which exists," or "My mental states are the only mental states."
However, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might truly come to
believe in either of these propositions without thereby being a
solipsist. Solipsism is therefore more properly regarded as the
doctrine that, in principle, "existence" means for me my existence and
that of my mental states. Existence is everything that I experience —
physical objects, other people, events and processes — anything that
would commonly be regarded as a constituent of the space and time in
which I coexist with others and is necessarily construed by me as part
of the content of my consciousness. For the solipsist, it is not
merely the case that he believes that his thoughts, experiences, and
emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only thoughts,
experiences, and emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no meaning
to the supposition that there could be thoughts, experiences, and
emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist understands
the word "pain," for example, to mean "my pain." He cannot
accordingly conceive how this word is to be applied in any sense other
than this exclusively egocentric one.
1. The Importance of the Problem
No great philosopher has espoused solipsism. As a theory, if indeed it
can be termed such, it is clearly very far removed from common sense.
In view of this, it might reasonably be asked why the problem of
solipsism should receive any philosophical attention. There are two
answers to this question. First, while no great philosopher has
explicitly espoused solipsism, this can be attributed to the
inconsistency of much philosophical reasoning. Many philosophers have
failed to accept the logical consequences of their own most
fundamental commitments and preconceptions. The foundations of
solipsism lie at the heart of the view that the individual gets his
own psychological concepts (thinking, willing, perceiving, and so
forth.) from "his own cases," that is by abstraction from "inner
experience."
This view, or some variant of it, has been held by a great many, if
not the majority of philosophers since Descartes made the egocentric
search for truth to the primary goal of the critical study of the
nature and limits of knowledge.
In this sense, solipsism is implicit in many philosophies of knowledge
and mind since Descartes and any theory of knowledge that adopts the
Cartesian egocentric approach as its basic frame of reference is
inherently solipsistic.
Second, solipsism merits close examination because it is based upon
three widely entertained philosophical presuppositions, which are
themselves of fundamental and wide-ranging importance. These are: (a)
What I know most certainly are the contents of my own mind – my
thoughts, experiences, affective states, and so forth.; (b) There is
no conceptual or logically necessary link between the mental and the
physical. For example, there is no necessary link between the
occurrence of certain conscious experiences or mental states and the
"possession" and behavioral dispositions of a body of a particular
kind; and (c) The experiences of a given person are necessarily
private to that person.
These presuppositions are of unmistakable Cartesian origin, and are
widely accepted by philosophers and non-philosophers alike. In
tackling the problem of solipsism, one immediately grapples with
fundamental issues in the philosophy of mind. However spurious the
problem of solipsism per se may strike one, these latter issues are
unquestionably important. Indeed, one of the merits of the entire
enterprise is the extent that it reveals a direct connection between
apparently unexceptionable and certainly widely-held common sense
beliefs and the acceptance of solipsistic conclusions. If this
connection exists and we wish to avoid those solipsistic conclusions,
we shall have no option but to revise, or at least to critically
review, the beliefs from which they derive logical sustenance.
2. Historical Origins of the Problem
In introducing "methodic doubt" into philosophy, René Descartes
created the backdrop against which solipsism subsequently developed
and was made to seem, if not plausible, at least irrefutable. For the
ego that is revealed by the cogito is a solitary consciousness, a res
cogitans that is not spatially extended, is not necessarily located in
any body, and can be assured of its own existence exclusively as a
conscious mind. (Discourse on Method and the Meditations). This view
of the self is intrinsically solipsistic and Descartes evades the
solipsistic consequences of his method of doubt by the desperate
expedient of appealing to the benevolence of God. Since God is no
deceiver, he argues, and since He has created man with an innate
disposition to assume the existence of an external, public world
corresponding to the private world of the "ideas" that are the only
immediate objects of consciousness, it follows that such a public
world actually exists. (Sixth Meditation). Thus does God bridge the
chasm between the solitary consciousness revealed by methodic doubt
and the intersubjective world of public objects and other human
beings?
A modern philosopher cannot evade solipsism under the Cartesian
picture of consciousness without accepting the function attributed to
God by Descartes (something few modern philosophers are willing to
do). In view of this it is scarcely surprising that we should find the
specter of solipsism looming ever more threateningly in the works of
Descartes' successors in the modern world, particularly in those of
the British empiricist tradition.
Descartes' account of the nature of mind implies that the individual
acquires the psychological concepts that he possesses "from his own
case," that is that each individual has a unique and privileged access
to his own mind, which is denied to everyone else. Although this view
utilizes language and employs conceptual categories ("the individual,"
"other minds," and so forth.) that are inimical to solipsism, it is
nonetheless fundamentally conducive historically to the development of
solipsistic patterns of thought. On this view, what I know immediately
and with greatest certainty are the events that occur in my own mind –
my thoughts, my emotions, my perceptions, my desires, and so forth. –
and these are not known in this way by anyone else. By the same token,
it follows that I do not know other minds in the way that I know my
own; indeed, if I am to be said to know other minds at all – that they
exist and have a particular nature – it can only be on the basis of
certain inferences that I have made from what is directly accessible
to me, the behavior of other human beings.
The essentials of the Cartesian view were accepted by John Locke, the
father of modern British empiricism. Rejecting Descartes' theory that
the mind possesses ideas innately at birth, Locke argued that all
ideas have their origins in experience. "Reflection" (that is
introspection or "inner experience") is the sole source of
psychological concepts. Without exception, such concepts have their
genesis in the experience of the corresponding mental processes.
(Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.i.4ff). If I acquire my
psychological concepts by introspecting upon my own mental operations,
then it follows that I do so independently of my knowledge of my
bodily states. Any correlation that I make between the two will be
effected subsequent to my acquisition of my psychological concepts.
Thus, the correlation between bodily and mental stated is not a
logically necessary one. I may discover, for example, that whenever I
feel pain my body is injured in some way, but I can discover this
factual correlation only after I have acquired the concept "pain." It
cannot therefore be part of what I mean by the word "pain" that my
body should behave in a particular way.
3. The Argument from Analogy
What then of my knowledge of the minds of others? On Locke's view
there can be only one answer: since what I know directly is the
existence and contents of my own mind, it follows that my knowledge of
the minds of others, if I am to be said to possess such knowledge at
all, has to be indirect and analogical, an inference from my own case.
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. (Compare J. S. Mill, William James, Bertrand Russell, and
A. J. Ayer).
Observing that the bodies of other human beings behave as my body does
in similar circumstances, I can infer that the mental life and series
of mental events that accompany my bodily behavior are also present in
the case of others. Thus, for example, when I see a problem that I am
trying unsuccessfully to solve, I feel myself becoming frustrated and
observe myself acting in a particular way. In the case of another, I
observe only the first and last terms of this three-term sequence and,
on this basis, I infer that the "hidden" middle term, the feeling of
frustration, has also occurred.
There are, however, fundamental difficulties with the argument from
analogy. First, if one accepts the Cartesian account of consciousness,
one must, in all consistency, accept its implications. One of these
implications, as we have seen above, is that there is no logically
necessary connection between the concepts of "mind" and "body;" my
mind may be lodged in my body now, but this is a matter of sheer
contingency. Mind need not become located in body. Its nature will not
be affected in any way by the death of this body and there is no
reason in principle why it should not have been located in a body
radically different from a human one. By exactly the same token, any
correlation that exists between bodily behavior and mental states must
also be entirely contingent; there can be no conceptual connections
between the contents of a mind at a given time and the nature and/or
behavior of the body in which it is located at that time.
This raises the question as to how my supposed analogical inferences
to other minds are to take place at all. How can I apply psychological
concepts to others, if I know only that they apply to me? To take a
concrete example again, if I learn what "pain" means by reference to
my own case, then I will understand "pain" to mean "my pain" and the
supposition that pain can be ascribed to anything other than myself
will be unintelligible to me.
If the relationship between having a human body and a certain kind of
mental life is as contingent as the Cartesian account of mind implies,
it should be equally easy – or equally difficult – for me to conceive
of a table as being in pain as it is for me to conceive of another
person as being in pain. The point, of course, is that this is not so.
The supposition that a table might experience pain is a totally
meaningless one, whereas the ascription of pain to other human beings
and animals that, in their physical characteristics and/or behavioral
capabilities, resemble human beings is something which even very young
children find unproblematic. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, I. § 284).
How is this to be accounted for? It will not do, in this context, to
simply respond that a table does not have the same complex set of
physical characteristics as a human body or that it is not capable of
the same patterns of behavior as a human body. Because the Cartesian
position implies that there is no logical connection between the
mental and the physical, between the possession of a body of a
particular kind and the capability for consciousness. Physical
differentiation can and must be acknowledged, but it can play no role
in any explanation of what it is to have a mental life.
I am surrounded by other bodies, some of which are similar to mine,
and some of which are different. On Cartesian principles such
similarities and such differences are irrelevant. The question as to
whether it is legitimate for me to ascribe psychological predicates to
entities other than myself, which the argument from analogy is
designed to address, cannot hinge on the kind of body that I am
confronted at a given time. Malcolm, N. (a)).
Assuming the validity of the Cartesian position, we have to infer that
it makes as much or a little sense, on these premises, to attribute
any psychological predicate to another human being as it does to
attribute it to a table or a rock.
On these premises, it makes no sense to attribute consciousness to
another human being at all. Thus on strict Cartesian principles, the
argument from analogy will not do the work that is required of it to
bridge the gulf between my conscious states and putative conscious
states that are not mine. Ultimately, it must be confessed that on
these principles I know only my own mental states and the supposition
that there are mental states other than my own ceases to be
intelligible to me. It is thus that solipsism comes to seem
inescapable.
If the above argument is valid, it demonstrates that the acceptance of
the Cartesian account of consciousness and the view that my
understanding of psychological concepts derives, as do the concepts
themselves, from my own case leads inexorably to solipsism. However,
it may fairly be said that the argument accomplishes more than just
this. It can, and should, be understood as a reductio ad absurdum
refutation of these Cartesian principles. Viewed from this
perspective, the argument may be paraphrased as follows:
If there is no logical connection between the physical and the mental,
if the physical forms no part of the criteria that govern my
ascription of psychological predicates, then I would be able to
conceive of an inanimate object such as a table as having a soul and
being conscious. But I cannot attach any intelligibility to the notion
of an inanimate object being conscious. It follows therefore that
there is a logical connection between the physical and the mental: the
physical does form part of the criteria that govern my ascription of
psychological words.
4. The Physical and the Mental
What then is this logical connection between the physical and the
mental? This question can best be answered by reflecting, for example,
on how a cartoonist might show that a particular table was angry or in
pain. As indicated above, it is impossible to attach literal meaning
to the assertion that a given inanimate object is angry or in pain,
but clearly a certain imaginative latitude may be allowed for specific
purposes and a cartoonist might conceivably want to picture a table as
being angry for humorous reasons.
What is significant in this connection, however, is that to achieve
this effect, the cartoonist must picture the table as having human
features – the pictured table will appear angry to us only to the
extent to that it possesses the natural human expression of anger. The
concept of anger can find purchase in relation to the table only if it
is represented as possessing something like a human form. This example
demonstrates a point of quite fundamental importance: so far from
being acquired by abstraction from my own case, from my own "inner"
mental life, my psychological concepts are acquired in a specifically
intersubjective, social, linguistic context and part of their meaning
is their primary application to living human beings. To put this
slightly differently, a person is a living human being and the human
person in this sense functions as our paradigm of that which has a
mental life; it is precisely in relation to their application to
persons that we learn such concepts as "consciousness," "pain,"
"anger," and so forth. As such, it is a necessary and antecedent
condition for the ascription of psychological predicates such as these
to an object that it should "possess" a body of a particular kind.
Wittgenstein articulated this point in one of the centrally important
methodological tenets of the Investigations:
Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a
living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind;
hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (I. § 281).
Consequently, the belief that there is something problematic about the
application of psychological words to other human beings and 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. The intersubjective world that
we live with other human beings and the public language-system that we
must master if we are to think at all are the primary data, the
"proto-phenomena," in Wittgenstein's phrase. (I. § 654) Our
psychological and non-psychological concepts alike are derived from a
single linguistic fountainhead. It is precisely because the living
human being functions as our paradigm of that which is conscious and
has a mental life that we find the solipsistic notion that other human
beings could be "automatons," machines devoid of any conscious thought
or experience, bizarre and bewildering. The idea that other persons
might all in reality be "automatons" is not one which we can seriously
entertain.
5. Knowing Other Minds
We are now in a position to see the essential redundancy of the
argument from analogy. First, it is a misconception to think that we
need any inferential argument to assure us of the existence of other
minds. Such an assurance seems necessary only so long as it is assumed
that each of us has to work "outwards" from the interiority of his/her
own consciousness, to abstract from our own cases to the "internal"
world of others. As indicated above, this assumption is fundamentally
wrong – our knowledge that other human beings are conscious and our
knowledge of their mental states at a given time is not inferential in
nature at all, but is rather determined by the public criteria that
govern the application of psychological concepts. I know that a person
who behaves in a particular way – who, for example, gets red in the
face, shouts, gesticulates, speaks vehemently, and so forth – is angry
precisely because I have learned the concept "anger" by reference to
such behavioral criteria. There is no inference involved here. I do
not reason "he behaves in this way, therefore he is angry" – rather
"behaving in this way" is part of what it is to be angry and it does
not occur to any sane person to question whether the individual who
acts in this way is conscious or has a mental life. (Investigations,
I. § 303; II. iv., p. 178).
Second, because the argument from analogy treats the existence of the
mental lives of other living human beings as problematic, it seeks to
establish that it is legitimate to infer that other living human
beings do indeed have mental lives, that each one of us may be said to
be justified
in his confidence that he is surrounded by other persons rather than
"automatons." The difficulty here, however, is that the argument
presupposes that I can draw an analogy between two things, myself as a
person and other living human beings, that are sufficiently similar to
permit the analogous comparison and sufficiently different to require
it. The question must be faced, however, is how or in what respects am
I different from or similar to other human beings? The answer is that
I am neither. I am a living human being, as are these others. I see
about me living human beings and the argument from analogy is supposed
to allow me to infer that these are persons like myself. However, the
truth is that I have no criterion for discriminating living human
beings from persons, for the very good reason that persons are living
human beings – there is no conceptual difference between the two.
Since the argument acknowledges that I know living human beings
directly, it thereby implicitly acknowledges that I know other persons
directly, thus making itself functionally redundant. (Malcolm, N. op.
cit.).
A final, frequently-encountered objection to the argument from analogy
derives from the work of Strawson and Malcolm: the argument attempts
to move inferentially from my supposed direct knowledge of my own
mental life and "inner" states to my indirect knowledge of the mental
states of others. It thus presupposes that I know what it means to
assign mental states to myself without necessarily knowing what it
means to ascribe them to others. This is incoherent. To speak of
certain mental states as being mine in the first place is to
discriminate them from mental states that are not mine and these, by
definition, are the mental states of others. It follows, therefore,
that in a fundamental sense the argument from analogy cannot get off
the ground: one cannot know how to ascribe mental states to oneself
unless one also knows what it means to ascribe mental states to
others.
Plausible as this objection seems at first sight, it is (ironically,
on Wittgensteinian criteria) quite mistaken. For it is not the case
that when I am in pain I first identify the pain and subsequently come
to recognize that it is one that I, as distinct from someone else,
have. The personal pronoun "I" in the locution "I am in pain" is not
the "I" of personal individuation – it does not refer to me or
discriminate me as a publicly situated person as distinct from others.
(The Blue Book and Brown Books, pp. 67-69; also Investigations, I. §
406). The exponent of the argument from analogy is not guilty of the
charge of presupposing the very thing that he is endeavoring to
demonstrate, as both Strawson and Malcolm suggest. Wittgenstein in
fact considered that there is a genuine asymmetry here, in relation to
the ascription of psychological predicates to oneself and to others,
which is dimly perceived but misrepresented by those who feel the need
of the argument from analogy. Whereas one ascribes psychological
states to others by reference to bodily and behavioral criteria, one
has and requires no criteria at all to self-ascribe or self-avow them.
(Investigations, I. § 289-290).
Thus the exponent of the argument from analogy sees, quite correctly,
that present-tense, first-person psychological assertions such as "I
am in pain" differ radically from third-person psychological predicate
ascriptions, but thinks of the former as descriptions of "inner"
mental states to which he alone has a privileged access. This is
crucially wrong. Such uses of the word "I" as occur in present-tense,
first-person psychological assertions do not identify a possessor;
they do not discriminate one person from amongst a group. As
Wittgenstein puts it,
To say "I have pain" is no more a statement about a particular person
than moaning is. (The Blue Book and Brown Books, p. 67; also
Investigations, I. § 404.).
To ascribe pain to a third party, on the other hand, is to identify a
concrete individual as the possessor of the pain. On this point alone
Wittgenstein concurs with the exponent of the argument from analogy.
However, Wittgenstein here calls attention to the fact that the
asymmetry is not one that exists between the supposedly direct and
certain knowledge that I have of my own mental states as distinct from
the wholly inferential knowledge which, allegedly, I have of the
mental states of others. Rather, the asymmetry is that the ascriptions
of psychological predicates to others require criterial justificatory
grounds, whereas the self-avowals or self-ascriptions of such
predicates are criterionless. It thus transpires that the argument
from analogy appears possible and necessary only to those who
misapprehend the asymmetry between the criterial bases for
third-person psychological predicate ascription and the non-criterial
right for their self-ascription or self-avowal for a cognitive
asymmetry between direct and indirect knowledge of mental states. The
Cartesian egocentric view of the mind and of mental events that gives
rise both to the specter of solipsism and attempts to evade it by
means of the argument from analogy has its origins in this very
misapprehension.
6. The Privacy of Experience
What then of solipsism? To what extent does the foregoing undermine it
as a coherent philosophical hypothesis, albeit one in which no-one
really believes? Solipsism rests upon certain presuppositions about
the mind and our knowledge of mental events and processes. Two of
these, the thesis that I have a privileged form of access to and
knowledge of my own mind and the thesis that there is no conceptual or
logically necessary link between the mental and the physical, have
been dealt with above. If the foregoing is correct, both theses are
false. This leaves us with the final presupposition underlying
solipsism, that all experiences are necessarily (that is logically)
private to the individual whose experiences they are. This thesis –
which, it is fair to say, is very widely accepted – also derives from
the Cartesian account of mind and generates solipsistic conclusions by
suggesting that experience is something that, because of its "occult"
or ephemeral nature, can never literally be shared. No two people can
ever be said to have the same experience. This again introduces the
problem of how one person can know the experiences of another or, more
radically, how one can know that another person has experiences at
all.
Wittgenstein offers a comprehensive critique of this view. He attacks
the notion that experience is necessarily private. His arguments
against this are complex, if highly compressed and rather oracular.
(For more detailed accounts, see Kenny, A., Malcolm, N. (b), Vohra,
A.).
Wittgenstein distinguishes two senses of the word "private" as it is
normally used: privacy of knowledge and privacy of possession.
Something is private to me in the first sense if only I can know it;
it is private to me in the second sense if only I can have it. Thus
the thesis that experience is necessarily private can mean one of two
things, which are not always discriminated from each other with
sufficient care: (a) only I can know my experiences or (b) only I can
have my experiences. Wittgenstein argues that the first of these is
false and the second is true in a sense that does not make experience
necessarily private, as follows:
Under (a), if we take pain as an experiential exemplar, we find that
the assertion "Only I can know my pains" is a conjunction of two
separate theses: (i) I (can) know that I am in pain when I am in pain
and (ii) other people cannot know that I am in pain when I am in pain.
Thesis (i) is, literally, nonsense: it cannot be meaningfully asserted
of me that I know that I am in pain. Wittgenstein's point here is not
that I do not know that I am in pain when I am in pain, but rather
that the word "know" cannot be significantly employed in this way.
(Investigations, I. § 246; II. xi. p. 222). This is because the verbal
locution "I am in pain" is usually (though not invariably) an
expression of pain – as part of acquired pain-behavior it is a
linguistic substitute for such natural expressions of pain as
groaning. (I. § 244). For this reason it cannot be governed by an
epistemic operator. The prepositional function "I know that x" does
not yield a meaningful proposition if the variable is replaced by an
expression of pain, linguistic or otherwise. Thus to say that others
learn of my pains only from my behavior is misleading, because it
suggests that I learn of them otherwise, whereas I don't learn of them
at all – I have them. (I. § 246).
Thesis (ii) – other people cannot know that I am in pain when I am in
pain – is false. If we take the word "know" is as it is normally used,
then it is true to say that other people can and very frequently do
know when I am in pain. Indeed, in cases where the pain is extreme, it
is often impossible to prevent others from knowing this even when one
wishes to do so. Thus, in certain circumstances, it would not be
unusual to hear it remarked of someone, for example, that "a moan of
pain escaped him" – indicating that despite his efforts, he could not
but manifest his pain to others. It thus transpires that neither
thesis (i) nor (ii) is true.
If we turn to (b), we find that "Only I can have my pains" expresses a
truth, but it is a truth that is grammatical rather than ontological.
It draws our attention to the grammatical connection between the
personal pronoun "I" and the possessive "my." However, it tells us
nothing specifically about pains or other experiences, for it remains
true if we replace the word "pains" with many other plural nouns (e.g.
"Only I can have my blushes"). Another person can have the same pain
as me. If our pains have the same phenomenal characteristics and
corresponding locations, we will quite correctly be said to have "the
same pain." This is what the expression "the same pain" means. Another
person, however, cannot have my pains. My pains are the ones that, if
they are expressed at all, are expressed by me. But by exactly the
same (grammatical) token, another person cannot have my blushes,
sneezes, frowns, fears, and so forth., and none of this can be taken
as adding to our stockpile of metaphysical truths. It is true that I
may deliberately and successfully keep an experience to myself, in
which case that particular experience might be said to be private to
me. But I might do this by articulating it in a language that those
with whom I was conversing do not understand. There is clearly nothing
occult or mysterious about this kind of privacy. (Investigations, II.
xi, p. 222). Similarly, experience that I do not or cannot keep to
myself is not private. In short, some experiences are private and some
are not. Even though some experiences are private in this sense, it
does not follow that all experiences could be private. As Wittgenstein
points out, "What sometimes happens could always happen" is a fallacy.
It does not follow from the fact that some orders are not obeyed that
all orders might never be obeyed. For in that case the concept "order"
would become incapable of instantiation and would lose its
significance. (I. § 345).
7. The Incoherence of Solipsism
With the belief in the essential privacy of experience eliminated as
false, the last presupposition underlying solipsism is removed and
solipsism is shown as foundationless, in theory and in fact. One might
even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for to make an
appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would
implicitly have to affirm the very thing that he purportedly refuses
to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria and a
public, extra-mental world. There is a temptation to say that
solipsism is a false philosophical theory, but this is not quite
strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is incoherent. What makes
it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist requires a
language (that is a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic
thoughts at all. Given this, it is scarcely surprising that those
philosophers who accept the Cartesian premises that make solipsism
apparently plausible, if not inescapable, have also invariably assumed
that language-usage is itself essentially private. The cluster of
arguments – generally referred to as "the private language argument" –
that we find in the Investigations against this assumption effectively
administers the coup de grâce to both Cartesian dualism and solipsism.
(I. § 202; 242-315). Language is an irreducibly public form of life
that is encountered in specifically social contexts. Each natural
language-system contains an indefinitely large number of
"language-games," governed by rules that, though conventional, are not
arbitrary personal fiats. The meaning of a word is its (publicly
accessible) use in a language. To question, argue, or doubt is to
utilize language in a particular way. It is to play a particular kind
of public language-game. The proposition "I am the only mind that
exists" makes sense only to the extent that it is expressed in a
public language, and the existence of such language itself implies the
existence of a social context. Such a context exists for the
hypothetical last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, but not for the
solipsist. A non-linguistic solipsism is unthinkable and a thinkable
solipsism is necessarily linguistic. Solipsism therefore presupposes
the very thing that it seeks to deny. That solipsistic thoughts are
thinkable in the first instance implies the existence of the public,
shared, intersubjective world that they purport to call into question.
8. References and Further Reading
Ayer, A. J. The Problem of Knowledge. Penguin, 1956.
Beck, K. "De re Belief and Methodological Solipsism," in Thought and
Object – Essays in Intentionality (ed. A. Woodfield). Clarendon Press,
1982.
Dancy, J. Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Blackwell, 1985.
Descartes, R. Discourse on Method and the Meditations (trans. F. E.
Sutcliffe). Penguin, 1968.
Devitt, M. Realism and Truth. Blackwell, 1984.
Hacker, P.M.S. Insight and Illusion. O.U.P., 1972.
James, W. Radical Empiricism and a Pluralistic Universe. E.P. Dutton, 1971.
Kenny, A. Wittgenstein. Penguin, 1973.
Locke, J. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. A.C. Fraser), Dover, 1959.
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