Social thinkers often use the concept of intersubjectivity to mark out a problem of theoretical sociology: If people are unable to look into each others' minds, why do they often understand each other nonetheless? This issue has been debated extensively by philosophers and sociologists in three largely disconnected discourses. The article investigates the three discourses for isolable ideas that can be fitted into a sociological answer to the problem of intersubjectivity. An interactional solution, fully coherent with key insights from the (...) discourses, is offered at the end of the article. Its main point is to identify coordinative interactional mechanisms that compel participants to "make themselves understandable" vis-à-vis their interaction partners. (shrink)

Professor Plantinga's “scandalous” conclusion thatIf my belief in other minds is rational, so is my belief in God. But obviously the former is rational; so, therefore, is the latterrests in part on the twin claims that the best reason we have for belief in other minds is the analogical argument, and the best reason we have for belief in God is the teleological argument. The conclusion also rests on Plantinga's analyses of these two arguments, which show that both fail for (...) very similar reasons. Thus the beliefs based on these arguments are “in the same epistemological boat,“ and Plantinga draws his conclusion. This is, as James Tomberlin says, “an ingenious argument for the conclusion that belief in God is justified in the absence of any good reason whatever.“In this paper I wish to consider the two claims mentioned above, that the best reasons we have for belief in other minds and belief in God are the analogical and teleological arguments, respectively. (shrink)

In apparent vogue, perhaps as a reaction against excesses on the part of certain Wittgensteinians, is the idea that the existence and nature of other people's mental lives are things known to us on broadly empirical grounds. A particularly unabashed version of this idea is to be found in Hilary Putnam's “Other Minds”1. Therein Putnam defines empirical realism as the “position that the existence of the external world is supported by experience in much the way that any scientific theory is (...) supported by observational data,”2 His concern in this article is to defend, after entering some criticism of detail, Paul Ziff's attempt to show that the same general sort of position is the proper one to adopt with regard to the traditional problem of other minds. I wish to argue here that the empirical realist's solution to the problem of other minds offered by Ziff and defended by Putnam is wrong. (shrink)