
	Where results make sense

Topic: The problem of other minds

	The problem of other minds - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The problem of other minds is the philosophical problem of determining how we know that there are minds associated with the bodies we see walking around among us.
		A mind at large is capable of percieving everything in the universe at the same time.
		The mind at large, that we are all capable of, has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/The_problem_of_other_minds (667 words)

	Philosophy - Wikipedia
		Philosophy of mind: the philosophical study of the nature of the mind, and its relation to the body and the rest of the world.
		On the other hand, if you don't see what all the fuss is about, it might help to read the motivation to philosophize, which explains what motivates many people to "do philosophy," and get an introduction to philosophical method, which is important to understanding how philosophers think.
		Other important, but less immediate applications can be found in epistemology, which might help one to regulate one's notions of what knowledge, evidence, and justified belief are.
	wikipedia.findthelinks.com /ph/Philosophy.html (2954 words)

	Other Minds
		Malcolm himself held that the problem lies in the belief that in looking for evidence of other minds, we need to start off from our own case and then look for evidence that other cases resemble my own in other humans.
		The problem is one of other minds, and we are, all of us, in a situation where we find ourselves confronted with apparent minds other than our own which are problematic.
		Strawson’s Transcendental Deduction of Other Minds by J.L. Martin in New Essays in the Philosophy of Mind ed.
	www.studyworld.com /basementpapers/sec_papers/Other_Minds.html (1764 words)

	The Problem of Other Minds
		The problem of other minds is the problem of demonstrating that solipsism is false.
		The problem of other minds can therefore be understood as a critique of dualism; if dualist assumptions entail that we cannot know that other people have minds, and we claim that we not only can but do know that other people have minds, then to be consistent we must reject those dualist assumptions.
		The common sense response to the problem of other minds is to say that although we cannot observe the minds of others directly, we can observe them indirectly; we see the effects of other minds and can infer the existence of other minds from those effects.
	www.philosophyofmind.info /otherminds.html (635 words)

	A Defence of Common Sense - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		In his third verse, he argues against the existence of God and against the existence of the afterlife.
		The fifth verse is an examination of the problem of other minds.
		In other words, the sense data that he perceives through his senses are facts about the interaction of the external world and himself, but he (and other philosophers) do not know how to analyze these interactions.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/A_Defence_of_Common_Sense (323 words)

	[No title]
		Hence to use the concept of a person to solve the problem of other minds, in Hume's famous words, "must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question."1 2.
		Persons and Other Minds To his credit, Strawson does not explicitly claim that his analysis of the concept of persons solves the problem of other minds.
		Stroud's use of Strawson to solve the problem of other minds is viciously circular; and the error is quite hard to forgive since Stroud himself thoroughly refuted parallel solutions to the problem of induction.
	www.gmu.edu /departments/economics/bcaplan/strawson.txt (2070 words)

	OTHER MINDS SCHRÖDINGER CARNAP
		Hypothesis P is not scientific, he insists, and that "(...) prohibits mentioning it in the very dealing with a scientific problem, in spite of, and perhaps because of the fact that science in its totality depends on that hypothesis".
		In his 1936 text, on the other hand, Carnap bases his metaphysical anti-solipsism on an argument which is borrowed from the article "Physicalismus" published by Neurath in 1931, and which arises from what the latter called "social behaviourism".
		That inference is just as legitimate as that which allows the derivation of the intensity of an electric current in a wire on the basis of quantities measured such as the rise in temperature of the wire or the deviation of a magnetised needle placed in the vicinity of the wire.
	perso.wanadoo.fr /michel.bitbol/alteregoangl.html (2991 words)

	The Problem of Other Minds II (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		The Problem of Other Minds II The Problem of Other Minds II Introduction: Recap
		In drawing inferences about the existence of other minds and the states of those minds, 'it is clear that we must appeal to something like that may be vaguely called "analogy".'
		Proposal: What justifies a) the belief that other organisms have minds and b) specific beliefs about the mental states of others is that they provide the best explanation of the behavior of others.
	www.phil.upenn.edu /~rsamuels/other_minds_2.html (602 words)

	Michael Tooley's Philosophy Home Page
		It is contended, first, that one's justification for believing that others have minds does not rest upon observation of mental states in one's own case, and secondly, that the reasoning is not a matter of inductive generalization, but of what may be labeled "inference to the best explanation".
		To apply it to the case of other organisms in order to establish that events in their brains do not have purely physical causes would be to argue in a circle, since in applying it to other organisms one is assuming that they have minds.
		Others might argue that even if epiphenomenalism is a coherent position, we can know that it is not true, and thus the suggestion that our knowledge of other minds, if based upon the inference to the best explanation, might be undermined at some future date, is not a real possibility.
	spot.colorado.edu /~tooley/Chapter6.html (17010 words)

	Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Although this view utilises language and involves the employment of conceptual categories ('the individual', 'other minds', etc.) which are inimical to solipsism, it was nonetheless fundamentally conducive historically to the development of solipsistic patterns of thought.
		This is the so-called 'argument from analogy' for other minds, which empiricist philosophers in particular who accept the Cartesian account of consciousness generally assume as a mechanism for avoiding solipsism.
		Consequently, the belief that there is something problematic about the application of psychological words to other human beings, that such applications are necessarily the products of highly fallible inferences to the 'inner' mental lives of others, which require something like the argument from analogy for their justification, turns out to be fundamentally confused.
	www.utm.edu /research/iep/s/solipsis.htm#TheIncoherenceofSolipsism (4283 words)

	[No title]
		In consequence, it is common for introductory books on philosophy of mind to deal quite briskly with the dualist position, moving swiftly on to physicalism, functionalism, and issues of contemporary debate.
		Various proposed solutions to the problem are discussed and criticized, and the assumptions which give rise to the problem are isolated and defended.
		At the end of the chapter the problem of other minds remains, to be unpicked gradually in later chapters of the book.
	www.philosophy.umd.edu /Faculty/pcarruthers/Blurb-NoM.htm (1678 words)

	The Problem of Other Minds I (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		According to the theory, external observers could never know how the overt behavior of others is correlated with their mental powers and processes and so they could never know or even plausibly conjecture whether their applications of mental-conduct concepts to those people were correct or incorrect.
		In many familiar cases that do not involve mental phenomena, we solve the problem of determining whether an event of type A counts as evidence for the occurrence of another kind of event B by observing that A and B events tend to be correlated --that they tend to go together.
		Russell on the Problem of Other Minds: The Argument From Analogy
	www.phil.upenn.edu /~rsamuels/244_other_minds_1.html (481 words)

	Solipsism: Assess the view that we start from our own case
		This is the one fundamental objection to the use of introspection that transcends all others.
		To solve the problem of other minds that was thus created he attacked the very idea of introspection as a philosophical tool.
		Secondly, the fact that the ontological, metaphysical and epistemic assumptions led to introspection and thus solipsism and thus the problem of other minds was the result of a confusion of language.
	www.arrod.co.uk /essays/solipsism.php (1458 words)

	Philosophy of Mind - The Problem of Other Minds - Some Criticisms of Wittgenstein
		Another criticism is that the problem of other minds seems to be untouched.
		This is because even though others seem to behave as if they are conscious in the same way as we are, we cannot know what it is like to be them.
		So, in the end, the problem of other minds seems to come down to the problem of consciousness.
	www.philosophyonline.co.uk /pom/pom_other_minds_wittgenstein.htm (173 words)

	The Problem of Other Minds (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		It's important to notice that this is a metaphysical problem.
		As we will see, the problem of other minds may become especially pressing given certain accounts of the mental (given certain accounts of what minds are).
		As such, the problem of other minds is going to be one of the tests we will use in evaluating different accounts.
	www.unc.edu /~theis/phil20/otherminds.html (256 words)

	Philosophy of Mind - The Problem of Other Minds - Introduction
		Well, though the problem has many aspects it mainly concerns the difficulties that arise when we consider the experiences of other people.
		But the problem arises when I try to imagine what it is like to be someone else.
		This sceptical problem argues that not only is is impossible to know what another person is thinking/feeling, but also that they actually think and feel.
	www.philosophyonline.co.uk /pom/pom_other_minds_introduction.htm (260 words)

	THE ARGUMENT FROM ANALOGY
		The traditional (Cartesian) Picture: Knowledge of our own minds is direct and immediate, but we know about the minds of others only indirectly through their behavior.
		(1) All the evidence we have to infer the existence of other minds is others’ observable behavior.
		The fallacy of “the ghost in the mind’s machine” is to suppose that mental states are causes of an individual’s behavior on a par with, and of the same sort, as the internal, neural causes of their behavior.
	www.unlv.edu /faculty/beisecker/Courses/Phi-101/ArgfromAnalogy.html (627 words)

	Societal Flourishing and the Inner Lives of Others (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		The problem of other minds may seem like a strange place to begin a discussion of the ideals of civil society.
		That being said, I propose to use the question of other minds to illuminate another truth that lies at the heart of what it is to thrive in a world where our desires and aims frequently come up against the desires and aims of others.
		While many will grant that other people exist and that their own cars are not annihilated when they walk around the corner, their lives reflect little concern with what does not directly affect them: their goals, their projects, their desires, their current activities.
	www.acton.org /programs/students/essay/2004/kadlac.html (1733 words)

	CSSP Thesis/Dissertation Abstracts -- Ulysses M. Aureus (M.A. in Philosophy) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		Any other creature will therefore likewise have a conscious experience as I do and will be having the same conscious experience as I do so long as the physical functional states of their cognitive systems implement the same causal functional organization as my brain.
		Incidentally, within a Utilitarian framework, the problem of abortion could be construed in terms of when the fetus is capable of being self-aware of the qualia of pleasure and pain and therefore should be protected under the maxim of the most optimal social maximization of pleasure, or the greatest good for the greatest possible number.
		But because both the qualia of pleasure and pain and self-awareness are conscious mental states, abortion is a practical instance of the problem of other minds.
	web.kssp.upd.edu.ph /abstracts/philo_aureus.html (304 words)

	Philosophy of Mind
		Minds are non-physical centers of thought and consciousness linked to physical bodies.
		In philosophy: Behaviorism emerged as an attempt to solve the problem of other minds.
		A problem for functionalism: Searle’s "Chinese room" allegedly shows that functionalism is too "liberal" – it attributes mental states to things that don’t have them.
	ruccs.rutgers.edu /ArchiveFolder/Phil104/BoardNotes-PhilofMind.html (729 words)

	Other Minds (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		The problem of other minds has a practical side in that it might seem as if we are only justified in treating a creature as having rights and/or duties if we are justified in treating it as having a mind.
		69: "The first problem [with the argument from analogy] is that it represents one's knowledge of other minds as resting on an inductive generalization from exactly one case.
		Note that this solution to the problem of other minds relies essentially on an understanding of our mental terms as being 'theoretical' and it thus sets the stage for the sort of elminitivism about the mental that Churchland defends elsewhere.
	www.yorku.ca /hjackman/Teaching/2160/ominds.html (727 words)

	Philosophy of Mind - The Problem of Other Minds - Exorcising the Ghost in the Machine
		As we saw when we looked at behaviourism, philosophers like Gilbert Ryle argued that it is not necessary to consider the mind as a separate physical substance, as Descartes did.
		This “ghost in the machine”, as Ryle called it, is totally unnecessary in accounting for the existence of a mind as long as we restrict our definition of mental activity to potentially observable behaviour.
		It is possible to do away with the middle box – the only unobservable part – and so do away with the problem.
	www.philosophyonline.co.uk /pom/pom_other_minds_ghost.htm (130 words)

	Newman Problem
		I have presented the "functionalist" account of the meaning of mentalistic vocabulary as the special case, for the problem of other minds, of a general strategy for explaining the meaning of "far side" terminology-- a strategy deriving, ultimately, from Russell and Ramsey.
		The problem is stated in fairly general terms by Demopoulos and Friedman in Philosophy of Science 52 (1985); they trace it back to a criticism of Russell's account of scientific theories and the external world made by Max Newman in Mind 37 (1928).
		In the lecture for 17.iv.2000 I presented the problem as it applies specifically to functionalist theories of mental states.
	www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au /handouts/161025/C.html (587 words)

	Philosophy of Mind Bibliography, Part 3: Metaphysics of Mind
		Kim, J. Causality, identity and supervenience in the mind-body problem.
		On some problems with supervenience, the relation between supervenience and reduction, and on reasons for accepting psychophysical supervenience.
		The problem's not just huge disjuncts, but also the sharing of bases, no local correlations, and base-properties presupposing supervenient properties.
	consc.net /biblio/3.html (3003 words)

	davidgagne.net » Archive » Brains and Behavior
		Logical behaviorism tries to solve the problem of other minds by showing that behavior is the effect of mind states.
		It is clear that Putnam believes the answer to the problem of other minds is not logical behaviorism.
		Not to say the mind is something we cannot apply to things and use in ways that may seem extraordinary, but that is just the reason that the mind is unknown or in the unknown.
	www.davidgagne.net /?p=5326 (1368 words)

	The Argument from Analogy (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-28)
		The "Argument from Analogy" is an attempt to solve the "Problem of Other Minds".
		However, nothing about the argument (or the problem of other minds, for that matter) depends on dualism.
		The problem of other minds is a completely general epistemological problem, and the argument from analogy is a general attempt to solve it.
	www.unc.edu /~theis/phil20/analogy.html (233 words)

	Hollis: "Understanding Social Action" (ch
		Recall Rosenberg’s point: depending on the desires and background beliefs I attribute to you, your action of lighting a cigarette can mean you think the theory of relativity is false.
		Problem of other minds is also the problem of other
		Where the goal pursued is so important it outweighs all other considerations (such as heroic or religious-fanatical actions).
	spruce.flint.umich.edu /~simoncu/311/hollis_7.htm (746 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)