Disjunctivism, Skepticism, and the First Person

Abstract

One can sometimes tell what someone else feels or thinks by seeing and hearing what he says and does. It is very common for philosophers to interpret this idea so that ‘what he says and does’ is taken to allude to a basis for knowledge of what the person feels or thinks. The thought of a basis here has two elements. The first is that the basis is something knowable in its own right ... knowledge of the basis could have this status—be knowledge—independently of the status of what it is a basis for. The second is that judgments about what the person feels or thinks emerge as knowledgeable in favourable cases because of an inferential relation in which they stand to the basis. The notion of a criterion, as used by Wittgenstein in connection with this sort of knowledge, is often interpreted on these lines. 1