Other Minds, Privacy and Private Language:

I think I get to recognize the other person as a person when several things go on either simultaneously or in different order: 1) I recognize the other person through looking into his eyes (Sartre’s ‘look’). Of course, something from my past experience must enable me to recognize the person as that person. Otherwise, it is just a person. 2) The fact that the other person speaks a language which I can understand and respond to gives me a basis to recognize the other person as a person. Notice how we are enamored by speech coming from the radio or television or a cash register or telephone. 3) There is one more important factor: that we have some sort of interaction with the other person through language or some other dealing. We are engaged in a dialogue, and we are involved with each other. There is the ‘you-I’ dialogue. Then the recognition of the other person is automatic. It is not that we are always explicitly conscious of the fact, but our dealings and behavior betray our recognition.

These are at the bottom even when we hate or are angry at someone. When someone mows down whole groups of people with a gun, it’s not clear what sort of attitude a person has. He could be treating them as mere things or animals or he could think that they are just a bunch of enemies to be gotten rid of.

What’s interesting to note here is that there is no special problem of knowing other minds in these contexts. For practical, day-to-day purposes, the recognition is all that matters and that’s what constitutes knowledge of other minds.

The rest is based on some philosophical mind-body dualism which didn’t need to exist in the first place.

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“I know how you feel,” is something we say to other people either simply to express our sympathy or indicate that we have been in a similar situation in our past or that we have had a similar experience.

I think George Herbert Mead is correct in saying that recognition of other people is a developmental phenomenon. We are taught to separate ourselves from other people, to be aware of other people as others and to be aware of ourselves as separate from them. We don’t make such distinctions to begin with. Notice how a child (or as a matter of fact, even a grown up – I have seen this in UG when he cried watching Suguna crying) cries in pain when the mother is in pain by being ill-treated or for whatever other reason.

Such empathy is based on the fundamental non-division between the self and others. You can call that identification, which may in fact be the basis for UG’s saying, “What happens there happens here.”

There are many issues of privacy in the area of knowledge of other minds, but I think the problems get confused when you tie them to the private language controversy generated by Wittgenstein. (I mean here the idea that only I have access to my feelings and therefore, only I can know them, assuming that there is a private language through which I refer them to myself.)

Privacy and Private Language:

Your mind is private in the sense your thoughts are private (if you don’t reveal to me), your feelings are private and what you do or did, or intend to do is private.

You say “you don’t know how I feel.” You could as well say “you can’t know how I feel.” There are some senses in which these statements are true and some in which they are false. I could have been in similar circumstances or had similar experiences in the past as you are having now. Still, I can’t have your feelings, because I can’t be you no matter how much I try -- much like I can’t be that television set in front me. In order to have your feelings, in some sense I must be you. But if I can’t be you, then I can’t have your feelings, therefore, I can’t know your feelings. To know your feelings here is tantamount to having them. So, to say “only I can know my feelings” just amounts to saying “only I can have my feelings.” In this sense Wittgenstein is right.

I can’t know what you are going to do, or what you intend to do, because you keep your thoughts and intentions (which are also thoughts) to yourself and do not reveal to me. I can’t know what you have been doing, because you keep them secret, and I have no access to that information.

But that situation is different from knowing your thoughts: there are times we do say I am thinking exactly the same thing as you are. Or, you say, “Are you thinking the same thing as I am?” There is no mystery in this. We can verify this by comparing our thoughts by expressing them to each other in spoken or written word.

In this sense, we can even compare each others’ feelings by giving a description of how each of us feels about a situation. Another person could say to me, “I feel the same way” in a given situation, perhaps meaning that his description of how he feels is similar to my description how I feel in that situation.

There is no other mystery about other minds as far as I can see.