You might say: all right, let us suppose these are wide-open possibilities. Perhaps I can never really know what the mind of another person is like, what mental events occur within it, or even whether there is any mental life going on at all. But can’t I still suppose that other people’s mental lives are much like mine? Can’t I reasonably use myself as a model for all the rest? It would be not so much a case of knowledge as of a hypothesis or conjecture, but it perhaps it is a reasonable conjecture to make. This is called the argument from analogy to the existence of other minds. The problem
...more
