Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (2006) 5: 5373 DOI: 10.

1007/s11097-005-9014-7

Springer 2006

The problem of other minds: Wittgensteins Phenomenological perspective SREN OVERGAARD

Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (E-mail: sov@cfs.ku.dk) Abstract. This paper discusses Wittgensteins take on the problem of other minds. In opposition to certain widespread views that I collect under the heading of the No Problem Interpretation, I argue that Wittgenstein does address some problem of other minds. However, Wittgensteins problem is not the traditional epistemological problem of other minds; rather, it is more reminiscent of the issue of intersubjectivity as it emerges in the writings of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. This is one sense in which Wittgensteins perspective on other minds might be called phenomenological. Yet there is another sense as well, in that Wittgensteins positive views on this issue resemble the views defended by phenomenologists. The key to a proper philosophical grasp of intersubjectivity, on both views, lies in rethinking the mind. If we conceive of minds as essentially embodied we can understand how intersubjectivity is possible. Key words: embodiment, other minds, phenomenology, skepticism, wittgenstein

Introduction What is the problem of other minds, and what should we do about it? Some philosophers feel that just by posing this question we have allowed ourselves to presuppose a particular answer to a more fundamental question: Are we correct in assuming that there really is such a problem? Could it not be that this problem is in fact just an illusion, engendered by certain philosophical confusions? And will this illusory problem thus not simply vanish, as soon as we have detected and exposed these confusions? If there is a received view on what the later Wittgenstein has to say about the problem of other minds, it is that he is a leading advocate of something like this latter approach. According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems are simply signs that we have become lost in the maze of our language (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 123). Philosophical problems should not be solved; they are not difculties needing solution; rather, they are more like illnesses that we need to be cured of. Wittgenstein intends to supply the therapies that will bring us back on our feet. Once this happens the philosophical problems, and among them the problem of other minds, will disappear completely (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 133). In the present paper, I want to question this sketch of Wittgensteins approach to the problem of other minds. To be sure, there is a sense in

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which Wittgenstein rejects anything that resembles a traditional philosophical problem about other minds. However, I shall argue that it is not correct to assume that Wittgenstein recognizes no legitimate philosophical task whatsoever concerning other minds. In other words, he should not be viewed as an unambiguous defender of a strict No Problem Approach, as I propose to call it.1 Despite much of what he explicitly says, what he actually does shows a profound concern with some problem or issue of other minds. I say some problem, because, as already indicated, we should not assume that Wittgenstein seeks to meet the traditional skeptical challenge. In fact, and this is the second point I shall attempt to establish, the traditional problem of others undergoes an important change in Wittgensteins hands, and becomes something like the intersubjectivity issues that phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger discuss.

The no problem approach Above, I mentioned the received view on Wittgensteins approach to the problem of other minds. But I added the caution, If there is one, and for a good reason, since different approaches have over the years been attributed to Wittgenstein. Thus, some commentators have claimed that what Wittgenstein argues is that we can establish that others have mental states, and which mental states they have, beyond any doubt. The crucial element in Wittgensteins account, they claim, is the notion of criterion, designating some special logical or conceptual connection between certain types of mental states and certain forms of behavior (Chihara and Fodor 1966, p. 390). According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein is trying to provide a straightforward answer to traditional skepticism concerning other minds. Whereas the skeptic claims we can never be certain whether others feel pain, pleasure, or nothing at all, Wittgenstein claims that, since behavior is conceptually and not just contingently connected with mind, then it will not make sense for one to suppose that another person is not in pain if ones [behavioral] criterion of his being in pain is satised (Malcolm 1966, p. 85). Another interpretation, famously voiced by Kripke, holds that Wittgenstein concedes more to the skeptic. Indeed, according to Kripke, Wittgenstein has no intention whatsoever of refuting the skeptic; his aim is rather to give a Humean skeptical solution to a skeptical paradox (Kripke 1982, p. 141).2 A skeptical solution, in stark contrast to a straight solution, is one that begins by conceding that the skeptics negative assertions are unanswerable (Kripke 1982, p. 66), but moves on to argue that our ordinary practice or belief is justied because [. . .] it need not require the justication the skeptic has shown to be untenable (ibid.). Thus, what Wittgenstein does, on this interpretation, is to argue that when people actually use expressions

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attributing sensations to others they do not really mean to make any assertion whose intelligibility is undermined by the skeptic (solipsist) (Kripke 1982, pp. 141142). This solution, Kripke says, involves a certain inversion: we do not pity others because we attribute pain to them, we attribute pain to others because we pity them (Kripke 1982, p. 142). With consequences such as these, Kripke observes, it is not hard to see how Wittgensteins skepticism becomes a gulf that separates him from common sense philosophy (Kripke 1982, p. 143). Most commentators, however, have been inclined to reject both these interpretations. Both interpretations depict a much too traditional epistemological approach to be applicable to Wittgenstein. The skeptic about other minds is being taken far too seriously: either the attempt is made to prove her doubts impossible, or she is conceded that her questions are indeed unanswerable, but need not be answered for us to go on about our business of attributing mental lives to others. Most readers of Wittgenstein have felt that, surely, he would opt for neither of these responses. Surely, the gulf that separates Wittgenstein from a common sense philosophy such as Moores is that the latter tries, in a confused way, to prove that we can indeed know what the skeptic claims we cant, while Wittgenstein, far from conceding anything at all to the skeptic, tries to cure us of our temptation to raise such problems in the rst place.3 He aims to free us from our felt need to ask skeptical questions at all. Wittgenstein proposes to do this through a number of simple descriptions. To put it very briey, his point is that, at bottom, our relations with each other are not based on knowledge at all, but on something more fundamental. In one context, Wittgenstein puts it in this way:
Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same. All our reactions are different. If anyone says: That cannot simply come from the fact that the living move about in such-and-such a way and that the dead do not, then I want to intimate to him that this is a case of transition from quantity to quality. (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 284)

Wittgenstein is not saying that we are instinctually programmed to be absolutely certain that others have souls, and to react accordingly (Wittgenstein 1963, p. 178), but that intersubjectivity is much more basic than the phenomena of knowledge, judgment, doubt, and justication. We do not have to build epistemic bridges to reach other minds; more fundamental than any knowledge is our instinctive attitude towards thers, Wittgenstein claims (cf. Wittgenstein 1967, Section 541):
I believe that he is suffering.Do I also believe that he isnt an automaton? It would go against the grain to use the word in both connections. (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am certain that he is not an automaton? Nonsense!)(. . .)

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My attitude towards him is an attitude towards the soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul. (Wittgenstein 1963, p. 178; cf. Wittgenstein 1982, Section 324)

We are already situated in intersubjective world, attuned to others as other minds or human beings, and since it is neither an opinion, nor a belief, nor something claiming the status of indubitable knowledge, this attunement is not vulnerable to attacks from skeptical thought experiments. It comes before opinion, knowledge, doubt, and justication, thus before the game the skeptic wants to play (Wittgenstein 1992, p. 38; cf. McGinn 1998); it is one of those hinges upon which doubt, justication, and certainty turn, to use a phrase from On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969, Section 341). From here it is just one small step to the No Problem reading. This step is the assumption that when we are rid of our tendency to raise a skeptical problem of other minds, in the manner just sketched, no philosophical problem or task whatsoever remains. Such a conclusion seems to nd some support in Wittgensteins well-known views on philosophy: Philosophy, he thinks, should stick to describing and avoid explanations (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 109). Once we have described the contours of our basic intersubjective attunement something lying deeper than certainty and doubt can reach then, if we are not to engage in explanations, there is nothing more for us to do. But nor do we need more. We have already shown the y how to escape from the y-bottle (cf. Wittgenstein 1963, Section 309), i.e., we have undermine[d] the skeptics position and, with this, any problem there may be about other minds (Avramides 2001, p. 203). If any question remains, it concerns only the pathology of such a philosophical problem, as it were, i.e., it is a question of the form: What is it about human beings that makes them maintain an interpretation that sustains the threat of skepticism? (Glendinning 1998, p. 2).4 There is no problem of other minds, but at the most a pathological problem about philosophers minds: why do they keep imagining that there is a problem?

Two problems of other minds But matters are slightly more complicated than this sketch of the route to the No Problem Interpretation seems to suggest. Our discussion so far gives the impression that there is only one, fairly clearly dened problem of other minds. In fact, however, there are two connected, but essentially different problems. These two problems of other minds are presented and discussed in Anita Avramides recent historical and systematic study Other Minds. Typically, we think of the problem of other minds as an epistemological problem that runs more or less as follows: How can I know that there are minds other than my own? Since I only have direct experiential access to my

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own mind, how can I ever be certain that there are other minds? According to Avramides, this problem is the one most philosophers from Descartes, through Locke and Berkeley, to John Stuart Mill have recognized that is, insofar as they can be said to have recognized any problem about other minds. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, it is characteristic of these philosophers that they do not see anything especially problematic about other minds (Avramides 2001, pp. 9, 11, 115, 135, 212, et passim). If they recognize a problem it is simply one of giving some account of our knowledge of other minds, and although that may be an important task, they think it presents no more difculties than does an account of other types of knowledge. But according to Avramides, there are certain assumptions, introduced by Descartes, and accepted by most subsequent Western philosophers even those critical of Cartesianism as such that generate more fundamental difculties. Avramides labels this problematic network of assumptions the Cartesian framework. Roughly speaking, the Cartesian framework explicitly or implicitly asserts an essential or conceptual divide between mind, on the one hand, and body and world on the other. This does not necessarily entail a commitment to Cartesian dualism, since the claim is only that the mind and its contents are one thing (but not necessarily immaterial), and the experienced world is another thing (but not necessarily material), so that there is a conceptual gap between mind and world that we need to bridge some way or the other.5 It is precisely when one has separated the mind from the world in this way that a more severe problem about other minds is bound to surface, Avramides claims. For if we start with this conception of mind and world, then one may ask:
what puts us in a position to so much as raise these questions about the mind of another? In order to raise these epistemological questions I must have a quite general concept of mind a concept that applies to others as well as myself. The question is whether I can give a plausible account of my possession of such a general conception of mind. (Avramides 2001, p. 219)

This more fundamental issue is not an epistemological problem, but a conceptual problem. A Cartesian conception of mind is a good example to illustrate the difculty, though Avramides insists that other conceptions are equally problematic. The conceptual problem is not, How can I know about other minds?, but more like this: Given that mind, for me, is this private inner realm, how can it even make sense to form the notion of other minds in the rst place? Or, to put it differently: How can I make sense of my mind as one instance of mind, given that mind, for me, is this private inner realm? As Avramides notes, this generality problem hangs closely together with the problem of unity of sense: If the notion of other minds is dened in terms of observable behavior, then how can mind have the same meaning here as when I am talking about my own mind the private, inner realm? The

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conceptual problem how to make sense of a general concept of mind, with unity of meaning, given that we start from an inner realm, cut off from the world is deeper than the epistemological problem and, as it were, swallows it up, according to Avramides: Until we are in a position to understand how our concepts can be general, we are not in a position to even raise the question how we know whether other minds exist (Avramides 2001, p. 228). In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein formulates the conceptual problem in a very similar way:
I am told: If you pity someone for having pains, surely you must at least believe that he has pains. But how can I even believe this? How can these words make sense to me? How could I even have come by the idea of anothers experience if there is no possibility of any evidence for it? (Wittgenstein 1958, p. 46).

According to Avramides, both the epistemological and the conceptual problems concerning others disappear, however, once we reject the framework that generates them. If we reject the conceptual divide between mind and world, then there are no bridges that need to be built in order to cross it (Avramides 2001, p. 214), and thus, in particular, no bridges to be built in order to make sense of other minds, and justify knowledge claims regarding their existence. This, on Avramides view, is precisely the point of Wittgensteins philosophical therapy. In his work, we begin as a community of language users (ibid.). All relations are already in place. From the very beginning, we are situated in an intersubjective world. Avramides calls this starting point, which embraces the world and others, as well as the subjects experiences, the lived position (Avramides 2001, p. 229). In contrast to the traditional Cartesian framework, starting with an isolated mind, it is clear that when we opt for the lived position, no conceptual or epistemological problem of other minds will be generated. Rather surprisingly, perhaps, Avramides nevertheless claims that there is still philosophical work to be done here (ibid.). There is still a question that faces us, she points out, even though we have rejected the questionable framework that harbors the traditional problems.6 As she admits, simply asserting the lived position seems to beg the question (Avramides 2001, p. 229). It wont do just to say that we already live in the world with others, and that therefore the Cartesian framework should be rejected. Even if this lived position is more basic than doubt and proof, and thus not something we need to prove, we still need to understand it. More precisely, in the wake of Wittgenstein, our philosophical task concerning other minds must be that of understanding how the lived position is possible (Avramides 2001, p. 230). Wittgenstein, however, does not accompany us as we embark on this journey, Avramides claims (ibid., p. 230). According to her, his is simply the No Problem Approach. Then we are much better advised to consult the work of

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such philosophers as P. F. Strawson and Donald Davidson, who, in different ways, try to elucidate the possibility of the lived position. Strawson was indeed one of the rst to criticize Wittgenstein for his exclusively negative approach to philosophical questions. According to Strawson, in opposition to Wittgensteins too restrictive notion of philosophical work, we need to make room for some positive philosophical task some purged kind of metaphysics (Strawson 1966, p. 34). This kind of philosophical approach, which Strawson famously labeled descriptive metaphysics, would approach the issue of other minds precisely as prescribed by Avramides. Concerning his all-important concept of a person, Strawson thus remarks:
We may still want to ask what it is in the natural facts that makes it intelligible that we should have this concept, and to ask this in the hope of a non-trivial answer, i.e. in the hope of an answer which does not merely say: Well, there are people in the world. (Strawson 1993, p. 111)

According to Avramides and Strawson, Wittgenstein would not even allow the trivial answer. He would simply insist on the lived position, rejecting as nonsensical the statement There are people in the world, as well as all attempts to provide some understanding of the possibility of the lived position. The question, however, is whether this is not a too narrow reading of Wittgenstein. But before addressing this central question, I will briey note how close Avramides position is to the position of phenomenologists such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. The reference to Strawson is very appropriate, but equally relevant would be references to phenomenology something Avramides is excluded from realizing because of her exclusive focus, within twentieth century philosophy, on philosophers from the analytic tradition(s) (Avramides 2001, p. xii). Phenomenology and the problem of others According to Husserl, we nd ourselves in an intersubjective world. I do not experience the world as my own private spectacle, but rather as our world, Husserl observes (Husserl 1991, p. 123). Not only can the mind, or subjectivity, as Husserl prefers to say, not possibly be separated from the experienced world (ibid., pp. 99, 102); in addition to this, it can only really be what it is a mind or a subject as part of a community of subjectivities (ibid., p. 166). This, clearly, is what Avramides calls the lived position. Now, according to Husserl, this lived position does not call forth skeptical questions concerning either the external world or other subjects. Neither the existence of the world nor the existence of other subjects can possibly be subjected to general doubt, as opposed to doubts in particular cases. Accordingly, it cannot be the job of phenomenology to prove any of this. However, that does not mean that there

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is no philosophical work to be done here. What Husserl says about objectivity in a famous passage from the Krisis applies to other minds as well: The crucial thing is not to secure objectivity, but to understand it (Husserl 1976, p. 193). Husserlian phenomenology wants to understand how the world comes to have the meaning it does have for us (Husserl 1976, p. 191), and that also includes understanding how it may be possible that I nd myself, at the outset, in an intersubjective world, in a community of minds (Husserl 1973b, pp. 5152, 68). To put it briey, Husserl refers to our existence as bodily subjects as something that makes intersubjectivity intelligible. I can, from the outset, nd myself among others, partly because I myself am, from the outset, an embodied mind, engaged in activities that are indivisibly mental and bodily (Husserl 1973a, p. 491):
Only because I can and must apprehend [auffassen] my kinesthetic movement [. . .] as a movement of my lived-and-physical body [Leibk orper] in the same space, and as movement in the same sense as that of other physical bodies, then it becomes possible that an external physical body similar to my lived-and-physical body, and with a similar behavior becomes apprehendable as having an interior, an inner-movement, etc. (Husserl 1973a, p. 515)

One should take care not to interpret this as if Husserl is re-introducing the argument from analogy. He himself explicitly warns against conceiving of intersubjectivity as something that is established in and through inferences of any kind (Husserl 1991, pp. 140141). The idea is therefore not that I can infer facts about the mental lives of others from their behavior on the basis of observations of regular connections between my own mental states and bodily behavior. Rather, the point is a much simpler (and much less intellectualistic) one. Ultimately, what Husserl is claiming is that I can be one subjectivity in a multitude of others because I am not initially an isolated contemplative mind, but an embodied subjectivity. As he points out, if an ego-plurality is to be able to stand in empathic relations, then it must be a plurality of egos that are related to the same nature, and they must be animalistic, body-endowed [leibbegabte] egos (Husserl 1973a, p. 260). Very similar insights are found in Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception. Again, the starting point is that we already live in an intersubjective world, already involved with things and other subjectivities; the social is already there when we come to know or judge it, as Merleau-Ponty puts it (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 362). But, while this entails that there are no skeptical problems to be raised, it does not entail that there are no philosophical tasks to be carried out. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty declares that his aim is to understand the system Self-others-things as it comes into being (ibid., p. 57). Thus, what phenomenology must do is try to provide some positive understanding of how the lived position is possible. In his elucidations of our relations with others, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes our

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embodied being-in-the-world as much as Husserl. The possibility of the lived position is made intelligible in terms of the essentially bodily nature of my subjectivity:
If I experience this inhering of my consciousness in its body and its world, the perception of other people and the plurality of consciousnesses no longer present any difculty. If, for myself who am reecting on perception, the perceiving subject appears provided with a primordial setting in relation to the world, drawing in its train that bodily thing in the absence of which there would be no other things for it, then why should other bodies I perceive not be similarly inhabited by consciousnesses? If my consciousness has a body, why should other bodies not have consciousnesses? (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 351) The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent to myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 352)

Heidegger, however, might seem to be an advocate of the No Problem Approach. His impatience with the traditional problems of modern philosophy is well known. What Heidegger says about the epistemology of the external world is doubtlessly what he would say about the epistemological problem about other minds as well:
We do not need to prove that an external world is present, and how; rather, we must indicate why Dasein, as being-in-the-world, has the tendency to initially bury the external world in nullity epistemologically before going on to resurrect it with proofs. (Heidegger 1993, p. 206)

Indeed, Heidegger is very critical of epistemological attempts to search for a path from one isolated subject to another (Heidegger 1993, p. 118); instead insisting emphatically on what Avramides calls the lived position. As Heidegger says, a mere subject without the world is not initially [given]; indeed it is never given. And ultimately, neither is an isolated ego given without the others (ibid., p. 116). From the beginning, the world is one I share with others. The world of Dasein is a co-world (ibid., p. 118), and any cognitive bridge-building from one subject or Dasein to another, far from establishing intersubjectivity, presupposes that Dasein is already attuned to others. In Heideggers terminology, it presupposes that Dasein is already being-with-others (Mitsein) (ibid., p. 125). But Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, too, insisted on the necessity of starting in the lived position. However, for them that did not entail that no other minds problem whatsoever would remain for phenomenology to address. The moot issue is whether Heidegger does think no question apart from a question of pathology, perhaps remains. The magnum opus, Being and Time, is more or less silent on the matter, leaving its reader with the impression that Heidegger would indeed sympathize with the No Problem Approach. However, it is signicant that

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being-with-others does surface as an independent theme of the book. It is not just brushed aside with the remark that Dasein is already, in itself, Mitsein. Rather, Heidegger describes in some detail how phenomena such as isolation and loneliness essentially refer to the fact that I am, in my being, already attuned to others; he separates two extreme modes of concrete being-withothers; and he devotes much attention to how relations with others can seem to dominate our lives completely. But even more important is the circumstance that, even though Heidegger is very critical of anything resembling the problem of the external world, some of his main efforts in Being and Time center on the question of the relation between Dasein and its world. Yet Heideggers discussions are quite unlike traditional discussions of the external world. His problem is not a skeptical problem, nor an epistemological one but rather an ontological problem. What Heidegger tries to do is thus to unveil the structures of Daseins being that make it intelligible why a Dasein cannot coherently be imagined in isolation from a world. This is precisely also what he does when it comes to the question of intersubjectivity. To be sure, there are no bridges needing to be built between one Dasein and the other; but we have to carefully describe those structures in the being of Dasein that make it intelligible why it makes no sense to pose epistemological questions here. Thus, in a lecture course from 1925, Heidegger says, associating the notion of empathy with the epistemological problem of others:
Having rejected this pseudo-problem about empathy how does an initially isolated subject reach another? we have by no means said that being-with-each-other and its understandability need no phenomenal elucidation; only, the question of co-Dasein must be understood as a question about Dasein itself. This ontic existentiell primordiality is not ontologically self-evident; it doesnt remove the ontological problem about empathy. (Heidegger 1979, p. 335)

This passage in a way sums up the position of all the phenomenologists.7 They reject the threat of solipsism, and insist on what Avramides calls the lived position. Nevertheless, they claim there is still phenomenological work to be done here. It is just not epistemological work, but rather ontological work: it must consist in an elucidation of structures of the being of subjectivity or Dasein, structures that make it comprehensible why the starting point in an isolated mind gets the phenomena wrong from the beginning.8 According to the phenomenologists, in other words, it is through a radical re-description of subjectivity one that not only rejects the conceptual divide between mind and body/world, but also positively shows how it is inadequate to the phenomena that we are brought to an understanding of the possibility of the lived position.

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Wittgenstein and the problem of others This brings us to the central question of this paper: Is it really so obvious that Wittgenstein subscribes to the No Problem view? Granted, certain of his programmatic statements on the tasks of philosophy could lead one to think so. But, as we have just seen concerning Heidegger, rst impressions are not always to be trusted. In what follows, I shall try to show that, if we look at what Wittgenstein actually does in the Philosophical Investigations and in his many manuscripts on the philosophy of psychology, we will be presented with a perspective remarkably similar to that of the phenomenologists.9 First of all, one should note that Wittgenstein tries to re-describe subjectivity or the mind along basically the same lines as the phenomenologists. He thus emphasizes that it is neither an incorporeal mind nor a material body that feels pain, sees rabbits running by, or goes shopping. Rather, it is simply a human being that undergoes and does these things, and a human being is not, without further ado, to be divided into body and soul, or inner and outer, or whatever:
What sort of issue is: Is it the body that feels pain? How is it to be decided? What makes it plausible to say that it is not the body? Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face. (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 286) To have an opinion is a state. A state of what? Of the soul? Of the mind? Well, of what object does one say that it has an opinion? Of Mr. N.N. for example. And that is the correct answer. (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 573) But doesnt what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without painbehaviour? It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 281).

Clearly, Wittgensteins point is not that we should subscribe to a version of behaviorism. Rather, he wants to present a picture that is as much an alternative to behaviorism as it is to Cartesianism. He wants to present a positive description that undermines the notion of a mind as something that is logically separated from all things bodily, but not to identify the mind with a Cartesian body separated from all things mental. According to Wittgenstein, the notion of a colorless physical body is just as misguided as the notion of an isolated, pure mental realm,10 and the alternative between Cartesianism and behaviorism is consequently a false alternative. Instead of contrasting inner and outer, mind (or soul) and body, Wittgenstein contrasts the whole living human being, and what is similar to it, with non-living things such as stones and bicycles (cf. Wittgenstein 1963, Section 284). It is a living human being that is the subject of sensations, thoughts, perceptions, and so forth; and a human being is not hidden, it is not something accessible only to itself.

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Rather, it is a creature out there in the world, perceivable by others vulnerable to earthquakes, affected by changes in temperature, and so forth. But again, this does not entail that a human being is only an object or a thing among others, or that we can conceive of it exclusively in terms of mere physical behavior. On the contrary, Wittgensteins point, if one may put it in somewhat un-Wittgensteinian terms, is precisely that human being is a fundamental, non-reducible, ontological category of its own. Relying on this re-description of subjectivity, Wittgenstein also essentially offers an account of how we experience each other. If Wittgenstein really thought it was simply enough to point out that intersubjective relations are too deeply rooted in our lives to be possible objects of universal doubt, then it is remarkable how much attention he devotes to the perceptual appearance of others. Let us rst recall Wittgensteins emphatic rejection of the notion that we believe or are of the opinion that others are minded (Wittgenstein 1963, p. 178). These are much too intellectual notions, he thinks, to capture what it means to be in the presence of others. They seem to invite us to provide some justication for our beliefs that particular entities are minded, while others are not. Wittgenstein rejects such a task, and instead calls attention to simple examples from ordinary life, which are supposed to convince us of the misguided nature of the whole approach. Why do we ascribe sensations to humans, cats, and perhaps even ies, but not to stones? Wittgensteins answer is simple: Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 284). If we try to do that, we will nd that this is a very difcult thing to do; a stone simply does not present itself to us as a possible candidate for feeling pain or hunger. And now look at a wriggling y and at once these difculties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 284). This is simply the way we experience things: in one case, ascriptions of pain can get no foothold for us, and in the other they can. Wittgenstein also emphasizes that when it concerns people as we encounter them in everyday life, it is in fact very difcult to make sense of the notion that they could be mere automatons without thoughts or feelings. Philosophers might be able to contemplate such things when they are secluded in their studies, but Wittgenstein thinks such ideas lose their foothold when, for instance, we watch children play in the park (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 420). In reections such as these, it seems not so much that Wittgenstein simply wants us to stop asking useless questions. Rather, he seems to want to direct our attention to certain facts concerning our everyday experience. Consider the following passages:
In general I do not surmise fear in him I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something inside from something outside; rather it is as if the human face were in a way translucent and that I were seeing it not in reected light but rather in its own. (Wittgenstein 1980b, Section 170)

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We see emotion. As opposed to what? We do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe a face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. Grief, one would like to say, is personied in the face. (Wittgenstein 1980b, Section 570; cf. 1967, Section 225) Consciousness in anothers face. Look into someone elses face, and see the consciousness in it, and a particular shade of consciousness. You see on it, in it, joy, indifference, interest, excitement, torpor, and so on. The light in other peoples faces. Do you look into yourself in order to recognize the fury in his face? It is there as clearly as in your own breast. (Wittgenstein 1967, Section 220; 1980a, Section 927; cf. 1982, Section 769)

What Wittgenstein tries to do here is clearly to draw attention to how we actually experience each other, in the context of ordinary life. His descriptions constitute a rather direct attack on those familiar accounts (such as the infamous argument from analogy) which claim that our knowledge of other minds is generally based on inferences. Pace such accounts, Wittgenstein points out that anothers mental states and consciousness are manifested in her bodily appearance, and rst and foremost in her facial expressions. That other people are minded (and even to some extent their specic thoughts and feelings) is something that we can have direct perceptual access to; it is something we can directly see.11 Not only is there no need to infer from external characteristics what might be going on inside another person. In fact, according to Wittgenstein, we are very often unable to give any merely external description of anothers facial features, while we are quite able to say that she looked angry, for instance (Wittgenstein 1992, p. 62).12 Another consequence of Wittgensteins re-articulation of subjectivity is that the skeptic is not right to say that there is always room for doubt concerning the mental states of others, or that we can never know what they really feel or think. If we consult our experience, Wittgenstein says, we will all have to agree that there are cases where only a lunatic could take the expression of pain, for instance, as a sham (Wittgenstein 1992, p. 33). If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me (Wittgenstein 1963, p. 223), and if I am engaged in a frank conversation with a friend, I feel no temptation to say, I wonder whats going on behind that face? (cf. Wittgenstein 1982, Section 978). These are situations where the picture of an essential gap between mind and body simply strikes us as inadequate and where, as a consequence, the skeptics insistence that the mental lives of others must in principle be dubitable seems completely out of place (cf. Wittgenstein 1963, Section 420). And these are not exceptional cases. According to Wittgenstein, there are countless such cases where we are certain about mental processes in someone else (Wittgenstein 1992, p. 94).

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But Wittgenstein does grant that there are situations where we feel we simply cannot gure a person out (Wittgenstein 1963, p. 223). He grants that there is room here for uncertainties regarding the mental lives of others, uncertainties that are not possible with regard to oneself, and he devotes much attention to the asymmetry between rst and third person modes of access to the mental. This is a signicant fact, because the asymmetry is part of what seems to justify the traditional starting point in an isolated mind:
It looks like this: there is something inner here which can be inferred only inconclusively from the outer. It is a picture and it is obvious what justies this picture. The apparent certainty of the rst person, the uncertainty of the third. (Wittgenstein 1982, Section 951)

Wittgenstein is in fact concerned to emphasize this asymmetry, though not as one of direct vs. indirect types of access, nor indeed as a difference between rst hand knowledge and mere guesswork. Rather, what we have here, according to Wittgenstein, are simply two kinds of access that are essentially different, but where one need not be epistemically superior to the other.13 As Wittgenstein says in one of the last manuscripts on the philosophy of mind, My thoughts are not hidden from [the other], but are just open to him in a different way than they are to me (Wittgenstein 1992, pp. 3435). It is not as if I had some infallible perceptual access to my own mind as if I were transparent to myself, as Merleau-Ponty said. That is not the reason why others ask me where it hurts, when Im in pain. Rather, they ask me because I am the one who is in pain (cf. Wittgenstein 1963, Section 246). Trivial as this may seem, it is an all-important point. Putting things in this way, we preserve the essential difference between being in pain and observing the suffering of another. But at the same time we are not tempted to cash out this difference in terms of the unique transparency of the mind to itself. Wittgenstein goes over these issues repeatedly in the later manuscripts, trying to show that the constitutional asymmetry should not be confused with Cartesian privacy or anything of the sort.14 This disarms one of the most important intuitions prima facie supporting the Cartesian framework in general, and skepticism in particular, viz. the notion that the intersubjective asymmetry reects the essential isolation of the individual, inner mind. The upshot of Wittgensteins reections is precisely that the relation between inner and outer is just a picture-like representation of the intersubjective asymmetry, and not some metaphysical fact that explains the asymmetry (Wittgenstein 1992, p. 68). Together, these points constitute weighty evidence against the No Problem Interpretation. Wittgenstein does much more than simply point out our intersubjective attunement. He underpins this attunement by careful descriptions of the kind of creature we are, the appearance of others, and of the difference between rst and third person types of access to the mind. Wittgensteins

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account is thus phenomenological in the sense that it essentially aims to describe things as they appear to us, i.e., describe them the way they strike us in everyday life (cf. McCulloch 1995, p. 131). Clearly, Wittgenstein is concerned to re-describe subjectivity in such a way as to make intelligible both how it can be something situated in the world and accessible to others, and how, nevertheless, it is given differently from a rst and a third person perspective. It all turns on his insistence that we are not minds, isolatable from body and world, but living human beings, already bodily and worldly. In this sense, too, his perspective is phenomenological. It involves a re-articulation of the kind of beings we are; an articulation that is remarkably similar to the one we nd in phenomenologists such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger.15

Conclusion Wittgenstein is trying to free us from the picture that generates skepticism about other minds. But one does not appreciate his efforts sufciently if one thinks he can be counted among the advocates of a No Problem Approach. To be sure, we have to be cured of our felt need to raise the traditional philosophical problems about other minds. The No Problem interpretation rightly holds that Wittgenstein wants to insist on the lived position, thus allowing no skeptical questions to be raised. But Wittgensteins preoccupation in his later years with the issues of subjectivity and intersubjectivity published in four volumes of remarks and writings on the philosophy of psychology indicates that for him this did not entail that there was no positive philosophical work to be done here. On the contrary, the task simply becomes a different one. We have to describe carefully what we are, and how others actually appear to us, and this descriptive work will provide us with an alternative positive picture of our relations with other human beings a picture that makes it intelligible how the lived position is possible. We are precisely human beings, not immaterial minds or mechanical bodies; and our mental life is not essentially private, although it is presented to ourselves in a different way from the way it is manifested to others. On this model, in contrast to the Cartesian framework, it is no mystery that the lived position is possible. Since I do not initially nd myself as a mind, needing to establish contact with a body and an external world, but rather, nd myself as a human being, essentially already out there in the world, then it is no mystery that I can also nd myself situated in an intersubjective community. Wittgenstein, then, does recognize some problem or issue of other minds. Not an epistemological one, but more like an ontological-phenomenological one. According to Wittgenstein, our philosophical task is to provide a surveyable or perspicuous presentation (u bersichtliche Darstellung) of how our being-with-others hangs together with what we are. A surveyable

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presentation, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations, is a presentation that produces just that understanding which consists in seeing connexions (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 122). As an unprejudiced look at Wittgensteins writings on the philosophy of mind reveals, he precisely wants us to understand how we can nd ourselves in an intersubjective community; he wants us to see the relevant connections. What commentators on Wittgenstein must never forget, but unfortunately sometimes do, is that although he was critical of philosophical explanations, he did not reject, but in fact prescribed philosophical descriptions (Wittgenstein 1963, Section 109). Wittgenstein did not think genuine philosophical work was restricted to cleaning up after centuries of philosophical confusions. He did not prescribe a medicine that would merely make us stop asking certain questions.16 He wanted to make us see.17

Notes
1. Some might want to use the word problem only in connection with the traditional philosophical problems. If we subscribe to that usage, then it is true that Wittgenstein does not recognize any problem of other minds. I do not want to argue over terminology; the point I want to establish is that Wittgenstein does recognize a philosophical task concerning other minds; and I call the approach that thus cannot be ascribed to him the No Problem Approach simply because it sounds better than, e.g., the No Task Approach. I think a good example of a No Problem Approach to philosophical problems is found Rortys Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979). Rorty happily draws the consequences of his view that all we have to do is to cure philosophers of their delusions (Rorty 1979, p. 229), in admitting that this is in a fair way toward dispensing with philosophy as a discipline (ibid., pp. 179, 208). But he reassures us that even when such a change occurs, people will still read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger (ibid., p. 394). Incidentally, Rorty thinks Wittgenstein and Heidegger are on his side in his therapeutic efforts, but these interpretative claims are not crucial to his argument. 2. Another commentator has argued that Wittgenstein offers a Berkeleyan refutation of skepticism concerning other minds. On this interpretation, Wittgenstein holds that even if there are such things as inner processes in others, then at least they are completely irrelevant to the language games we play with psychological words (Olscamp 1965, esp. p. 246). This reading, unlike Kripkes Humean interpretation, clearly commits Wittgenstein to a kind of logical behaviorism. 3. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein positively rejects that common sense can provide satisfactory answers to (other minds) skepticism: There is no common sense answer to a philosophical problem. One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense; not by restating the views of common sense (Wittgenstein 1958, pp. 5859; an elaboration of the same point is found in Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 108109). 4. This, of course, is a slight rephrasing of a remark by Heidegger (cf. Heidegger 1993, p. 206). I shall consider later whether Heidegger would agree with something like the No Problem approach. Apart from Rorty, Glendinning, and Avramides, who are quite explicit, I think Marie McGinn and John W. Cook also attribute a No Problem Approach to Wittgenstein.

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Cook thus emphasizes that Wittgensteins view is simply that we must accept the everyday language-game, and indeed Wittgensteins whole alternative to the type of approach that makes it look as if there is something we need to justify here can, according to Cook, be summed up in his remark: My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul (Cook 1969, p. 144). In her article The Real Problem of Others Marie McGinn also implicitly attributes a No Problem Approach to Wittgenstein. McGinns aim is thus apparently to show, using Wittgenstein, that there is an equivalent, in the case of other minds, of our everyday rejection of skepticism about the external world (McGinn 1998, p. 45). She seems to think that the real problem about other minds simply consists in nding a suitable everyday rejection of the skeptic; no positive task appears to remain after that. That this is indeed McGinns position is clear from her claim that what separates Wittgenstein from the phenomenologists is his rm resistance to the temptations of positive philosophy (McGinn 1997, p. 8; cf. pp. 2831). Joachim Schultes reading has similar consequences. Schulte does not explicitly mention the problem of other minds at all. But he speaks of the mind-body problem and some of the questions that have arisen in the context of discussion of the mind-body problem (Schulte 1993, p. 166), and he concludes that Wittgenstein considers these questions misguided and confused and not a word is uttered on any alternative positive task (Schulte 1993, pp. 159, 166). The No Problem Interpretation of Wittgensteins perspective on the problem of other minds is often just a corollary of a more general claim about Wittgensteins view of philosophy. Robert Fogelin phrases the claim in this way: When Wittgenstein says that the real discovery allows us to stop doing philosophy when we want to, he doesnt simply mean that it allows us to stop doing traditional philosophy; he means that it allows us to stop doing philosophy altogether. If his philosophical investigations gain their signicance from the traditional philosophical problems that call them forth, then they lose their signicance when these problems completely disappear (Fogelin 1976, p. 127). This type of claim is echoed in many other recent publications. In addition to Marie McGinns work, one might, for example, refer to McDowells Mind and World (McDowell 1996, pp. 175176) and David Sterns Wittgenstein on Mind and Language. Stern writes: The point of [Wittgensteins] later philosophy is still to achieve insight into the nature of our language, but that insight is only supposed to undermine the grammatical illusions that generate philosophical problems, not generate yet another philosophical theory. [. . .] His later philosophy leaves everything as it is: that is, he aims to expose traditional philosophical claims to answer philosophical questions as meaningless, while providing no substantive answer to those questions himself (Stern 1995, p. 27). There is something right about this: Wittgenstein does not intend to provide positive answers to traditional philosophical questions. But when Stern adds that Wittgenstein did not think of philosophical problems as merely technical; he thought of them as a form of intellectual neurosis, calling for self-examination and, above all, treatment (Stern 1995, p. 29) then it seems as if Wittgenstein is dismissive of all kinds of positive philosophical enquiry. And that is false, even if Wittgensteins irritation with philosophy often got the better of him. 5. A very similar perspective on the mainstream of modern epistemology and ontology is found in McCulloch 1995. McCulloch sees what he calls the Cartesian Tendency as dominating modern philosophy of mind (cf. pp. 23, 155). Just as Avramides, McCulloch emphasizes that his claim is not the obviously false claim that most modern philosophy of mind is committed to Descartes immaterialism concerning the mind. The problem is rather the assumption that the human mind [. . .] is self-contained with respect to its material surroundings, including (at least most of) the human body (McCulloch 1995, p. 109; cf. p. 47). McCulloch terms his own alternative to this Cartesian Tendency in-the-world Wittgensteinianism (p. 99).

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6. Anthony Rudd apparently overlooks this aspect of Avramides position when he criticizes her for her claim that no problem of other minds remains after we have dismissed the conceptual problem (Rudd 2003, p. 148). This is unfortunate, since I think the question Avramides claims we are still faced with is much more philosophically interesting than the practical problems of human communication that remain, on Rudds account (Rudd 2003, p. 150). Of course a lot of practical everyday issues will always remain that is one thing all philosophers would agree on but is it essentially the job of philosophy to address them? 7. This is not to say that their views are in all respects identical. There are differences and mutual criticisms, but the basic perspective, I think, is the same. A more detailed discussion of the various phenomenological approaches to the problem of others is found in Zahavi 2001. 8. For an argument that Husserls phenomenological project is more properly described as ontological rather than epistemological, see Overgaard 2004a, esp. ch. 2. 9. David Pears is one of very few commentators to directly challenge the No Problem Interpretation; indeed, it is one of the central theses of his study The False Prison that the problem of other minds had occupied the middle Wittgenstein immensely, and continued to set the course for his later philosophy even to the point where it excluded him from paying due attention to other important issues (Pears 1988, pp. 294, 296, 398405). The question, however, is which problem of other minds that Pears thinks Wittgenstein was struggling with. Since Pears often talks of the problem of other minds in connection with the problem of the external world, one may get the impression that Pears thinks Wittgenstein was grappling with the traditional epistemological problem. And that is certainly not correct as far as the later Wittgenstein is concerned. 10. See Hacker 1993, pp. 97126 for a good discussion of this point. 11. It is quite hotly debated whether this is really true. McDowell has famously championed the view that our perceptual experiences can reach the mental states of others (McDowell, 1982, pp. 456457). But others have criticized this claim (Hacker 1997, p. 313; Rudd 2003, pp. 119121), arguing that, e.g., a persons pain is different from the behavior that expresses it. As Rudd emphasizes, what I see is always behavior, not pain (Rudd 2003, p. 121), and thus [t]here remains a gap between what I can see and the mental life of another (ibid.). But what does it mean to say I cannot see the pain, but only the behavior? If we are pressed on this point we might feel inclined to admit that the pain itself we do not really see but then does anyone ever see a pain? Do I see my own toothache, when I am suffering from it? That would be a strange claim. In fact, it would make more sense to say that under suitable circumstances, I see the pains of others (but I dont undergo those pains). It seems as if Rudd is here lapsing into conceiving of pains as inner objects that only one person can see. But that seems wrong, and it is certainly not Wittgensteins view. See also Hackers second thoughts on this issue (Hacker 1993, p. 132; note that this is written several years after Hacker 1997). 12. This might be articulated as a kind of seeing aspects: we immediately perceive the meaningful whole (e.g., the angry face), whereas the physical shapes and colors escape our attention. An aspect-blind person, on the other hand, would have to deduce the meaning from a careful study of the mere physical appearance. For more on aspect-seeing, cf. Mulhall 1990. Mulhall is criticized in Johnston 1993. According to Johnston, there is nothing that indicates that we continuously perceive aspects (Johnston 1993, pp. 240245). But is that not obviously false? I nd it quite natural to think that aspect-perception might be one way of articulating the difference between autistic subjects and normal subjects. The problem is not that autistic persons dont see well, or dont notice things in their surroundings. It seems, rather, that they suffer from a kind of blindness to at least certain types of aspects (facial expressions and tones of voice of a certain complexity, etc.) and therefore

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13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

are left with the extremely difcult task of trying to build a meaningful whole out of the objective data they perceive (a mouth curved in this particular way, etc.). One autistic subject, described in Cole 1998, thus explains her reluctance to look at faces by reference to the meaningless[ness] of their component parts, and she complains that in general everything comes in disconnected and in often meaningless bits and pieces (Cole 1998, pp. 95, 100). What she appears to lack is something that seems to me quite appropriately termed aspectperception. Incidentally, some of Johnstons attempts to provide a reductio of Mulhall e.g., questions of this type: If we bump into a table does that mean we are momentarily aspect-blind? (cf. p. 245) are very lame, and fortunately below the standard of the rest of his book. Note how different this is from Ryles view that [t]he sorts of things that I can nd out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can nd out about other people, and the methods of nding them out are much the same (Ryle 2000, p. 149). One can easily imagine how Wittgenstein would respond to the suggestion that I nd out about my own pains using much the same methods as the ones I use to nd out about the pains that others feel. It is thus a confusion to claim that Wittgenstein actually subscribed to Cartesian metaphysics, with all its hidden inner objects (Hintikka & Hintikka 1986, pp. 250, 267, 292). (Hintikka & Hintikka explicitly claim that it is Wittgensteins opinion that there is a beetle in every persons box (cf. p. 248)!) Wittgenstein is equally opposed to behaviorism and Cartesianism, but commentators have always found it hard not to associate him with one of these positions. For a fuller discussion of this, see Overgaard 2004b. It is often assumed that, whereas Wittgenstein did associate his thinking with phenomenology around 19291930, as is evident in his Philosophical Remarks (Wittgenstein 1975), he soon realized the fundamental problems of such an approach. I cannot possibly do justice to the question of Wittgensteins phenomenology here, but let me just note this: Wittgensteins conception of phenomenology in the middle period has very little to do with phenomenology in the Continental tradition, and more to do with the sense data theories of the logical positivists theories that are rejected by all Continental phenomenologists. Wittgensteins later philosophy, with its insistence on descriptions of the ordinary, manifest world, comes much closer to the perspectives of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. It would therefore be best to avoid certain rather fashionable claims about Wittgensteins philosophy. It is misleading to say, e.g., that Wittgenstein just wants to return us to everyday life (cf. Stern 1995, p. 17; Rudd 2003, pp. 85, 108109, 120), for this could mean two very different things: (1) That we should simply give up the philosophical enterprise and go back to living, unreectively, our everyday life. (2) That we should go back to the everyday life as philosophers, i.e., in order to study it and describe it. I think the latter is true, although Wittgenstein sometimes expresses views that are in line with the former. Incidentally, I think that Stern would opt for the rst as the right interpretation of Wittgenstein, while Rudd would be more sympathetic towards the second (cf. Rudds own reservations about the word everyday in Rudd 2003, p. 188). This study was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, and carried out at the Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research. An earlier draft of the paper was presented at the conference Intersubjectivity and Embodiment: Perspectives from Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, hosted by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), in September 2003. I thank everyone who took part in the discussion of it. Special thanks are due to Beata Stawarska for her comments on the penultimate version.

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