Reading Notes by Christopher Lay

Los Angeles Pierce College

Department of History, Philosophy, and Sociology

Russell	"The Argument from Analogy for Other Minds"	(1948/2009) Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, published by Taylor & Francis Routledge, pp. 425-428.
Part VI.	"Postulates of Scientific Inference"
Chapter 8	"Analogy"
Experiences Shared & Not	We feel and think Others feel and think Sticks and stones do not feel or think	"The problem with which we are concerned is the following. We observe in ourselves such occurrences as remembering, reasoning, feeling pleasure and feeling pain. We think that sticks and stones do not have these experiences, but that other people do."
Animals?	We have doubts about many animals, but about (normal) humans, we don't doubt	"as regards human beings it admits no doubt."
Physics	Physics alone doesn't seem to help us ascertain others' experiences, feelings, or thoughts We need a postulate beyond what physics can give us, Russell seeks to provide just such a postulate	"It is clear that belief in the minds of others requires some postulate that is not required in physics, since physics can be content with a knowledge of structure. My present purpose is to suggest what this further postulate may be."
Analogy	"It is clear that we must appeal to something that may be vaguely called 'analogy.' The behaviour of other people is in many ways analogous to our own, and we suppose that it must have analogous causes."
Inference	"This is a boring lecture," uttered by a colleague of yours, would be said by you if you had the thought that this lecture is boring, and so you infer that they too think that this lecture is boring	"What people say is what we should say if we had certain thoughts, and so we infer that they probably have these thoughts."
Behavior	Your colleague yawns, and this too is evidence that they are bored, as you have yawned when you are bored	"They behave in ways in which we behave when we are pleased (or displeased) in circumstances in which we should be pleased (or displeased)."
	"There are, in short, very many ways in which my responses to stimuli differ from those of 'dead' matter, and in all these ways other people resemble me."
Similar Causes	Thoughts cause, in a law-governed way, my behavior And "it is natural to infer that the same is true of the analogous behaviour of my friends."	"As it is clear to me that the causal laws governing my behaviour have to do with 'thoughts,' it is natural to infer that the same is true of the analogous behaviour of my friends."
Knowledge	Russell's goal is to determine what kind of knowledge we can have of others' thoughts, feelings, and thoughts	"We are concerned now with a much more specific kind of inference, the kind that is involved in our knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others—assuming that we have such knowledge."
Doubt	Here, we will be dealing with levels of doubt, not certitude	"It is of course obvious that such knowledge is more or less doubtful."
Behavior is Insufficient	Notice that human behaviors can occur in the (immediate, at least) absence of a live human MP3 players, televisions, and the like all evince human behavior, but they often times like an immediate live human	"There are calculating machines that do sums much better than our schoolboy sons; there are gramophone records that remember impeccably what So-and-so said on such-and-such an occasion; there are people in the cinema who, though copies of real people, are not themselves alive."
Robots	And we can imagine (easily now-a-days) very lifelike robots that evince all sorts of human behavior that are nevertheless not backed, so to speak, by a living human	"There is no theoretical limit to what ingenuity could achieve in the way of producing the illusion of life where in fact life is absent."
But How Do You Know?	And how do we know that an MP3, heard through an MP3 player, is not evidence of occurrent thought by some living human (or humanlike creature)?	"But, you will say, in all such cases it was the thoughts of human beings that produced the ingenious mechanism. Yes, but how do you know this? And how do you know that the gramophone does not 'think'?"
Behavioral Differences	Well, there are behavioral differences between the two	"There is, in the first place, a difference in the causal laws of observable behaviour."
Command One	I can request both a singer, say Emy Reynolds, and an MP3 player stocked with Emy Reynolds' "Stubborn" to perform for me Emy Reynolds' "Stubborn" Both comply	"If I say to a student 'write me a paper on Descartes' reasons for believing in the existence of matter,' I shall, if he is industrious, cause a certain response."
Command Two	I can request both a singer, say Emy Reynolds, and an MP3 player stocked with only Emy Reynolds' "Stubborn" to perform for me Emy Reynolds' "Best Day Ever" Only the singer complies Even if I threaten to destroy the MP3 players, it will not comply with my request	"A gramophone record might be so constructed as to respond to this stimulus, perhaps better than the student, but if so it would be incapable of telling me anything about any other philosopher, even if I threatened to refuse to give it a degree."
The Difference	"One of the most notable peculiarities of human behaviour is change of response to a given stimulus."
More	That difference is not enough to prove that "there are 'thoughts' connected with living bodies other than my own"	"But the differences in observable behaviour between living and dead matter do not suffice to prove that there are 'thoughts' connected with living bodies other than my own."
External Observation Materialism	Yet, "It is probably possible theoretically to account for the behaviour of living bodies by purely physical causal laws, and it is probably impossible to refute materialism by external observation alone."
Inner Observation	Taking inner observation into consideration, we must appeal to inferences from the relationship between our own thoughts and behaviors to others' thoughts corresponding to their observable behaviors	"If we are to believe that there are thoughts and feelings other than our own, that must be in virtue of some inference in which our own thoughts and feelings are relevant, and such an inference must go beyond what is needed in physics."
Rational Connection	We need a rational connection between behaviors we externally observe in others, and the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and experiences we cannot externally observe in others	"the possibility of a postulate which shall establish a rational connection between this belief and data, e.g. between the belief 'Mother is angry' and the hearing of a loud voice."
Self Observation	"We know, from observation of ourselves, a causal law of the form 'A causes B,' where A is a 'thought' and B a physical occurrence." When I think to myself, "I am fat," that causes me to suck in my gut A: thought "I am fat" Causes B: behavior of sucking in gut
Other Observation	I see a colleague sit up and suck in his gut when I enter a room I infer the thought "I am fat" in my colleague	"We sometimes observe a B when we cannot observe any A; we then infer an unobserved A."
Evidence	The more evidence I observe, the less doubtful my inference	"It is evident that my confidence in the 'inference' is increased by increased complexity in the datum and also by increased certainty of the causal law derived from subjective observation, provided the causal law is such as to account for the complexities of the datum."
Certitude	For me to have certain knowledge, my inference would have to conclude that I had isolated the only cause behind my colleague's behavior But there are other possible causes	"It is clear that, in so far as plurality of causes is to be suspected, the kind of inference we have been considering is not valid. We are supposed to know 'A causes B,' and also to know that B has occurred; if this is to justify us in inferring A, we must know that only A causes B."
Probability	"Or, if we are content to infer that A is probable, it will suffice if we can know that in most cases it is A that causes B."
		"our principle is not only employed to establish the existence of other minds, but is habitually assumed, though in a less concrete form, in physics."
Evidence & Probability	Our inference is more probable when we find complementary evidence My colleague, for instance, could utter at the very same time that he sucks his gut in, "I feel so fat"	"Complexity in the observed behaviour of another person, when this can all be accounted for by a simple cause such as thirst, increases the probability of the inference by diminishing the probability of some other cause. I think that in ideally favourable circumstances the argument would be formally as follows:"
Inference w/Certitude	"From subjective observation I know that A, which is a thought or feeling, causes B, which is a bodily act, e.g. a statement. I know also that, whenever B is an act of my own body, A is its cause. I now observe an act of the kind B in a body not my own, and I am having no thought or feeling of the kind A. But I still believe, on the basis of self-observation, that only A can cause B; I therefore infer that there was an A which caused B, though it was not an A that I could observe."
Conclusion	"On this ground I infer that other people's bodies are associated with minds, which resemble mine in proportion as their bodily behaviour resembles my own."
Doubts	Yet, "We cannot be sure that, in our subjective experience, A is the only cause of B." "And even if A is the only cause of B in our experience, how can we know that this holds outside our experience?"	"In practice, the exactness and certainty of the above statement must be softened."
Mere Probability Is Sufficient	"It is not necessary that we should know this with any certainty; it is enough if it is highly probable."
		"It is the assumption of probability in such cases that is our postulate. The postulate may therefore be stated as follows:"
Inference w/Probability	"If, whenever we can observe whether A and B are present or absent, we find that every case of B has an A as a causal antecedent, then it is probable that most B's have A's as causal antecedents, even in cases where observation does not enable us to know whether A is present or not."
Conclusion	"This postulate, if accepted, justifies the inference to other minds, as well as many other inferences that are made unreflectingly by common sense."