Mind Workshop: Avramides

Anita Avramides, "Knowing vs. Acting with Others: Some Background", argued that an otherwise promising approach to knowledge of others, exemplified by early knowledge externalists such as Goldman and Dretske, fail to account adequately for the relations we bear to others. This is for the reason that they attempt to account for knowledge of others against a background that leaves open as a possibility the sceptical hypothesis that we lack knowledge of others - we can have knowledge of what another is thinking without knowledge that another is thinking. Anita argued that a recent view, proposed by Quassim Cassam, that we can see that others are in mental states, does not really progress very far from this basic externalist position. Instead, she argued, we should look to Wittgenstein who conceives of the background to our knowledge of others in terms a kind of social interaction that leaves no room for the sceptical possibility to take root. In this way, we can take a more satisfactory view of what is wrong with the sceptical arguments.