Knowledge of other minds: Norman Malcolm's philosophical approach

¶ … Minds," Norman Malcolm attempts to highlight the difficulty of establishing the existence of minds other than one's own, specifically by dismantling the so-called "argument from analogy" (Malcolm 969). This actually makes Malcolm's argument a little easier to track, because he constructs it carefully in order to avoid the same logical fallacies he believes the argument from analogy engages in. By carefully tracking Malcolm's argument, one can see not only how the argument from analogy is insufficient as evidence for the knowledge of other minds, but also how Malcolm makes a convincing case for the ultimate impossibility of this knowledge, or at least, that the lack of this knowledge does not actually represent a true problem for philosophy.

Malcolm begins his argument by outlining a number of different variations of the argument from analogy. He begins with the most basic form, which is the idea that "I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because, first, they have bodies like me, which I know, in my own case, to be the antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings" (Mill 243 qtd. In Malcolm 969). This is an argument from analogy because it considers the existence of bodies to be analogous to the existence of minds, based on the experience of the individual. He goes on to cite variations of this argument, which, while different in their details, nevertheless depend on the same "fundamental error" (Malcolm 974). As will be seen, it is this "fundamental error" that makes the argument from analogy not only insufficient, but actually nonsensical.

Malcolm picks apart these individual formulations of the argument from analogy one by one, and it is not actually necessary to repeat here his specific criticisms of these variations here, because they are ultimately secondary to his main argument, which is the claim that all versions of the argument from analogy, "whether the argument is the classical one (the analogy between my body and other bodies) or [Professor H.H.] Price's version ( the analogy between my language and the noises and signs produced by other things)," depend upon "the mistaken assumption that one learns from one's own case what thinking, feeling, sensation are" (Malcolm 974). Malcolm argues that starting from this assumption necessarily defeats the argument, because there is no way to compare one's own experience with the observed behavior of someone else; put another way, when someone is talking about his or her "own case" or experience, he or she is talking about something internal that is only intelligible to that individual, but when he or she is talking about others, the thing that is being discussed is behavior, not an internal state (Malcolm 974-975). Thus, "when I say 'I am in pain,' by 'pain' I mean a certain inward state. When I say 'He is in pain,' by 'pain' I mean behavior. I cannot attribute pain to others in the same sense that I attribute it to myself," and so the analogy falls apart (Malcolm 975).

The most interesting part of Malcolm's whole argument, however, is his conclusion, because he suggests that the problem of determining the existence of other minds is not a problem at all, or, is a misidentification of the real question. This is because the entire question of other minds is ultimately subsumed by the fact that when we make statements about our personal experience (whether those statements are said aloud or not), we are not actually describing something internal, but rather we are identifying whatever experience we have with some external criteria (Malcolm 977). Even then, however, we are not so much making a claim (I feel pain) as we are expressing that feeling in a certain behavior, in the same way that "crying, limping, holding one's leg" is an expression of that feeling (Malcolm 978). This is because any other consideration of "one's own case" is ultimately nonsensical; if feelings are identified as such because they correspond to external definitions, then we are not really talking about anything "internal" to the individual, and if feelings are identified as such because they correspond to some previous instance of that feeling, then this identification is ultimately nonsensical because there is no way to be sure that the second instance of that feeling actually corresponds to the first; if everything is internal, then there is no way to check for accuracy (Malcolm 977-978).