Other minds are neither seen nor inferred
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Other minds are neither seen nor inferred Mason Westfall1 Received: 9 September 2019 / Accepted: 21 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract How do we know about other minds on the basis of perception? The two most common answers to this question are that we literally perceive others’ mental states, or that we infer their mental states on the basis of perceiving something else. In this paper, I argue for a different answer. On my view, we don’t perceive mental states, and yet perceptual experiences often immediately justify mental state attributions. In a slogan: other minds are neither seen nor inferred. I argue that this view offers the best explanation of our deeply equivocal intuitions about perception-based mental state attributions, and also holds substantial interest for the epistemology of perception more generally. Keywords Mind · Epistemology · Perception · Social cognition · Other minds
1 Introduction Often we ascribe mental states on the basis of what we see. But how, exactly, do our visual experiences contribute to these attributions? This question is challenging, in part, because there are strong competing pressures on an acceptable answer. On the one hand, often our mental state ascriptions seem to result directly from what we see. I look at your face, and can just tell that you are enjoying yourself. On the other, the view that we literally see mental states strikes many people as highly counterintuitive. The contemporary literature has struggled to explain our equivocal intuitions about perception-based mental state ascriptions. Here I explain how these ascriptions can be direct, despite our not perceiving mental states. In particular, I argue that our
I would like to thank Jennifer Nagel, David James Barnett, Diana Raffman, Imogen Dickie, Aaron Henry, Elliot Carter, Evan Westra, Manish Oza, Melissa Rees, audience members at the 2019 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association—especially Eleonore Neufeld, Zoe Jenkin and Amogha Sahu, and at the 2019 Annual Congress of the Canadian Philosophical Association—especially Madeleine Ransom. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful, incisive comments improved this paper immensely.
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Mason Westfall [email protected] University of Toronto, 170 St George St, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON M5R 2M8, Canada
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mental state ascriptions are often immediately justified by visual experiences, despite mental states not being perceptually presented. On my view, we should give up an overly narrow conception of perceptual justification, on which perceptual experiences immediately justify only judgments that correspond to what is perceptually presented. If we give up this narrow conception, we can explain the uniquely puzzling features of perception-based mental state ascriptions.
2 Preliminaries I hold that other minds are neither seen nor inferred. Let me explain what I mean. I take visual experiences to consist in the phenomenally conscious presentation of distal objects and properties. Som
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