Temptation and Therapy: Wittgensteinian Responses to Other Minds Skepticism

Sofia Miguens

doi:10.1515/witt-2019-0014

Article

Temptation and Therapy

Wittgensteinian Responses to Other Minds Skepticism

Sofia Miguens

Published/Copyright: January 16, 2019

Published by

Become an author with De Gruyter Brill

Author Information Explore this Subject

From the journal Wittgenstein-Studien Volume 10 Issue 1

Abstract

Although many philosophers have, throughout history, regarded themselves as answering the skeptic, the question arises whether answering the skeptic is the thing to do. If not, the question becomes how else to respond to her. Wittgenstein-inspired stances are, in general, therapeutic. In this article I focus on the problem of other minds in order to analyze and compare the different shapes such therapeutic stances may have. I begin by showing how crucial resisting the temptation to answer the skeptic was for John McDowell’s early formulations of disjunctivism in the 1980s. In his article “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge” I identify substantial positions such as the rejection of highest common factor views, the diagnosis of the connection between such highest common factor views and an (untenable) conception of appearances, as well as the proposal of a non-Cartesian, or modest, approach to indistinguishability for a subject. Whatever his success in these other enterprises, McDowell continues to regard both the temptation to answer the skeptic and a substitute therapeutic stance as epistemologically motivated. But if skepticism is more than an intellectual conundrum, as maintained by Stanley Cavell, the source of such temptation has to be considered in a completely different light.

Included in N. Venturinha (ed.), Special Section on Wittgenstein and Applied Epistemology.

Bibliography

Cavell, Stanley: The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism and Tragedy, Oxford 1979.Search in Google Scholar

Diamond, Cora: The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, in: Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe, Philosophy and Animal Life, New York 2008.Search in Google Scholar

Glendining, Simon: Cavell and Other Animals, in: James Conant & Andrea Kern (eds.), Varieties of Skepticism: Essays after Kant, Wittgenstein and Cavell, Berlin 2014, 429 – 450.10.1515/9783110336795.429Search in Google Scholar

Hamawaki, Arata: Cavell, Skepticism and the Idea of Philosophical Criticism, in: James Conant & Andrea Kern, Varieties of Skepticism: Essays after Kant, Wittgenstein and Cavell, Berlin 2014, 389 – 428,10.1515/9783110336795.389Search in Google Scholar

Kern, Andrea: Understanding Scepticism: Wittgenstein's Paradoxical Reinterpretation of Sceptical Doubt, in: Denis McManus (ed.), Wittgenstein and Skepticism, London 2004, 200 – 217.10.4324/9780203467794_chapter_8Search in Google Scholar

Macarthur, David: Review of Wittgenstein and Scepticism, Edited by Denis McManus, in: Philosophical Books, 48(2) (2007), 168 – 170.10.1111/j.1468-0149.2007.440_4.xSearch in Google Scholar

McDowell, John: Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge, in: Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, Cambridge, MA 1998a, 369 – 394.Search in Google Scholar

McDowell, John: Singular Thought and the extent of inner space, in: Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, Cambridge, MA 1998b, 228 – 259.Search in Google Scholar

Miguens, Sofia: Apperception or environment – J. McDowell and Ch. Travis on the Nature of Perceptual Judgement, in: ConTextos Kantianos – An International Journal of Philosophy, 6 (2017), 79 – 92.Search in Google Scholar

Online erschienen: 2019-01-16

You are currently not able to access this content.

Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/witt-2019-0014