Two kinds of methodological solipsism
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Sami Pihlström
Abstract
The paper deals with an analogy between two philosophical positions: (1) the kind of methodological solipsism associated with Carnapian logical positivism and, more generally, with the entire post-Cartesian tradition in epistemology and in the philosophy of mind and language, and (2) the more socially oriented, late-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, which constitutes the background of several influential philosophical treatments of the conditions of understanding human cultures and social forms of life. In the latter, the solipsistic “I”, the locus of all experience and meaning, is replaced by a social subject, “we”, but the position remains methodologically solipsistic, since experiences and meanings are still created from a first person point of view, on the basis of what is “given” to the (social) subject. The solipsism issue turns out to be fundamentally relevant to some basic concerns in the philosophy of science and of the social sciences, because even pragmatic and constructivist currents based on Wittgenstein's later work employ solipsistic methodological assumptions.
© Philosophia Press 2000
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- Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul. The Welfare State edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul, Cambridge University Press 1997, 292 sider
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Articles in the same Issue
- Rational Ends: Humean and Non-Humean Considerations
- Two kinds of methodological solipsism
- The Touch of Art: Adorno and the Sublime
- Understanding Scepticism
- Against Deontology
- The Passivity of Reason – On Heidegger's Concept of Stimmung
- The Undeflated Domain of Semantics
- Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. 159 pp.
- Herbert Schnädelbach: Philosophie in der modernen Kultur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, 283 Seiten
- Gronke, Horst: Das Denken des Anderen: Führt die Selbstaufhebung von Husserls Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität zur transzendentalen Sprachpragmatik? (Epistemata: Reihe Philosophie Bd. 234) Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999, 294 sider Zahavi, Dan: Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität: Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik. (Phaenomenologica 135) Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, 204+xii sider
- Laura Otis. Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. 210 pp.
- Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul. The Welfare State edited by Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller & Jeffrey Paul, Cambridge University Press 1997, 292 sider
- Søren Kjørup. Kunstens filosofi: En indføring i œstetik. Roskilde: Roskilde Universitets Forlag, 2000, 213 pp.
