to first assess how this issue arises from the problem of our knowledge of other minds. There is a difficulty in that we know our own minds through one method, and the minds of others by another. There is an asymmetry here as we use different methods to identify what should be essentially the same characteristics. It is presumed that we know our own minds best; in a special way that is different from the way others perceive us:

…The kind of knowledge that a person has of his own mental (psychological) states, such as thoughts and feelings, is in principle not only fundamentally different from but also superior to the knowledge of his thoughts and feelings that is available to anyone else.[i]

This idea that we have superior knowledge of our own minds, which can be called Privileged Access, can lead to difficulties with knowledge of other people. This problem was addressed by Descartes. He was concerned that although he was certain of the existence of his own mind, he was not, and could not be, about the minds of others. He wrote:

But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax. Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.[ii]

For him, then it seemed clear that all he could see of other people was their behaviour. It was his own philosophy that led him unfortunately to this conclusion, as he considered the mind to be non-corporeal and private, and the body to be physical and public. We might say that ‘states of mind are “private.” They are “directly observable” only by the person (or creature) having them; outsiders can only infer them from their material effects.’[iii] So the mind, in effect, is separate from the physical world and there is no way to prove its existence in another person. It can be seen, then, that our special knowledge of our own minds leads us to be unable to give a reason for our belief in other minds. We assume that other people are like us, but what proof do we have?

If all we can observe of others is their behaviour, is it not possible to use behaviour as a proof? One way is to generalise from your own case to that of others. This is known as the argument from analogy, and is summarised below:

From subjective observation I know that A, which is a thought or feeling, causes B, which is a bodily act, e.g., a statement. I know also that, whenever B is an act of my own body, A is its cause. I now observe an act of the kind B in a body not my own, and I am having no thought or feeling of the kind A… I therefore infer that there was an A which caused B, though it was not an A that I could observe.[iv]

So we attribute minds like our own to other people because they behave as we do. In our case we know that specific behaviour is invariably caused by particular mental states, so we infer from the production of similar behaviour that they must be in possession of a similar mental state. The main, and obvious, problem with the argument from analogy is that it is an inductive argument of a very weak kind, as we are generalising from just one case (our own) to that of everyone else. Using an argument of this form can be seen to have problems:

Thus, one might imagine there being a firm taboo against our ever seeing one another unclothed, and in that case my knowing that I had a hidden birth-mark would not entitle me to infer with any great degree of confidence that the same was true of everybody else.[v]

As can be seen by the above example one can generate a large number of generalisations without ever producing something that is true. It is therefore not productive to base a belief in the existence of other minds on an argument of this form, as there is nothing to justify the generalisation. There is nothing that can be used as supporting evidence as ‘all one can ever observe is one-half of the alleged connection: the creature’s behaviour?’[vi] But, could it not be considered that ‘observable behaviour is, in some sense, all there is to having a mind.’[vii] The behaviourists believed so. They did not have any difficulty with the problem of other minds because, from their view, as long as there is behaviour there is a mind.

For the psychological behaviourists, it was not correct to refer to the inner workings of the mind at all; such things should be referred to instead entirely through observation of behaviour. A given situation would produce typical behaviour, reducing human actions to input/output behaviour. Since mental states were considered identical to behaviour, descriptions of inner states could be deemed irrelevant:

Behaviourism held that mental states were identical with sets of actual and counterfactual overt behaviours and that inner states of the subject, though no doubt causally implicated in such behaviours, were not theoretically important to understanding what it is to be in certain mental states.[viii]

Conversely philosophical behaviourism was less inclined to dismiss the mind altogether. It talks instead about dispositions to behave. For example a brittle vase may be deemed disposed to smashing, but we do not call it the cause of the vase breaking. Examples like this can be applied to people in order to suggest how they might behave given certain dispositions. They concede that these dispositions may never be manifested at all, for example a brittle vase that never breaks.

A problem that behaviourists encountered was that behaviour is never the same from one occurrence to the next. There are many different ways that I can raise my arm to drink my cup of tea, but that does not suggest a different behaviour each time. It became the case that ‘behaviourists were unable to state the necessary and sufficient behavioural conditions for the application of even a single psychological term.’[ix] There is no way to describe behaviour in a neutral way that still encompasses all acts of a specific type of behaviour. Another difficulty is that we would ‘have no good inductive grounds for speculating about the feelings of utterly silent people, or of people who did not betray themselves in speculating about us.’[x] If there is no behaviour it is very difficult to generalise.

Both forms of behaviourism appear to undermine our notion of Privileged Access. It is interesting to consider that:

It is an essential aspect of our use of certain mental predicates that we apply them to others on the basis of behavioural evidence but to ourselves without benefit of such aid… It is a strange idea that claims made without evidential or observational support should be favoured over claims with such support.[xi]

So we can use behavioural evidence for ascribing mental predicates to others, but we do not feel the need to provide any such evidence for ourselves. This could be argued to be because we feel that because of our special knowledge of our own mind we could not be wrong about its contents.

It can be questioned whether we can be completely sure about our own case. For example, in the case of jealousy it is often the case that people know that you are jealous before you become aware of it yourself. If we have no external criteria for verifying whether or not our own ascriptions are correct then how can we ever be sure about the contents of our own mind?

He feels sure that he identifies correctly the occurrences in his soul; but feeling sure is no guarantee of being right… He does not know how to distinguish between actually making correct identifications and being under the impression that he does.[xii]

This means our knowledge of our own case may not be a good place to generalise from anyway. This was questioned by Norman Malcolm, who said: ‘It is the mistaken assumption that one learns from one’s own case what thinking, feeling, sensation are.’[xiii] For example you could believe that you had correctly identified what you were feeling, but you would have nothing to verify this with.

So there is a difficulty, not with verifying other minds, but in verifying our own. It is difficult to observe our own behaviour, and it seems unreliable to presume that this is what one needs to do to verify one’s own mental states.

However, there is still a sense in which we want to say that our knowledge of our own minds is superior. It could be considered that even if we can be mistaken about some of the contents of our minds, we could not be mistaken about it in its entirety; there is still a feeling that we are in a better position to observe ourselves. So, following the behaviourist view, what could cause us to feel that we have superior knowledge of ourselves? If the criterion which is being used is behaviour, it could be that ‘what we take for “Privileged Access” is due to nothing more than the fact we are generally better placed to observe ourselves than others are.’[xiv] We continually have experience of our own behaviour, whereas the behaviour of others is only apparent when we are in contact with them. So, could it be that what we take as being Privileged Access is merely an offshoot of familiarity? Gilbert Ryle thought that the apparent asymmetry was caused not by differences in kind of thing we identify but in degree, we merely have more access to out own behaviour.

It would seem that this view is missing an important factor; after all as Donald Davidson said: ‘It is seldom the case that I need or appeal to evidence or observation in order to find out what I believe; normally I know what I think before I speak or act.’[xv] We do not, normally, find out what we believe by observing our own behaviour. There is a very important sense in which we know what we think irrespective of our actions.

So, we turned to behaviourism in order to explain how it was we could have knowledge of the minds of others, but ‘behaviourism was then rejected in part because it could not explain one of the most obvious aspects of mental states: the fact that they are in general known to the person who has them without appeal to behaviouristic evidence.’[xvi] We do not need evidence to understand our own minds, and if we did it would undermine our own personal knowledge. However, we need a way to understand how we ascribe any mental properties to others. Any public criteria will undermine our own sense of the special status of the knowledge of our own mind:

If we grant (as we should) that the necessary public and interpersonal character of language guarantees that we often correctly apply these predicates to others, and that therefore we often do know what others think, then the question must be raised what grounds each of us has for thinking he knows what (in the same sense) he thinks.[xvii]

This is a major difficulty, as the situation has now been reversed. We started wondering how we could know the existence of other minds, and were led to the unfortunate point where we have to justify our conception of ourselves. If we follow the line that we know our own minds, that we have access to a non-physical private thing that is our mind, then we cannot ever know the mind of others. But we want to find a way to retain the idea of Privileged Access without negating our ability to talk with confidence of the minds of others. There is still a need to explain our own special knowledge of the contents of our own minds. So, in our own case, what is it that we are referring to when we do ascribe propositional attitudes or dispositions? What is the nature of the ‘I’ to which we refer?

When we talk of ourselves in ways such as ‘My shoulder hurts’ or ‘I don’t like that’ it is normally considered to be equivalent to saying ‘your shoulder hurts’ or ‘you don’t like that’. In the latter case we are mentally pointing to the physical person to whom we refer. In the former however we would seem to be referring to something non-corporeal, i.e. our very sense of self. So, it could be considered that we are making a kind of inner pointing when we refer to ourselves. In the Cartesian view we would be attending to the non-physical thing which is the mind. However, it seems difficult to see exactly how we know that we are referring to the right thing, or even to the same thing each time? Is it the case that we are referring to some sort of inner object?

Philosophers who have reflected on the ‘use as subject’ of the first-person pronouns have often been inclined to say such things as that one cannot be an object to oneself, that one’s self is not one of the things one can find or encounter in the world.[xviii]

Hume found that he could not find the thing to which he referred when he talked of his self:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on one particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception.[xix]

For him all he could observe of himself was sensations and perceptions, but he could not find a unifying thing that was himself. It is because we have the feeling that there is something special about the way we use the word ‘I’ that the difficulty arises. A person feels that there is ‘something else in the background for which his ‘I’ stands, a something which has still to be described after all his ordinary personalia have been listed.’[xx] So we need to identify this thing which Hume could not find – because, after all, we are referring to something.

But, as Hume found, we are not referring to an object, and thereby we are not using the ‘I’ in the way that we would have thought. The ‘I’ is not being used as a name since: ‘The use of a name for an object is connected with a conception of that object… Such a conception is requisite if ‘I’ is a name.’[xxi] Wittgenstein argued that the ‘I’ is not being used as a name as that would not be comprehensible. In his Philosophical Investigations he gives the following example:

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. – Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. – But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language? – If so it would not be used as the name of a thing.[xxii]

The contents of the box may be different for each person, in which case they would not be seen to be referring to the same thing. It cannot be used as the name of a thing as it would have no public criteria for reference. This example suggests that, due to the notion of Privileged Access, although our language would seem to be referring to the same thing, it might not necessarily be doing so. If there are no public criteria then the word ‘I’ is not being used as the name of a thing.

How coherent is the notion that when we introspect we are looking to an internal object? It could be considered that it is because of the fact that we do not perceive ourselves in the same way as we perceive objects or other people that we cannot find ourselves. If we are looking for a ‘thing’ using the very same thing then we are unlikely to find it. This is perhaps an answer to Hume’s difficulty: ‘As Professor Price once observed, it looks very much as though the self that Hume professed to be unable to find is the one that he finds to be stumbling.’[xxiii] So perhaps there is nothing more to it than the qualities that we experience. It could be thought that: ‘From the fact that we are acquainted with the self as it manifests itself as having certain qualities, it follows that we are acquainted with the self as it is in itself.’[xxiv] So, perhaps there is not so much of a problem with not being able to find this ‘elusive’ self, at least not in connection with the notion of Privileged Access.

We shall look more closely at what exactly this notion of Privileged Access entails. It is a feature of the notion of Privileged Access that ‘a person’s sincere first-person present tense claims about his own thoughts and sensations are incorrigible – they cannot be mistaken’.[xxv] When people make an avowal (an ‘authoritative, non-inferential self-ascription’[xxvi]) they seem to have an advantage in making such a claim. It can be considered that this strong doctrine of Privileged Access means that we cannot be mistaken about the contents of our own minds.

A recent problem was raised by the Externalists who realised that the nature of the meaning of the words we say is based on our causal relation to the environment. We are reliant on our relation to the environment for the meanings of the terms that we use. As Tyler Burge suggested, it is possible to be mistaken about the actual meaning of terms that we use: ‘Thus I can know that I have arthritis, and know I think I have arthritis, even though I do not have a proper criterion for what arthritis is.’[xxvii] This would lead to a large limitation on what we can be said to know about our own minds as it would seem that ‘someone has first-person authority with respect to the contents of his mind only as those contents can be described or discovered without reference to external factors.’[xxviii]

In this way, we can be mistaken about what we actually think that we mean when we use terms, but there is still a sense in which we cannot be mistaken. It is still the case that ‘avowals would appear to exhibit a form of weak authority nonetheless… Other things being equal, I ought to know what my beliefs, desires and hopes, etc., are, even if sincerity and understanding along do not guarantee the truth of what I say about them.’[xxix] To say ‘I think I know what arthritis is’ is something which can only be verified by the person making the statement (and allowing for the fact that they are not deliberately misleading us) what they say is guaranteed to be true, even if their notions are incorrect. For example:

Just as someone thinks, falsely, “I wrote the Tractatus” does not fail to refer to himself, so someone (a human being) who mistakenly believes himself to be an immaterial soul does not thereby fail to refer to himself with his uses of “I”, even if the notion of an immaterial soul is incoherent.[xxx]

It is to be considered then that ‘no errors at all are possible in strict cogito judgements; they are self verifying.’[xxxi] So it can be seen then that ‘for its justification, basic-self-knowledge requires only that one think one’s thoughts in the self-referential, self-ascriptive manner. It neither requires, nor by itself yields a general account of the mental kinds that it specifies.’[xxxii] So self knowledge in this respect is not really revealing anything new, it just is logically self-justified.

The notion of the incorrigibility of self-ascriptive statements leads to another difficulty. In fact it is the very incorrigibility of such claims would appear to undermine the fact that such claims are deemed knowledge. This is because knowledge only really makes sense when doubt and error are possible. This was a difficulty raised by Wittgenstein:

Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it… It cannot be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain?[xxxiii]

It could be considered that the problem arises from the attempt to justify how we know what we mean when we make an avowal. As Wittgenstein suggests in the above there is no solution to such a question. It could be thought that it is a difficulty of the way that we are considering avowals:

Conceiving of avowals as reports of states and processes which are going on anyway appears to enforce a disjunction: either accept the Cartesian view, which cannot accommodate ordinary knowledge of others, or accept some form of externalisation – perhaps behaviourist, nowadays more like physicalist – which cannot support the special place of self-knowledge. So we should reject the parent assumption.[xxxiv]

The issue then as P. F. Strawson suggested is that the difficulty is intractable whilst we retain the notion that we are dealing with separate entities:

…if we try to think of that to which one’s states of consciousness are ascribed as something utterly different from that to which certain corporeal characteristics are ascribed, then indeed it becomes difficult to see why states of consciousness should be ascribed, thought of as belonging to, anything at all.[xxxv]

So, to conclude, there is a sense in which Privileged Access is a notion which we do not wish to give up. However, if we retain it we are left with the same problem. It could be that we are just asking the wrong question and that looking for a way to justify either knowledge of other minds or Privileged Access whilst retaining the asymmetry is incoherent. To deny that there is any such asymmetry leads one to a position such as behaviourism - which although it deals with the difficulty still appears to be an untenable position - but to accept the asymmetry appears to keep the problem intractable. The difficulty stands that to do justice to the special status of our knowledge of our own minds we are left in much the same as the Cartesian position, and have to accept the asymmetry.

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[i] William Alston, ‘Varieties of Privileged Access’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 8, 1971, p223
[ii] Rene Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, Cambridge University Press 1988, p85
[iii] John Heil, Philosophy of Mind, Routledge Press 1998, p18
[iv] Bertrand Russell, ‘Analogy’, The Nature of Mind, Ed. D M Rosenthal, Oxford University Press 1991, p90-1
[v] A J Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, Pelican Books 1976, p134
[vi] Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press 1988, p68
[vii] Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind, Penguin Books 1995, p49
[viii] Andy Clark, Microcognition, MIT Press 1993, p22
[ix] Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press 1988, p70
[x] Stuart Hampshire, ‘The Analogy of Feeling’, The Nature of Mind, Ed. D M Rosenthal, Oxford University Press 1991, p101
[xi] Donald Davidson, ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p44
[xii] Norman Malcolm, ‘Knowledge of Other Minds’, The Nature of Mind, Ed. D M Rosenthal, Oxford University Press 1991, p95
[xiii] Norman Malcolm, ‘Knowledge of Other Minds’, The Nature of Mind, Ed. D M Rosenthal, Oxford University Press 1991, p95
[xiv] Donald Davidson, ‘First-Person Authority’, Dialectica, 38, 1984, p104
[xv] Donald Davidson, ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p43
[xvi] Donald Davidson, ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p51
[xvii] Donald Davidson, Knowing One’s Own Mind, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p44-5
[xviii] Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p85
[xix] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford University Press 1978, p252
[xx] Gilbert Ryle, ‘Self-Knowledge’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p31
[xxi] G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p146
[xxii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell Publishers 1999, p100
[xxiii] Roderick Chisholm, ‘On the Observability of the Self’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p97
[xxiv] Roderick Chisholm, ‘On the Observability of the Self’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p108
[xxv] Quassim Cassam, ‘Introduction’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p15
[xxvi] Crispin Wright, ‘Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy’, Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, Ed. Anthony O’Hear, Cambridge University Press 1998, p102
[xxvii] Tyler Burge, ‘Individualism and Self-Knowledge’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p78
[xxviii] Donald Davidson, ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p60
[xxix] Crispin Wright, ‘Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy’, Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind, Ed. Anthony O’Hear, Cambridge University Press 1998, p105
[xxx] Quassim Cassam, ‘Introduction’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p14
[xxxi] Tyler Burge, ‘Individualism and Self-Knowledge’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p74
[xxxii] Tyler Burge, ‘Individualism and Self-Knowledge’, Self-Knowledge, Ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford University Press 1994, p78
[xxxiii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell Publishers 1999, p89
[xxxiv] Crispin Wright, ‘Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy’, Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, Ed. Anthony O’Hear, Cambridge University Press 1998, p111
[xxxv] P. F. Strawson, ‘Persons’, The Nature of Mind, Ed. D M Rosenthal, Oxford University Press 1991, p107

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