Abstract
Robert Pargetter has argued that we know other minds through an inference to the best explanation. My aim is to show, by criticising Pargetter's account, that this approach to the problem of other minds cannot, as it stands, deliver the goods; it might be part of the right
response to the problem, but it cannot be the whole story. More precisely, I will claim
that Pargetter does not successfully reconstruct how ordinary people in everyday life
come reasonably to believe in other minds, given only the gross behavioural evidence
actually available to them. I will suggest, contrary to both Pargetter in particular and this
approach in general, that reference to one's own case does, after all, play an indispensable
evidential role in the justification of belief in other minds, something which obviously
marks an important disanalogy between the case of other minds and that of such
theoretical entities as electrons.