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Refuting Solipsism

Is Epistemological solipsism a contradiction?

The IEP article Solipsism and The Problem of Other Minds:

https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/

7 The Incoherence of Solipsism:

https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/#H7

With the belief in the essential privacy of experience eliminated as false, the last presupposition underlying solipsism is removed and solipsism is shown as foundationless, in theory and in fact. One might even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would implicitly have to affirm the very thing that he purportedly refuses to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria and a public, extra-mental world. There is a temptation to say that solipsism is a false philosophical theory, but this is not quite strong or accurate enough. As a theory, it is incoherent. What makes it incoherent, above all else, is that the solipsist requires a language (that is, a sign-system) to think or to affirm his solipsistic thoughts at all.

Given this, it is scarcely surprising that those philosophers who accept the Cartesian premises that make solipsism apparently plausible, if not inescapable, have also invariably assumed that language-usage is itself essentially private. The cluster of arguments—generally referred to as “the private language argument”—that we find in the Investigations against this assumption effectively administers the coup de grâce to both Cartesian dualism and solipsism. (I. § 202; 242-315). Language is an irreducibly public form of life that is encountered in specifically social contexts. Each natural language-system contains an indefinitely large number of “language-games,” governed by rules that, though conventional, are not arbitrary personal fiats. The meaning of a word is its (publicly accessible) use in a language. To question, argue, or doubt is to utilize language in a particular way. It is to play a particular kind of public language-game. The proposition “I am the only mind that exists” makes sense only to the extent that it is expressed in a public language, and the existence of such language itself implies the existence of a social context. Such a context exists for the hypothetical last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, but not for the solipsist. A non-linguistic solipsism is unthinkable and a thinkable solipsism is necessarily linguistic. Solipsism therefore presupposes the very thing that it seeks to deny. That solipsistic thoughts are thinkable in the first instance implies the existence of the public, shared, intersubjective world that they purport to call into question.

VENN DIAGRAMS - Private Knowledge and Coherent Public Subdomain

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If private Minds A and B exist then shared public knowledge is the intersection of A and B. If private Minds A, B, and C exist then public knowledge is the intersection of four domains that we might call shared or public knowledge. If public knowledge exists independent of any minds, or of any particular mind, then how does it become private or public knowledge in any distinct mind(s)? Would the Universe outside private Minds be full of all possible public knowledge that somehow mysteriously makes its way into some private Minds but not other private Minds? How would anyone recognize public knowledge apart from their private Mind?

SENDER - RECEIVER MODEL - Public Messages Evoke Private Knowledge

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The Sender and Receiver might need public knowledge to encode and decode messages in a manner which evokes private knowledge. But the public knowledge is still a subdomain of private knowledge and the encoding and decoding the meaning of signs or symbols are in the respective domains of private knowledge.

I think these models alone and in combination are coherent with epistemological solipsism but not with ontological solipsism.

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    The gist of the argument from that IEP article seems to be: if I use an incoherent interpretation of solipsism, then I end up concluding that solipsism is incoherent. Solipsists might argue against this, but if I adopt an incoherent interpretation of their counter-argument, I still end up concluding that solipsism is incoherent. Their assertion that language only makes sense in a social context is just that: an assertion, and it's one a solipsist would most likely reject. There's a ton of bias there for what I presume is supposed to be a reputable and relatively unbiased source.
    – NotThatGuy
    Commented Apr 7 at 0:50
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    The argument quoted is ludicrous. It seems to be saying that for the solipsist to experience thought they need language, which must come from outside. Why? And why only language? If the solipsist's mind is capable of imagining everything else in the Universe, like string theory, general relativity, dozens of consistent views of the Grand Canyon, The Large Hadron Collider finding Higgs bosons, why can't it imagine language? Commented Apr 7 at 5:59
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    This passage depends on your understanding of the famous private language argument which some philosophers deemed very high and convinced for humans it's impossible to have any kind of private language in the colloquial sense of either natural or Morse-code like or interpretable formal languages, even for a lonely person entirely living on an island... Commented Apr 7 at 6:43
  • I don't see what the question is here. You choose to start from a presupposition that is incompatible with the presupposition of the IEP article, so it is not surprising that you reach a different conclusion. Perhaps your question is whether your conclusion is true. I read it as asserting that we know that solipsism is true even though it is not, which I find very hard to understand. The issue here depends on whether the private language argument is correct. See SEP - Private Language Argument
    – Ludwig V
    Commented Apr 7 at 6:48
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    If one accepts the conclusion of the private language argument, like IEP, then solipsism is incoherent. Your models are not counterexamples because they use "public" and "private" in the colloquial sense, not in Wittgenstein's technical sense. In Wittgenstein's sense, "public" is not what is shared but what is sharable, "private" is what cannot be shared even in principle, "private language" is one developed from scratch without any social interaction whatsoever. To make solipsism coherent, one needs such "private language". But "private" knowledge in messaging is all public.
    – Conifold
    Commented Apr 7 at 8:01

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