to the question "But, if you are certain, isn't it that you are shutting | 33
your eyes in the face of doubt?" Wittgenstein answers: "They are shut." This, of course, does not explain why our eyes are shut, or tell
us why it is justifiable that they should be shut with regard to the 3 situation. At face value, it only tells us that we are prone to jump to f conclusions without sufficient reflection in the situations of practical
life. All this is true, but how does this observation do away with our % intellectual need to discover how we have knowledge of other minds?
How does the mystery of the inner mental state dissolve once we see what i happens in the particular case? Wittgenstein gives a sort of answer by
way of this passage:
" "He alone knows his motives" - that is an expression of the fact that we ask him what his motives are. - If he is sincere he will tell us them; but I need more than sincerity to guess his motives. This is where there is a kinship with the case of knowing". 34
The point here is that the statement "he alone knows his motives" may mislead us into thinking that this means he has a private mental state which only he can be familiar with. This way of putting the matter gives rise to the idea that there is a philosophical problem
involved in our coming to know his mind. But it is just here that we are being misled. For all that is really the case when we talk like this, i.e. when we say that somebody knows his own motives, is that in this situation we ask the person what his motives are. There need be
no qualitatively different type of knowledge of his motives possessed by him for us to say this, it is something we say and regard ourselves as warranted in saying in situations determined by observable external criteria. This is the type of clarification which is supposed to dissolve the mystery. For Wittgenstein the reason we are misled
eventually boils down to our tendency to make generalisations. This is true in ordinary language and it is even more true in philosophy. When we make generalisations we get far away from what really happens in the particular case, or in reality, and thus our generalisations give rise to problems which result purely from this way of using language, and not from the world itself. Metaphysics is therefore not required, because the reality which we experience - construed as the particular and concrete - makes perfectly good sense by itself. If we are to refute Wittgenstein, we have to show that attention to the particular leads us not away from but towards metaphysics. We need to show that the problems and tensions which seem to require further explanation are not only in language but in the world itself. And it seems that it is not difficult to do this with reference to the Wittgensteinian treatment of the other minds.
According to Wittgenstein, in actual cases we do not doubt
whether we know the contents of someone else's consciousness. We do not worry about the theoretical justification of our knowledge. And this is not, for Wittgenstein, simply because we are indulging in sloppy thinking or are basing our judgment on a probable inference. It is because we actually do not need justification. We do not need justification because, in the particular case "all lies open to view." But this can only mean that when we describe what is going on in someone's mind we mean nothing more than that he is liable to do such and such given some particular
psychological states when we are prone to behave in similar ways. And if this really is aVt we mean, then it is certain that the metaphysical problem of other minds is rendered redundant.
But that this is not an adequate account of how we regard other minds can be seen by looking at the very particular and concrete case which Wittgenstein valued so highly. For it is just here that the total experience of what it is like to communicate with other minds comes before us in its inescapable fullness. The first thing we can say is
that in a concrete experience of this sort we do not, and cannot, think of another person's state of mind as no more than a tendency to behave in a certain way given certain conditions. This way of thinking of another mind is only the result of seeking for the way to get rid of a philosophical problem, it is itself the result of being misled by philosophy and not
looking at the facts of the concrete situation. In the particular case, in real life, we can never perform this reduction, and we regard other minds as transcending a list of behavioural characteristics, however much we rely upon the latter as indicative of the thoughts of another person. Wittgenstein goes some way towards recognition of this when he asserts that one person can be a complete enigma to another. In communicating with others, we presuppose that they have minds somewhat like ours. It seems that they must have, yet those minds are far from being open to view. Our actual primitive experience is like this, it is the task of phenomenology to give a complete description of it and the task of metaphysics to try to make sense of it (i.e. to interpret the primitive experience). It is because of how we regard other minds from the start, as living feeling consciousnesses like ourselves, that we do not stop to doubt when we see somebody writhing in pain.
Once we accept that our experience of other minds has a richness and depth which arises from human experience itself, we see that the
35. That Wittgenstein does take such a narrow view of experience can