The Privacy of Mind and Its Implications for the Philosophy of Language

In this article, the author considers the privacy of mind thesis in the philosophy of mind and in the philosophy of language. She argues that this thesis is inconsistent, and its inconsistency becomes clear when the thesis passes to the philosophy of language. The first part of the article examines the thesis itself and the problems this thesis causes in the philosophy of mind. The author provides the general definition of privacy, i.e., an object might be considered private if there is only one agent who has a direct epistemic access to it. Then, she analyzes the relations between the privacy of mind thesis, the transparency thesis, and the privileged access thesis. She presents Alfred Jules Ayer's four criteria of privacy and demonstrates that these criteria do not help to distinguish between private and public objects. The second part of the article deals with the three main implications of the privacy of mind for the philosophy of language. The author argues that it is these implications that have led to the rejection of this thesis. The first implication concerns dualism in descriptive languages implied by the opposition between private / mental objects and public/physical objects. These languages seem to be untranslatable into each other giving rise to attempts to construct a single unified language. The author gives an example of Rudolf Carnap's project of reducing sentences about agent's mental states to sentences about his / her physical states. The second implication is about restrictions that the privacy of mind places on the conception of ostensive definition. The reason for that is that it is unclear how to refer to private mental objects and gain knowledge about them. Here, the author discusses Ludwig Wittgenstein's criticism of the conception of ostensive definition. The third implication involves the revision of self-knowledge. Given the refusal of the privacy of mind, one tends to construct the concept of self-knowledge as a linguistic practice of mental self-ascriptions. Gareth Evans and Sydney Shoemaker exemplify this tendency while criticizing the perceptive model of self-knowledge and rejecting the idea of a metaphysical referent, i.e., the self, in such kind of knowledge. The author briefly concludes that the philosophy of language revealed and proved the inconsistency of the privacy of mind thesis, which in turn resulted in a new idea of the linguistic nature of mind.

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