Event · Other minds · c. 2nd–5th century CE
Smoke, Fire, and the Unseen Mind
A school of Indian logic treats other minds the way it treats fire on a hill: not by looking inside, but by inferring from a sign.
- North India, on the page of the sūtras and their commentaries
- Classical Nyāya
Plate · Generated interpretation
Smoke on a hill. What do you take yourself to know, and how?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
The Nyāya Sūtra, attributed to Akṣapāda Gautama, and Vātsyāyana’s commentary, treat anumāna, inference, as a pramāṇa, a means of knowledge. Smoke on the hill licenses fire. Desire, speech, and action, in this grammar, license a knower who is not available to sight. Other minds are not a modern puzzle invented in Oxford. They are a case of inference.
Nyāya Sūtra 1.1.5 and Vātsyāyana’s Bhāṣya. IEP, “Nyāya.” Later Navya-Nyāya refines the sign. These are not one pamphlet.
The self, for Nyāya, is a substance that bears qualities such as desire and knowledge. That is already a metaphysics. The inference to another’s pain from their cry is not a proof that you feel their pain. It is a claim that you may know it is there.
English “other minds” can smuggle a Cartesian sealed room. Nyāya does not start from that room. Analogy is not identity.
Whether inference of this kind is knowledge, or a useful wager, is a fight inside the tradition and outside it.
A word
anumāna
Sanskrit. After-measuring, inference. Not a synonym for empathy.
Distant echoes
Echo
Late analytic philosophy · Princeton, on the page of *The Philosophical Review*
What is it like to be a bat?
Nagel says the like cannot be entered. Nyāya says the presence can still be known. Two claims, not a draw.
One question remains
Other minds · How do we know when another being is experiencing anything at all?
If I never enter another’s pain, what exactly have I inferred when I say I know it is there?