The practical and professional dimensions of scepticism about others : an essay on the problem of other minds

What is the problem of other minds? One answer might be that the problem of other minds is itself a set of closely related questions. For example, can I know that there are other minds like my own? How can I establish that my beliefs about others have the status of knowledge? What do I believe when I believe that there are other minds? How can I so much as have the concept of another person? An answer along these lines is at best an incomplete one. It does not state what the problem is; it merely tells us what sorts of questions that problem supposedly leaves us with. If that seems like an unreasonable issue to have with the answer, it might help to compare the problem of other minds with its older, larger philosophical sibling: the problem of the external world. Recall that Descartes invites us, in his Meditatiom, through a certain line of reasoning to a particular conclusion. From that conclusion a number pressing questions were supposed to follow. A simplistic rehearsal of this reasoning might go as follows: what I know of the world is the set of ‘effects’ which it has upon me. These effects are logically distinguishable from their cause or causes. I can, therefore, entertain drastically different hypotheses about those causes to the ones which I now hold. The world might be totally different from the way I think it is. All of these effects, what I take myself to know about the world already, might even be the devising of an evil demon. These considerations leave us with the following sort of question: how do we, or can we, know that the world is what we take it for, and not fundamentally different? What would an equivalent line of reasoning look like in the case of the problem of other minds? If there is one, it is regrettably absent from philosophical literature, both past and present. (In this respect the problem of other minds and the problem of the external world stand apart). I am not sure if that is because philosophers who write on the topic tend to take it for granted that the substance of it has already been made clear enough by others, or that it is perhaps just obvious enough in its own right to go without explicit formulation. All one tends to find, by way of introductory remarks, are instances in which problematic questions about knowledge of other minds simply appear, without explanation, or without the aid of any specific line of reasoning