Knowledge of other minds: the inner and the outer

Abstract

We cannot perceive the minds or experiences of other people, but only their bodies and behaviour. The 'inner' therefore appears to be hidden behind the 'outer' and to be inferred from perceptible behaviour by analogy. Our knowledge of the experiences of others, in comparison with what philosophers think of as self‐knowledge, seems distinctly shaky. Wittgenstein conceived of the 'constitutional uncertainty' of the inner not as a consequence of defective evidence, but as a reflection in the rules of evidence of disagreement in human attitudes and responses that antecede our language‐games. The non‐uniformity in our instinctive reactions of trust and mistrust towards each other is one source of the constitutional uncertainty of psychological concepts. There is no such uncertainty in numerous other language‐games, and that too is determined by the character of our reactions. Indeed, it is tempting to misconstrue the constitutional uncertainty of the mental as confirmation of the idea that the 'inner' is hidden.