1. The topic of this chapter is not the philosophical problem of solipsism or scepticism about other minds but the spectre of these problems as they haunt our everyday relations with others, in the form of the asymmetry of first-and third-person uses of psychological concepts and the doubts and uncertainties about others that afflict our ordinary adult lives. The question is whether these familiar aspects of our everyday relations with others are to be regarded as capturing the germ of truth in their more extreme or paradoxical philosophical counterparts. I want to look at the response that three different philosophers – Cavell, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein – have made to this question. In particular, I want to use the response of the last two as the basis for a critique of Cavell's suggestion that the philosophical problems of scepticism about other minds and scepticism about the external world stand in a different relation to our everyday practice; that is, that there is no equivalent, in the case of other minds, to our everyday rejection of scepticism about the external world.

2. Stanley Cavell argues that there is an asymmetry between scepticism about the external world and scepticism about other minds. While the former is strictly unliveable, confounded by our natural inability to own the sceptic's doubts or feel them as real for us, the latter, he suggests, has its roots in our everyday experience of others. Unlike scepticism about the external world, scepticism about other minds remains a problem for us even when the philosophical errors that vitiate its traditional formulation are pared away. Sceptical doubt about the external world is ‘lunatic’; even when we are caught in the sceptical net of philosophical argument, we never lose sight of our ability to put a stop to the fascination by ‘joining again […] the healthy, everyday world, outside the isolation of the [study]’ (Cavell 1979: 447). In the case of scepticism about other minds, by contrast, ‘I can live my scepticism’, for ‘there is no comparable, general alternative to the radical doubt of the existence of others […] such doubt does not bear the same relation to the idea of lunacy’ (447).