Knowing others as persons

ABSTRACT

Philosophers have struggled with the problem of knowing others. The emphasis is often on the knowing here. In this paper, I want to concentrate on our conception of what is known (i.e. a person). I shall argue that we should aim to give an account of our knowledge of others that has us engaging with each other as persons. I shall argue that there is a perceptual account of our knowledge of others that has this result.

KEYWORDS:

• Other minds
• persons
• John McDowell
• direct perception
• disjunctivism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are those, not the majority, who take the central problem to be conceptual. On the conceptual problem see Avramides (2001). For a review of the problems here see Parrott (2019).

2 Michael Dummett has written that philosophy continued to be dominated by epistemology from the time of Descartes until the linguistic turn that was brought about by Frege, ‘the first philosopher after Descartes totally to reject this perspective’ ([1967] 1978, 89).

3 An exception here is the writing of Wittgenstein, and some who have followed in his footsteps – in particular, as we shall see, John McDowell.

4 See Cavell (1979, 453).

5 For this way of reading Cavell see McGinn (1998).

6 In contrast to what I am suggesting here, Nagel (1979) queried whether we could ever know what it is like to be a bat, but he did not think there was a problem of other minds in connection with other human beings.

7 The point was also observed by Bertrand Russell who wrote that our thoughts and feelings ‘cannot, even theoretically, be observed by anyone else’ ([1921] 1951, 117).

8 This translation is taken from of A. Chakrabarti (2019, ch. 17). Chakrabarti and others (e.g. Ganeri) take Dharmakirti here to be proposing an argument from analogy.

9 I don’t mean to suggest that this observation is coherent.

10 Yet further philosophical work may yield a deeper understanding of what is involved in encounters with other persons. I suggest, below, that thinking of our encounters as involving persons allows us to appreciate a ‘give and take’ that is arguably involved in knowing others, but I do not develop the idea in this paper. This ‘give and take’ may be thought to differentiate perception of persons from perception of bodies.

11 These two epistemological questions (one deep and one shallow) may be taken to correspond to a ‘thick’ and a ‘thin’ problem that can be raised concerning others (see Avramides 2015).

12 It is important to note that I am writing here only of the analytic tradition. Philosophers writing in the phenomenological tradition have rejected inferential accounts of our knowledge of others in favour of perceptual ones for a much longer time (see, for example, the work of Edith Stein and Max Scheler.)

13 The way I outline below is one defended by McDowell. It is arguable that Dretske’s perceptual account is not consistent with the idea I defend in this paper. For a detailed examination of Dretske’s work in this connection, see Avramides (2019b).

14 Aldrich (1965, 124). A few lines earlier, Aldrich writes: ‘I am quite certain that philosophers will fall short of the mark who fail to reach a theory that allows perception … of other human beings to be as reliable and primitive as the sort of perception of their bodies … ’.

15 See Hinton (1973) and Snowdon (1980–1981). Questions about just how much of a piece McDowell’s work is with that of Hinton and Snowdon is a matter of some discussion. See, for example, Thau (2004), Haddock and Macpherson (2008), and Byrne and Logue (2008). For the sake of this brief exposition, and in keeping with what McDowell himself has written, we may take the positions here to be substantially similar.

16 As Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson (2008, 6) write, ‘The justification provided by such seeing is supposed to be non-inferential as well as indefeasible’. Haddock and Macpherson (following Byrne and Logue 2008) separate what they label metaphysical from epistemological disjunctivism and ask how the two relate. The importance of both the metaphysical and the epistemological versions of disjunctivism in McDowell’s work is defended in Avramides (2019a).

17 Following the work of Burnyeat (1982), McDowell suggests that reflection on the position of the ancient sceptic allows for the possibility that it is not by knowing about the world that we come to be in possession of it.

18 The phrase is McDowell’s and its use has led to difficulties that that are discussed by Byrne and Logue (2008).

19 While it is arguably possible to uphold the disjunctive move and not use it as McDowell does to diffuse the skeptical threat, McDowell sees these two moves as related. Note that I only say in the text that the disjunctive move allows for us not to feel threatened by the sceptic.

20 The quotation continues: ‘ … which would not be the case if we were not perceptually in touch with the world in just about the way we ordinarily suppose we are’. Note the Moorean flavour of McDowell’s argument here.

21 Victoria McGeer has developed the idea that the attribution of mental states to others does not just involve an explanatory/predictive element (as presumed by the standard models) but also involves a normative element. She writes that when we make attributions of mental state to one another we ‘are engaged in the activity of moulding behaviour – cajoling, encouraging, reprimanding, promising and otherwise giving ourselves over to the task of producing comprehensible patterns of well-behaved agency in ourselves and others from a folk psychological point of view’ (McGeer 2007, 149).

22 The sort of example usually given here includes, ‘I can just see that he is angry, or that she is in pain’, and the like. McDowell writes that ‘one can sometimes see what someone’s mental state is by (as we say) looking into her eyes’. McDowell is careful here to say that we don’t say such things in connection with all mental states and occurrences. By drawing attention to such locutions McDowell is clear that what he is wanting to avoid is the idea ‘that the mental is withdrawn from direct engagement with the world’ ([1995] 1998, 413).

23 I may be worth noting that to say that error in connection with our knowledge of other persons is deep-seated is not to say that it is widespread.

24 For more on this see Avramides (2019a).