Understanding Bertrand Russell’s Argument in Analogy of Other Minds

Many scientific studies have clearly shown that each human being has a brain of their own, but theories differ when it comes to the existence of the mind – the immaterial element that enables a person to subjectively experience the world. In “Analogy of Other Minds,” Bertrand Russell sets out to prove that minds exist other than his own through introspection and analogy; he believes that by looking inwards and recognizing and understanding your own mind, you can observe other people’s behaviors and safely conclude that they have the same thoughts and feelings as you, confirming the idea that each individual has a mind. He asserts that a thought, denoted as A, will cause in him a behavior, denoted as B. He posits that since A’s cause B’s, if this behavior can be observed in other people, they too, have a mind. However, in this essay, I will discuss that Russell’s argument of analogy to convince that different minds exist is lacking, because having only ever really looked at your own perspective is not enough to generalize about the minds of others and whether they are in fact there. 

Unsuccessful Arguments About Similar Human Behavior

All Russell relies on is comparing similar behaviors, which can easily be faked or influenced by different thought processes; with this approach, one does not have the conscious understanding behind other individuals’ behaviors and is thus missing solid evidence to make conclusions about minds other than one’s own. Russell explains that through arithmetic problems, you can infer that another person also has a mind when they get the same answer as you; however, it is a known fact that there are many different ways of getting to the same answer, especially in mathematics. Russell argues that if you were to give someone a difficult arithmetic problem, you could infer that he would solve the problem in the same way you would. He explicitly explains that because “the causal laws governing his behavior have to do with “thoughts,” it is natural to infer that the same is true of the analogous behavior of his friends” (Russell, 90). Yet, there are multiple different ways to arrive at one conclusion; two plus eight gives you the same answer as adding five to five. You can see that your friend’s conclusion is the same as yours, but this does not mean that your friend’s thought process is also identical. This concept only gets clearer when examining more difficult problems. For example, even when it comes to coding inputs in different coding languages, there are multiple ways to form fragments and combinations of code and still arrive at the same output. Therefore, the argument of analogy when it comes to solving problems and deriving identical answers is not enough evidence to support a conclusion regarding the existence of other minds. At a later point, Russell explains that certain behaviors are explicitly caused by the same thoughts and seeing other people’s behaviors allows you to infer that the other person had the same thought you would have before behaving in the same way; however, this assertion also fails to address the fact that people might behave in similar manners as you for completely different reasons. He believes: “on the basis of self-observation, that only A can cause B; he therefore infers that there was an A which caused B, thought it was not an A that he could observe. On this ground he infers that other people’s bodies are associated with minds, which resemble his in proportion as their body behavior resembles his own”. 

Behavior Is Not Always a True Sign of What Someone is Thinking

Since we can only experience both the thoughts and the behaviors of our own, we have a very limited perspective, which does not allow us to make inferences about other people’s minds. He asserts that B is only caused by A, but often that is not the case for other people. If you are drinking water because you are thirsty, someone else can be drinking water because they need to take a urine test soon or to clear out toxins from their body. His argument is solely based on looking inwards and comparing your behaviors with the behaviors of those around you, supposing that they think the same way as you. Clearly, people can act in the same way as you for different reasons, so relying on analogous actions is not sufficient enough to make claims about other people’s minds. Comparing your behavior with that of anyone is not even necessarily completely accurate, because behaviors are not always indicative of what someone is thinking. Russell explains that “an ingenious person could construct an automaton which would laugh at his jokes, however often it heard them; but a human being, after laughing a few times, will yawn, and end by saying ‘How I laughed the first time I heard that joke’”. Here, Russell differentiates between human minds and robots because humans react differently to specific stimuli, which he terms as “differences in observable behavior”. However, in this case, he assumes that humans only laugh because they find something funny, which is not always true. Someone could laugh at another person’s joke and be faking it the entire time for their own reasons, such as trying to get on the person’s good graces or because they felt uncomfortable in the situation. Humans fake behavior constantly, seen clearly during plays when actors act out certain behaviors not because they actually feel the same emotions as their characters do but because the script requires them to. Therefore, you not laughing at a joke you have heard multiple times is not the same as an actor who has heard that same joke during practice hundreds of times but still has to laugh when the time comes. Therefore, Russell’s theory of analogous minds does not apply here either, since behavior certainly is not always a true sign of what someone is thinking, making it invalid to use when inferring about someone else’s mind. 

Russell concludes by saying that his theories may not fully hold but they are good enough to portray the idea that different minds exist; however, since his claims are based on probability, then they lack solid proof and are not very strong. He says that “We cannot be sure that, in our subjective experience, A is the only cause of B. And even if A is the only cause of B in our experience, how can we know that this holds outside our experience?”. However, he believes that this is not important because it is enough to conclude that different minds exist. A problem arises here because his entire argument is that by noting the similarities in your behavior with that of the person next to you, you can infer that they have a mind just like you. Yet, near the end, he says that it may not always be true that A causes B, which brings me back to my point that introspection is not enough to deduce claims about other people and how their minds function. If there is a strong possibility of A not always causing B, then Russell’s reasoning is flawed in its nature. By agreeing that there are loopholes in his theory, the significance in Russell’s claims cannot be justified as illustrating the existence of minds. Since there is a chance that A causes a different behavioral response in another person, then you do not know how they think, so Russell’s theories of analogy do not have much backing. 

Final Thoughts

Bertrand Russell’s argument from “Analogy of Other Minds” to persuade for the existence of different minds has a few limitations, because one’s own introspection is not enough to articulate about others and their form of operating. In addition, behavior can easily be manipulated and is not always a clear indication of what is going on in the mind. Moreover, Russell himself mentions that his theories are not exactly concrete. For these reasons, it is not solid proof that other’s minds are the same as our own or that they even exist. It is true that there are many different theories on how each person has their own mind but the evidence behind this idea does not stem from Russell’s analogical argument regarding it. Nonetheless, the mind is a complex matter that has many puzzling aspects, and while Russell’s argument is inadequate, fortunately there are many different theories proposed by scholars that effectively aim to understand the nature of the mind and prove its existence in others.