Abstract

This paper is an attempt to clarify our talk about minds and thoughts—our own minds and the thoughts which run through them and which we know directly, as well as the minds of other people and the thoughts with which we credit them. We do so in order to be able to characterize satisfactorily our whole performance in talking about minds and thoughts, the rules according to which such talk operates and the goals it purports to reach. We also hope to evaluate, in the light of such a characterization, a number of more elaborate ways of speaking about minds and thoughts, so as to become clear as to their advantages or disadvantages in comparison with more ordinary ways of speaking. The whole investigation is well worth undertaking, since it has long been evident that our talk about mind and thought is, to a peculiar extent, liable to become the seat of certain deep perplexities, which do not arise when we deal with unusual material on the borderlines of knowledge, but which tend, rather, to obtrude themselves in commonplace situations, and to trouble our grasp of the most obvious notions and the most evident truths. Such perplexities, broadly covered by the word “philosophical,” are rendered very stubborn by their objects and their origin. For when we are dealing with things remote, strange and intricate, we have at least a firm foothold in the well-known, simple and near, and a clear set of terms to talk with; but we hardly seem to have a perch to hop to, or any intelligible language left to talk in, when the obvious itself begins to present difficulties. And it is also characteristic of most of the difficulties we are considering that in them the burning zone of perplexity seems to shift erratically from issue to issue, that each expedient adopted to meet them involves us in new problems, that men cannot ever agree as to the best expedient or the least serious difficulty, and that, in the outcome, they resemble nothing so much as a set of sleepers under inadequate coverings, some of whom prefer exposure in one place, while others prefer it in another.