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Other Minds
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.
- GenresPhilosophy
276 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1965
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About the author
John Wisdom
35 books9 followersArthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom (12 September 1904, Leyton, Essex – 9 December 1993, Cambridge), usually cited as John Wisdom, was a leading British philosopher considered to be an ordinary languagephilosopher, a philosopher of mind and a metaphysician. He was influenced by G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgensteinand Sigmund Freud, and in turn explained and extended their work.
He is not to be confused with the philosopher John Oulton Wisdom (1908–1993), his cousin, who shared his interest in psychoanalysis.
- Wikipedia
He is not to be confused with the philosopher John Oulton Wisdom (1908–1993), his cousin, who shared his interest in psychoanalysis.
- Wikipedia
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August 8, 2024
PRESENTATION OF A VARIETY OF PERSPECTIVES ON THE ISSUE
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom (1904-1993) was a British philosopher who was, for most of his career, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. (Near the end of his career he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon.)
This book is a reprinting of papers originally published in ‘Mind,’ ‘Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,’ etc., and several addresses. Most of the early chapters are told as a dialogue between ‘Black, ‘White,’ ‘Gray,’ and ‘Brown.’ (So it can be difficult at times to ascertain exactly what is Wisdom’s own position.)
He wrote in the Preface to this 1952 book, “The central aim of [this book] is to indicate what it is about one person’s knowledge of the mind of another which has led some philosophers to say that such knowledge is impossible, other to say that it is inevitably indirect and others to say that it is not more than knowledge of the reactions of an organism to its environment. The book is also concerned with what has led philosophers to say similar things about other sorts of knowledge: knowledge of the future, knowledge of the past, knowledge of the material world as opposed to knowledge of what at the moment appears to be so.”
Here are some excerpts: “BLACK: … even the modern theologian is serious. True, he is quite unlike the primitive believer in God, who believes that floods have been sent by God… the modern theologian knows that is only an anthropomorphic superstition, and he no more expects sacrifice or prayer to make any difference to the number of sheep saved than does an atheist… They regard personal immortality as another childish feature of primitive belief. But they seriously believe that something is going on now other than the processes of nature, namely the supervising mental processes of a super-being. And this is what makes their question serious.” (Pg. 44)
“BLACK: Once I said to [G.E.] Moore, that great apostle of propriety, ‘What bothers you about statements about the minds of others? You are satisfied that they don’t mean the same as any stories, however complete, about their bodies; you are satisfied of course that sometimes you know such statements to be true. Is it then only the folly of others that bothers you? You yourself surely find nothing puzzling about the matter?’ He replied that of course sometimes he knew statements about the minds of others to be correct, but that what bothered him was that he didn’t know HOW he knew them to be correct.” (Pg. 61)
“WHITE: I insist upon the idiosyncrasy of the relationship between the phenomena in which these things manifest themselves to us and these things themselves, between the basis of our knowledge of these things and these things, and this is a way of grasping the nature of these things… Metaphysics comes from obsessional qualms about the use of ‘justify,’ a Pharisaism in Logic instead of in Morals or Art.” (Pg. 73)
“BLACK: I insisted… that when your hearer is the person about whom you are speaking then a statement about him will feel has a very different meaning from what the corresponding statement about how he and his environment will look has. Thus it makes no difference to us whether Smith has his stitches out under an anaesthetic or not, nor whether he’s shot at dawn and joins the choirs invisible or shot at dawn and joins the choirs invisible or shat at dawn and joins the devils in hell. But it does to him.” (Pg. 88)
“WHITE: Gray, your faith in ratiocination is pathetic. I can just hear you deducing away ‘Is it LOGICALLY or merely PHYSICALLY impossible to find out whether God exists? It’s logically impossible, therefore it’s a senseless question. But don’t you see that the new formula only reputs the question… in the form ‘Is it logically impossible to find out whether God exists?’… There are no right words in philosophy, only lucky ones… no reformulations are at last correct for then they vanish into logic. And there is no sharp line between logic and philosophy. Logic is rhetoric, proof persuasion, and philosophy logic played with especially elastic equations.” (Pg. 93-94)
“WHITE: Besides the fact that any telepathy consists in predicting sensation from sensation and is thus (a) indirect and (b) still confined to the knower’s sensations, there is the point that only if the telepathic sensations are extremely like those they are used to predict is there any inclination to speak of the facts of telepathy as direct seeing into the mind of another. At the same time if they are extremely like a new disinclination to say this arises in another way.” (Pg. 106-107)
“GRAY: Whether you call this ‘looking into’ the mind of another or no isn’t the point. The point is ‘Wouldn’t this be KNOWING what is going on in the mind of another?’ and it would be. What is more it would be knowing is in a very special way, not from his face and behavior but in the sort of way one knows one’s own mind. For with this gift I should know that Smith was in love by the way I felt and this is the way I know I am in love, that is, this is the way I know what is going on in my own mind.” (Pg. 127)
“WHITE: I believe that it is impossible that a man should know the mind of another in the sort of way he knows his own sensations of the moment, but it takes time to see why…we shall then see the connection between the nature of knowing and the nature of what is known, and how this connection is not accidental but necessary, so that (i) ‘We never really know the minds of others, never really know anything beyond their behavior,’ is not only true but necessarily true; (ii) ‘We never really know anything beyond our own sensations’ is not only true but necessarily true; (iii) ‘We never really know anything beyond our own sensation of the moment’ is not only true but necessarily true; (iv) ‘We never really know anything’ is not only true but necessarily true.’” (Pg. 140)
“WHITE: ‘There are skeptics whose skepticism arises from not accepting your last step, from denying that even an infinite knowledge of the actual and potential patterns of appearance gives knowledge of reality… It is with a wider skepticism that we are now concerned. This skepticism has a different source, namely the denial that from the present we can know ANYTHING about the future. Skeptics of this sort say, ‘You may say if you like that knowledge is possible to the point of infinity, and that when time and with it distance is no more than error will have become impossible. For then the objective will have vanished into the subjective, the subjective into the objective, and we shall know not through a glass darkly but face to face. But this way of describing our ignorance … doesn’t affect out claim that no man knows anything.” (Pg. 184)
“WHITE: “When the pessimist says ‘Perfect love is impossible’ he speaks as if he is remarking on a shortcoming which he has noticed in all loves---a coming short of something he can dream of but never find. At the same time he conveys the impression that the shortcoming is inevitable. It is indeed inevitable, it if of the essence of love. Not merely of human love… for him there is no top story, so that in heaven, too, love is imperfect, and this is no accident but of the essence of love.” (Pg.198)
In another paper, Wisdom observes, “the pure paradox that we CAN never know the mind of another emphasizes the differences between everything we do call or might be tempted to call one person’s learning the correctness of a prediction about the mind of another and what we call a person’s learning the correctness of a prediction about his own mind. It does this by using the differences to persuade us to call ‘nothing’ knowing the correctness of a prediction about the mind of another in the way he knows it himself.” (Pg. 219)
Later, he adds, “Even a logical statement… can reveal to us what we had not realized. Thus the equation: ‘God exists’ means ‘Something is divine’ disconnects ‘God exists’ from ‘God knows’ and ‘God loves’ and so breaks the power of an analogy suggested by the shape of sentences and very confusing, as we know, in certain connections.” (Pg. 221)
In the final essay (which was his 1950 presidential address to the Aristotelian Society) he said, “[Metaphysics’] doctrines are paradoxes when they aren’t platitudes. And they are tautologies, truths which couldn’t but be true. And they are tautologies which tend towards the unlimited tautology of Absolute Skepticism. Take ‘No one really knows the past.’ This couldn’t but be true in its paradoxical role. For in that role it either refers to the peculiarities of knowledge of the past which makes it knowledge of the past or it’s a deduction from the wider paradox that no one really knows anything as to what is gone or what’s to come, only what is so… But all this no more makes metaphysical questions senseless than it makes other tautological and unlimited and unlimited paradoxical questions senseless. Such questions have their own sort of sense… Reasons for answers to paradoxical questions are eccentric but they are reasons still.” (Pg. 264-265)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying analytical philosophy.
Arthur John Terence Dibben Wisdom (1904-1993) was a British philosopher who was, for most of his career, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University. (Near the end of his career he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon.)
This book is a reprinting of papers originally published in ‘Mind,’ ‘Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,’ etc., and several addresses. Most of the early chapters are told as a dialogue between ‘Black, ‘White,’ ‘Gray,’ and ‘Brown.’ (So it can be difficult at times to ascertain exactly what is Wisdom’s own position.)
He wrote in the Preface to this 1952 book, “The central aim of [this book] is to indicate what it is about one person’s knowledge of the mind of another which has led some philosophers to say that such knowledge is impossible, other to say that it is inevitably indirect and others to say that it is not more than knowledge of the reactions of an organism to its environment. The book is also concerned with what has led philosophers to say similar things about other sorts of knowledge: knowledge of the future, knowledge of the past, knowledge of the material world as opposed to knowledge of what at the moment appears to be so.”
Here are some excerpts: “BLACK: … even the modern theologian is serious. True, he is quite unlike the primitive believer in God, who believes that floods have been sent by God… the modern theologian knows that is only an anthropomorphic superstition, and he no more expects sacrifice or prayer to make any difference to the number of sheep saved than does an atheist… They regard personal immortality as another childish feature of primitive belief. But they seriously believe that something is going on now other than the processes of nature, namely the supervising mental processes of a super-being. And this is what makes their question serious.” (Pg. 44)
“BLACK: Once I said to [G.E.] Moore, that great apostle of propriety, ‘What bothers you about statements about the minds of others? You are satisfied that they don’t mean the same as any stories, however complete, about their bodies; you are satisfied of course that sometimes you know such statements to be true. Is it then only the folly of others that bothers you? You yourself surely find nothing puzzling about the matter?’ He replied that of course sometimes he knew statements about the minds of others to be correct, but that what bothered him was that he didn’t know HOW he knew them to be correct.” (Pg. 61)
“WHITE: I insist upon the idiosyncrasy of the relationship between the phenomena in which these things manifest themselves to us and these things themselves, between the basis of our knowledge of these things and these things, and this is a way of grasping the nature of these things… Metaphysics comes from obsessional qualms about the use of ‘justify,’ a Pharisaism in Logic instead of in Morals or Art.” (Pg. 73)
“BLACK: I insisted… that when your hearer is the person about whom you are speaking then a statement about him will feel has a very different meaning from what the corresponding statement about how he and his environment will look has. Thus it makes no difference to us whether Smith has his stitches out under an anaesthetic or not, nor whether he’s shot at dawn and joins the choirs invisible or shot at dawn and joins the choirs invisible or shat at dawn and joins the devils in hell. But it does to him.” (Pg. 88)
“WHITE: Gray, your faith in ratiocination is pathetic. I can just hear you deducing away ‘Is it LOGICALLY or merely PHYSICALLY impossible to find out whether God exists? It’s logically impossible, therefore it’s a senseless question. But don’t you see that the new formula only reputs the question… in the form ‘Is it logically impossible to find out whether God exists?’… There are no right words in philosophy, only lucky ones… no reformulations are at last correct for then they vanish into logic. And there is no sharp line between logic and philosophy. Logic is rhetoric, proof persuasion, and philosophy logic played with especially elastic equations.” (Pg. 93-94)
“WHITE: Besides the fact that any telepathy consists in predicting sensation from sensation and is thus (a) indirect and (b) still confined to the knower’s sensations, there is the point that only if the telepathic sensations are extremely like those they are used to predict is there any inclination to speak of the facts of telepathy as direct seeing into the mind of another. At the same time if they are extremely like a new disinclination to say this arises in another way.” (Pg. 106-107)
“GRAY: Whether you call this ‘looking into’ the mind of another or no isn’t the point. The point is ‘Wouldn’t this be KNOWING what is going on in the mind of another?’ and it would be. What is more it would be knowing is in a very special way, not from his face and behavior but in the sort of way one knows one’s own mind. For with this gift I should know that Smith was in love by the way I felt and this is the way I know I am in love, that is, this is the way I know what is going on in my own mind.” (Pg. 127)
“WHITE: I believe that it is impossible that a man should know the mind of another in the sort of way he knows his own sensations of the moment, but it takes time to see why…we shall then see the connection between the nature of knowing and the nature of what is known, and how this connection is not accidental but necessary, so that (i) ‘We never really know the minds of others, never really know anything beyond their behavior,’ is not only true but necessarily true; (ii) ‘We never really know anything beyond our own sensations’ is not only true but necessarily true; (iii) ‘We never really know anything beyond our own sensation of the moment’ is not only true but necessarily true; (iv) ‘We never really know anything’ is not only true but necessarily true.’” (Pg. 140)
“WHITE: ‘There are skeptics whose skepticism arises from not accepting your last step, from denying that even an infinite knowledge of the actual and potential patterns of appearance gives knowledge of reality… It is with a wider skepticism that we are now concerned. This skepticism has a different source, namely the denial that from the present we can know ANYTHING about the future. Skeptics of this sort say, ‘You may say if you like that knowledge is possible to the point of infinity, and that when time and with it distance is no more than error will have become impossible. For then the objective will have vanished into the subjective, the subjective into the objective, and we shall know not through a glass darkly but face to face. But this way of describing our ignorance … doesn’t affect out claim that no man knows anything.” (Pg. 184)
“WHITE: “When the pessimist says ‘Perfect love is impossible’ he speaks as if he is remarking on a shortcoming which he has noticed in all loves---a coming short of something he can dream of but never find. At the same time he conveys the impression that the shortcoming is inevitable. It is indeed inevitable, it if of the essence of love. Not merely of human love… for him there is no top story, so that in heaven, too, love is imperfect, and this is no accident but of the essence of love.” (Pg.198)
In another paper, Wisdom observes, “the pure paradox that we CAN never know the mind of another emphasizes the differences between everything we do call or might be tempted to call one person’s learning the correctness of a prediction about the mind of another and what we call a person’s learning the correctness of a prediction about his own mind. It does this by using the differences to persuade us to call ‘nothing’ knowing the correctness of a prediction about the mind of another in the way he knows it himself.” (Pg. 219)
Later, he adds, “Even a logical statement… can reveal to us what we had not realized. Thus the equation: ‘God exists’ means ‘Something is divine’ disconnects ‘God exists’ from ‘God knows’ and ‘God loves’ and so breaks the power of an analogy suggested by the shape of sentences and very confusing, as we know, in certain connections.” (Pg. 221)
In the final essay (which was his 1950 presidential address to the Aristotelian Society) he said, “[Metaphysics’] doctrines are paradoxes when they aren’t platitudes. And they are tautologies, truths which couldn’t but be true. And they are tautologies which tend towards the unlimited tautology of Absolute Skepticism. Take ‘No one really knows the past.’ This couldn’t but be true in its paradoxical role. For in that role it either refers to the peculiarities of knowledge of the past which makes it knowledge of the past or it’s a deduction from the wider paradox that no one really knows anything as to what is gone or what’s to come, only what is so… But all this no more makes metaphysical questions senseless than it makes other tautological and unlimited and unlimited paradoxical questions senseless. Such questions have their own sort of sense… Reasons for answers to paradoxical questions are eccentric but they are reasons still.” (Pg. 264-265)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying analytical philosophy.
Displaying 1 of 1 review