The self and the other practice questions.

Wittgenstein asks us to imagine that everyone has a box containing something they call a 'beetle', into which no one else may look. What does the case argue?

• That we can never know whether other people are conscious at all
• That the private object drops out as irrelevant to the word's meaning
• That sensations are dispositions to behave rather than inner episodes
• That the boxes must all contain the same kind of thing if communication is to succeed

Answer: That the private object drops out as irrelevant to the word's meaning

The target is the picture of sensation-words as names of private objects: the argument concerns meaning and makes the private object idle rather than unknowable. Logical behaviourism is a further step that Wittgenstein does not take.

Strawson argues that a person is a single subject to which both states of consciousness and bodily characteristics are ascribed, and that one can ascribe such states to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others. What does that claim rule out?

• That human beings have bodies as well as minds
• That other people can be mistaken about what one is feeling
• That one and the same predicate can be applied to two different people
• That the concept of mind could be learnt from one's own case alone

Answer: That the concept of mind could be learnt from one's own case alone

The point is conceptual rather than evidential: ascription to oneself and to others comes as a package, so the argument from analogy begins too late to help. It leaves untouched the ordinary fact that people misjudge each other's feelings.

Honneth argues that misrecognition is not merely unpleasant but a form of injury. On his account, what makes it an injury?

• It causes measurable psychological distress that can be documented clinically
• It breaches a legal duty that every citizen owes to every other citizen
• It damages a relation to self that one can sustain only through others
• It prevents the distribution of resources from tracking what people deserve

Answer: It damages a relation to self that one can sustain only through others

Recognition is treated as the condition of self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem, so withholding it removes something a person cannot supply on her own. That makes the wrong irreducible to distress, illegality or maldistribution, even where it is accompanied by all three.

Merleau-Ponty argues that I do not first observe another body and then infer a mind behind it: I see anger in the gesture and gentleness in the hands, because my own body already understands what such movements do. His account of our access to other people is therefore that

• we reach other minds by an inference from behaviour, which is reliable but always uncertain
• the existence of other minds cannot be established at all and the question should be set aside as unanswerable
• other people are known only through language, so a being that could not speak could not be recognised as a subject
• another person is encountered as an expressive body before any inference is made

Answer: another person is encountered as an expressive body before any inference is made

The claim is that perception of others is not built out of a two-step argument, which is why it is offered as dissolving rather than solving the problem of other minds. Contrast the argument from analogy, which grants the two-step structure and then tries to make the inference secure.

De Beauvoir argues that in the relation she describes, one term is set up as the Self and the other as the Other, and that the relation is not reciprocated. What does she take to be distinctive of the case of women?

• The Other does not set up the Self as Other in return, so the asymmetry is not reversed
• The Other is defined by biology rather than by any social relation at all
• The Other is a category that arises only in relations between men and women
• The Other freely chooses the position it occupies and can abandon it at will

Answer: The Other does not set up the Self as Other in return, so the asymmetry is not reversed

Her point is that groups usually reciprocate the Self-Other move — each tribe treats the other as foreign — while in this case the reciprocity is missing; reading her as making a biological claim ignores her insistence that the position is constituted socially rather than given.

A tradition holds that one becomes fully human by cultivating the conduct proper to one's roles — child, sibling, friend, subject — and that ritual practice is how the self is formed rather than a constraint imposed on a self already complete. This conception of the self is characteristic of

• Hobbesian egoism, in which the self is a bundle of appetites and aversions
• Confucian thought, in which the self is constituted through role relations
• Sartrean existentialism, in which the self is what it makes of what it is given
• Cartesian dualism, in which the self is a thinking substance

Answer: Confucian thought, in which the self is constituted through role relations

The mark of the Confucian account is that relations are constitutive, not merely obligations laid on an independent individual; Sartre's self is also unfinished, but for him roles are what one must not mistake for one's being, which is the exact opposite emphasis.