This is a guest post by Constantine Sandis, author of Wittgenstein on Other Minds: Strangers in a Strange Land
If some people looked like elephants and others like cats, or fish, one wouldn’t expect them to understand each other and things would look much more like what they really are.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, letter to Piero Sraffa, 23 August 1949
A philosopher might – in all seriousness – spend an entire lecture arguing that we cannot know that other people exist, then subsequently mark an absent student down for non-attendance. This is commonly known as the problem of insulation. The phenomenon occurs when a person’s everyday life is completely insulated from their philosophical scepticism, thereby rendering the latter pointless or null.
The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume objected to Cartesian scepticism on the grounds that it was psychologically impossible to maintain such an extreme form of doubt without going mad. He famously wrote that after a few hours of dining, conversing and playing backgammon with his friends, most philosophical speculations appear ‘cold, and strained, and ridiculous’ to him.
Hume was first a human and then a philosopher. Wittgenstein was arguably the opposite. However, they both shared a distaste for empty philosophical pontification. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein notes:
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy’.
One popular area of philosophical scepticism is the so-called problem of other minds. This is often understood as a problem in epistemology about how we can know what anybody else is thinking or feeling. At its solipsistic extreme, the alleged problem is that of knowing that other minds exist at all. How can I know that those around me are not actually automata or just mere figments of my imagination – perhaps the work of some Cartesian demon who can deceive me about anything other than the fact that I exist?
In his later work, Wittgenstein shows the above worries to be spurious, not because we can know that others have minds, but because it ordinarily makes no sense to doubt such things. Phrases such as ‘other beings have minds’ are neither true nor false but, rather, rules of grammar or linguistic hinges that allow us to make truth-apt statements about the mental lives of human and non-human animals alike.
Wittgenstein’s analytic deconstruction reveals the philosophical problem of other minds as a kind of nonsense. It doesn’t follow, however, that there are no real-life difficulties in understanding others and, indeed, ourselves. In his private life, Wittgenstein’s scepticism regarding the possibility of understanding others (and being understood by them) was unmatched. This was not on the philosophical grounds of its being in principle impossible to understand anybody but rather because it can sometimes be difficult to do so in practice, particularly in those cases in which we have little in common with the other in terms of our norms and practices. The difficulty is not an abstract metaphysical or epistemological problem but rather an everyday psychological and cultural one. This is what Marie McGinn refers to as ‘the real problem of others’. As McGinn puts it, ‘Wittgenstein is deeply opposed to the idea that our everyday doubts about others amount to a way of “living scepticism”’.
I have been working on this opposition, and Wittgenstein’s approach to understanding others more generally, for more than a decade. My book Wittgenstein on Other Minds: Strangers in a Strange Land brings together revised versions of my various essays on these themes. The aim of the book is to show how Wittgenstein’s anti-scepticism with regard to the philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ is not only compatible with but also supported by his scepticism concerning real-life difficulties of understanding others (and being understood by them). Although each individual essay focuses on particular issues (including philosophical anthropology, interpersonal psychology, translation, historiography and animal concepts), the essays collectively paint a picture of the real-life difficulties of understanding others and what, if any, expectations we should have in relation to overcoming them. Proceeding via an exegesis of Wittgenstein’s public and private writings on these matters, the book aims to showcase the relevance of Wittgenstein’s thought beyond the academy, touching on topics as wide-ranging as friendship, human–animal communications, intercultural understanding, aesthetic experience, historical understanding, forms of life and AI-mediated communication.