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A Glimpse into J.L. Austin’s Other Minds
Shirley Losmithgul
2020080249
Word count: 1588
J.L. Austin’s ‘Other Minds’ was written in reflection of our experimentation with the
notion of knowledge. In order to create a link between the observations of such and the greater
concerns in conventional philosophy at the time, Austin questioned how the general person
would respond to someone’s claim of knowing something, and more specifically, how one would
verify the veracity of the claimant’s statement. In doing so, he examined the fine line between
gullibility - readily accepting whatever is being said, and unreasonable precaution - refusing to
believe what is said without sufficient proof.
In discerning the possibility of knowing whether a mind other than one’s own exists, and
its mental state, Austin introduced the problem of ‘other minds’. Particularly, he focused on the
following problems posed by John Wisdom:
a. How do we know another man’s anger, and if we do,
b. is knowing it similar to our knowledge of material objects?
Whilst answering these questions, Austin addressed the incorrect use of language when
making claims to knowledge. To be exact, he deemed the placement of feelings and sensations
(of another person or oneself) after “I know” grammatically wrong. For example, in saying “I
know what you are feeling”, it does not mean, “I can feel exactly what you are feeling”, as it is
physically impossible to ‘know’ (through identification and recognition of an object or sensa),
and be subject to that feeling at the same time. Therefore, knowing anger is not relegated to a
form of physical behaviour, but rather, a linguistic convention in ordinary conversation.
Traditional philosophers before Austin have raised the question of how we know that
something is undeniably what it is. For example, in reacting to someone’s claim of knowing, we
may ask the question “How do you know?”, often as a way of challenge. Whether or not we
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support their point would thereupon depend on their ability to adequately answer this question.
If, say, we consider their answer not ‘enough’ to cover the characteristics prototypical to a
goldfinch, we may further ask “How do you know it isn’t [something with the attributes similar
to that which was mentioned]?” Other questions of metaphysics, such as whether knowing is a
result of seeing and how we can ascertain against the possibility that our perception of reality is
but a dream, have also been raised. Our incapacity to definitively answer those questions led
some philosophers to draw the general, yet perplexing conclusion that we do not know anything.
To Austin however, people are much less unreasonably cautious than what was believed -
in that we demand a lot less proof to confirm a person’s knowledge-claim. “(b) Enough is
enough: it doesn’t mean everything”, Austin writes. “Enough means enough to show that (within
reason, and for presents intents and purposes) it ‘can’t’ be anything else, there is no room for an
alternative, competing, description of it. It does not mean, e.g., enough to show it isn’t a stuffed
goldfinch [as opposed to a real one].” Enough, in Austin’s interpretation, is that there exists a
finite set of information to sufficiently prove something is what someone claims it to be, so that
there is no more room for information proving that it could be something categorically different
