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Language and the other-minds problem

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Language and the other-minds problem
makerowner
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Posted 07/19/08 - 04:08 PM:
Subject: Language and the other-minds problem 		quote post
#1
The problem of other minds, like many other skeptical problems, is a problem only because it is framed like one. Philosophers, in attempting to solve it, have accepted as an unstated premise an assumption that is fatal to their project; namely, that the subject who is trying to determine whether any minds other than his own exist is sui generis and has no history. They take the adult, rational human as basic, and ignore that every such subject was once an irrational infant. What bearing does this have on the problem of other minds? The crucial fact that there are always already other minds, that our own minds are indirectly constructed by these others. This last statement may seem like a radical metaphysical claim, but what I mean is simply that much of our thought is linguistic, and thus presupposes other minds. Language is inherently social in two ways: first, because it requires others to whom we can speak or write; second, because we learn it from a pre-existing linguistic community. The subject can only use language to describe states of his own mind by first having learned them from others. Thus no subject with language can exist without other minds. Since subjects with language do exist, we can conclude that other minds do as well.

Thoughts?
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.
Pete
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Posted 07/19/08 - 04:54 PM:
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#2
Interesting move. But doesn't the problem of other minds then turn into the problem of whether we are thinking in a private language or a public language? Is there any reason to think this problem is easier to solve than the original?




Edited by Pete on 07/19/08 - 05:20 PM
swstephe
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Posted 07/19/08 - 07:20 PM:
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#3
makerowner wrote:
The problem of other minds, like many other skeptical problems, is a problem only because it is framed like one. Philosophers, in attempting to solve it, have accepted as an unstated premise an assumption that is fatal to their project; namely, that the subject who is trying to determine whether any minds other than his own exist is sui generis and has no history. They take the adult, rational human as basic, and ignore that every such subject was once an irrational infant. What bearing does this have on the problem of other minds? The crucial fact that there are always already other minds, that our own minds are indirectly constructed by these others. This last statement may seem like a radical metaphysical claim, but what I mean is simply that much of our thought is linguistic, and thus presupposes other minds. Language is inherently social in two ways: first, because it requires others to whom we can speak or write; second, because we learn it from a pre-existing linguistic community. The subject can only use language to describe states of his own mind by first having learned them from others. Thus no subject with language can exist without other minds. Since subjects with language do exist, we can conclude that other minds do as well.

Thoughts?


Well, I would agree, but I'm not sure you would appreciate the company since I favor functionalist arguments. If something produces language which my mind can begin to comprehend, then it is "practical" to assume that whatever produced the language had a mind like mine. I say "practical", because I'm dismissing the subjective requirement for there to be a mind in actuality. It is easy to write a computer program which scans a lot of documents and generates a statistical representation of our language, (the probability that the next word is going to be E, if the previous 4 words were A,B,C,D -- is an example of "Markov Chaining"). Now see -- everyone is going to argue that my stupid program, (which doesn't know what any of the words meant or language), could never be implied to have a mind. For functionalists, it doesn't matter -- words are information, the relationships between words is a kind of information ... I created a virtual parrot can appear to "talk" because it has been trained to generate something close enough for functional purposes. Even more of a trick, my computer talks to me all the time. If a program makes an error, it generates a linguistic sequence which explains what error occurred. It doesn't have a mind to generate that language, but the programmer who made the program and typed the error message which appeared did have a mind and he transcribed that logical information into the program.

Essentially you are saying, "I produce language to share the information in my mind with other minds, therefore, anything that produces language must have a mind (like mine)", which implies "only minds can create language", (get thee behind me parrots and computers!). It assumes a few things like -- if someone speaks a language which I can't understand or has some subtle feature which is different than my own, does that mean their mind would be different? (see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the languages you speak sculpts the way your mind thinks). This reminds me of some old linguistic trivia: that ancient Greek manuscripts only a few colors compared to modern languages. Were they able to perceive more colors than what they wrote about? In some languages, like Japanese, there are interesting color assignments. The color "aoi" is properly translated "blue-green", because it lies between what Europeans would consider "blue" and "green", there is a word for "green", (midori), added more recently, but it is used for a different range of colors. Does that mean that they don't see any distinction between the color of a green light on a stoplight and the sky, (both are "aoi")? My wife grew up speaking Malay. In Malay, they don't distinguish between gender in pronouns in spoken or written language. There is only one word for "he", "she" or "it", ("dia"). Currently, she speaks very good English, but she still has a tendency to mix up "he" and "she" while speaking, ("Did you see my brother? She was wearing a new suit"). Can you determine whether she really differentiates gender in her mind because her language doesn't differentiate? I can tell that they do -- culturally, they have very strong feelings about gender. Interestingly, the local slang for the many transvestites is "he/she", (the English words). I've become fluent in several languages and worked as a translator before. From my experience, I think there is a "language mind" which is a subset of the rest of the non-speaking mind. When you are fluent in several languages, its often like having multiple language minds. I can hear something in one language, understand the concept, but have difficulty in expressing that concept in my native language.

By the way, I don't think babies are irrational. Although pretty emotionally reactionary, their responses seem somewhat rationally pragmatic. Kids don't start playing with more abstract ideas until they acquire more language and find out how to manipulate others with it. I think that as soon as they develop motor skills, they also develop the main mind -- a kind of non-linguistic "emotional reactive mind", (now I sound like a Scientologist?!?). I think we all carry this mind around and its a good thing, (it is the source of everything we pride humanity on), but it is often self-deluded into thinking that it is the linguistic/rational mind that they developed socially -- especially since it is the social one which presents our identity to the world.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.
yffer
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Posted 07/20/08 - 06:29 AM:
quote post
#4
makerowner wrote:
The problem of other minds, like many other skeptical problems, is a problem only because it is framed like one. Philosophers, in attempting to solve it, have accepted as an unstated premise an assumption that is fatal to their project; namely, that the subject who is trying to determine whether any minds other than his own exist is sui generis and has no history. They take the adult, rational human as basic, and ignore that every such subject was once an irrational infant. What bearing does this have on the problem of other minds? The crucial fact that there are always already other minds, that our own minds are indirectly constructed by these others. This last statement may seem like a radical metaphysical claim, but what I mean is simply that much of our thought is linguistic, and thus presupposes other minds. Language is inherently social in two ways: first, because it requires others to whom we can speak or write; second, because we learn it from a pre-existing linguistic community. The subject can only use language to describe states of his own mind by first having learned them from others. Thus no subject with language can exist without other minds. Since subjects with language do exist, we can conclude that other minds do as well.

Thoughts?

Are you begging the question?


Language requires other minds
Language exists
Therefore other minds exist.



If mind is something other then language you haven’t shown that language is social because you haven’t shown us other minds, you’ve only inferred them.

The other minds problem is plagued by solipsism.
makerowner
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Posted 07/20/08 - 07:11 AM:
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#5
Pete wrote:
Interesting move. But doesn't the problem of other minds then turn into the problem of whether we are thinking in a private language or a public language? Is there any reason to think this problem is easier to solve than the original?






I think my second way that language is social refutes this objection: we always have to learn language from someone else. How could a language be private if we learn it from other people? How could we apply words that we learn from other people to our own mental states unless those people had similar mental states?
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.
makerowner
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Posted 07/20/08 - 07:43 AM:
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#6
swstephe, thanks for the lengthy response. There's lots for me to think about here, but I'll give my immediate reactions. As for the communication from your computer, I would argue that it's not a mind because of its very restricted stimuli and responses, whereas human minds can deal with all kinds of stimuli and produce any number of responses. It seems likely though that this is more a difference of degree than of kind; if a computer could be built that would consistently pass a Turing test, I don't think there's any way we could deny that it was a mind. Though I think it's also possible that minds are intimately connected with bodies in such a way that a bodiless mind would be unrecognizable to us (ie. would not pass a Turing test).

I'm familiar with the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, and I don't think it's true. In an earlier draft of the OP I said something like "our minds are constructed in part by other minds" but I removed that for some reason. I think that language is important to the structure of our minds, and I'm not sure minds as we know them would be possible without language, but I don't think language completely determines our possible thoughts. Otherwise how would neologisms occur?
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.
makerowner
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Posted 07/20/08 - 07:49 AM:
quote post
#7
yffer wrote:

Are you begging the question?


Language requires other minds
Language exists
Therefore other minds exist.

If mind is something other then language you haven’t shown that language is social because you haven’t shown us other minds, you’ve only inferred them.

The other minds problem is plagued by solipsism.






I don't think that's begging the question. The form of the argument is a modus ponens: If language, then other minds; language, therefore other minds. The only possible disagreement is with the first premise, which I admit is controversial. But I don't see how it begs the question.

I notice also that no one seems to be addressing the second way in which language is social, that we have to learn it from others. The only objection to it that I can see is the possibility that we might learn the language of mental states from a robot that has none.
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.
Pete
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Posted 07/20/08 - 09:02 AM:
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#8
makerowner wrote:
I think my second way that language is social refutes this objection: we always have to learn language from someone else. How could a language be private if we learn it from other people? How could we apply words that we learn from other people to our own mental states unless those people had similar mental states?


I think I'm trying to make essentially the same point as Yffer.

Yes, I'm willing to grant that language is essentially social--that the idea of a private language is incoherent.

But I'm still not seeing how this fact helps with the problem of other minds.

Here's the problem of other minds: How can I know that anyone besides myself thinks? I know that I think via introspection. I obviously cannot introspect the minds of others. Nor can I perceive their minds--I have perceptual access only to their behavior, not their thinking.

Here's your argument:

(1) I think.
(2) If I think, then I must have a language.
(3) If I have a language, then there must be other speakers.
(4) If there are other speakers, there must be other minds.

Won't anyone who thinks the problem of other minds is a genuine problem take issue with (4)? In other words, won't they ask, how do you know that they are expressing thoughts when they speak? You cannot perceive their thoughts, only their words.

So it seems to me that your argument will not persuade anyone who thinks that the problem of other minds is a genuine problem.

*************

Now you might try claiming that, if I had learned my words from mindless beings, then I would not count as having a genuine language. I.e. that it is a conceptual truth that, if I have a language, there are other minds.

But this just pushes the problem one step back. Someone who is in the grip of the problem of other minds will ask: how can you know that you have a genuine language as opposed to a schmanguage (that is, words learned from beings without minds)?

Edited by Pete on 07/20/08 - 09:31 AM
yffer
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Posted 07/20/08 - 09:43 AM:
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#9
makerowner wrote:


I don't think that's begging the question. The form of the argument is a modus ponens: If language, then other minds; language, therefore other minds. The only possible disagreement is with the first premise, which I admit is controversial. But I don't see how it begs the question.

I notice also that no one seems to be addressing the second way in which language is social, that we have to learn it from others. The only objection to it that I can see is the possibility that we might learn the language of mental states from a robot that has none.


The conclusion is implied, (or even explicitly stated) in the initial premise.

But the main issue is that by failing to define ‘others’ and ‘mind’ you have yet to show that language is social.



makerowner
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Posted 07/20/08 - 10:55 AM:
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yffer wrote:


The conclusion is implied, (or even explicitly stated) in the initial premise.






You're going to have to do more than just say it's implied there: show me how. I don't see it. The conclusion certainly follows from the premise (plus the fact that language exists), but if that counts as begging the question, then no deduction is possible.


But the main issue is that by failing to define ‘others’ and ‘mind’ you have yet to show that language is social.




Well I'm not using them in any special sense. Their regular English definitions will probably do just fine.
For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.
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