7 - Mindreaders

Summary

The words ‘know’ and ‘feel’ were like ‘it’ and ‘of’ and ‘by’ – you couldn't see them or touch them, so the meaning wasn't significant. People cannot show you a ‘know’ and you cannot see what a ‘feel’ looks like.

(Williams 1994, p. 95)

OTHER MINDS

According to the broadly Gricean account of communication adopted throughout this book, linguistic communication is an intelligent, intentional, inferential activity. Utterances do not encode the messages they convey; rather, they are used to provide evidence of the speaker's intentions, which hearers must infer. Although there is room for debate about precisely how important a role inference plays in communication (and indeed about the precise nature of ‘inference’ itself) most pragmatists now agree that verbal communication amounts to more than a simple coding–decoding process.

It's worth remembering, however, that the attribution of mental states to others plays an important role in cognition as well as communication. The human disposition to attribute mental states is so much a part of our individual (and collective, species-specific) psychological make-up that it is not something we can choose to do or not to do: it's something we just can't help, any more than we can help pulling our hand back from a source of extreme heat.

Plainly, other people's intentions and mental states generally are not objects to be perceived in the world in the same way as are their faces or bodies; they are ‘out there’, but they are invisible.