Recapitulation

In the last lecture, we examined the Janus-faced character of certain psychological predicates. In the first-person present, they are used groundlessly – without reference to any outer criteria (that is, behaviour) and without reference to an inner criterion either. By contrast, ascribing such psychological predicates as being in pain, feeling frightened, wanting a drink to others involves reference to what they do and what they say in the circumstances – in other words, to behavioural criteria. These two aspects of psychological predicates are indissolubly welded together by the essential connection between a given mental attribute and its constitutive forms of behavioural manifestation. The criterionless first-person use is possible only because of a threefold connection with behaviour:

• ● First, the first-person utterance has to be congruent with the rest of the speaker's behaviour. Pain utterances, for example, mesh with groaning, crying out and assuaging the injury.

• ● Second, the roots of first-person utterances lie in expressions and manifestations of experiences, beliefs, intentions and so forth. So, pain utterances are rooted in natural behavioural manifestations of pain. Explicit expressions of believing and thinking are learnt as qualifying operations on empirical assertions. Expressions of intention are rooted in announcement of plans and projects. And so on.

• ● Third, a first-person utterance of an experience, belief or intention is itself a behavioural criterion for others to ascribe the predicate to the speaker.

In the previous lecture, I remarked that this account of the logico-grammatical character of such psychological predicates has multiple consequences. Here I shall start by indicating some of them. Then I shall move on to examine the correlative notions of behaviour and of the mental that are involved. For a widespread misconception about what counts as behaviour in such contexts feeds on and is fed by a further misconception of the mental as inner, that is, as hidden or concealed behind the observable. I shall then make some remarks about behaviourism.

Unfinished Business: The Argument from Analogy and ‘Theory-Theory’

First of all, let's pick up the threads of the two accounts of knowledge of other minds which I introduced in the last lecture: the traditional philosophical explanation known as ‘the argument from analogy for the existence of other minds’ and the contemporary psychological explanation known as ‘theory-theory’ – namely, the claim that our ability to ascribe psychological predicates to others rests on a theory that we developed when we were children about the behaviour of other people.