PHENOMENAL PRIVACY, SIMILARITY AND COMMUNICABILITY

A familiar sceptical worry about other minds is that if conscious experiences are private then I could never know whether another subject's experiences are like mine. A somewhat different sort of worry is that I could not even understand another subject's claims about the private features of her experience-and, conversely, that she could never understand my claims about my private features. Edward Craig (1982; 1986; 1997), taking Wittgenstein (1953) as his target, repeatedly argued that such incommunicability would not follow from the private nature of the features in question. The basic idea is that two subjects might each privately introduce predicates to describe their own private phenomenal features and these predicates might (albeit unknowably) have the same meaning, and that this could suffice for mutual understanding. After clarifying the notion of privacy at issue, I argue against this apparently plausible line of thought by showing how hard it is to make sense of the allegedly possible sameness of meaning.