Response

Dear Sir,

Dr Goldberg has missed the point of my argument in ‘Triangulation, one's own mind, and objectivity’. But since it is often and easily missed, I am glad for the chance to make it again, perhaps more clearly.

My argument has to do with some of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions on which the child can come to have something that is appropriately called ‘thought’ (as distinct from other kinds of intelligent, discriminatory, responses to the environment) in the first place, with what must have been the case in Dr Goldberg's own life that enables him even to pose his objections. The argument concludes that, among other conditions (e.g. embodiment), the child must be in communication of some kinds with other creatures. So if correct, the argument does not allow Dr Goldberg's thought experiment to get off the ground, since, of course, once someone is already a thinker (as Dr Goldberg, Descartes, and I, all are), he or she can imagine being the only person in the world, being a brain in a vat (the philosopher's favorite solipsistic image), etc. The question I posed is: what must already have happened in this thinker's life for her or him to be able to entertain this thought?

Dr Goldberg ends with a version of Bishop Berkeley's Idealist argument, which has been well criticized by a great number of philosophers (e.g. in our century, George Pitcher). To put the answer to it simply: it is obviously true that the only world we can talk about, know about, and so on, is the world that each of us experiences from his own point of view. It does