We Are Not What We Think: Solipsism & the Concept of Mind

Author

• Michael Marcoux, CUNY Bernard M Baruch CollegeFollow

Date of Award

Spring 4-27-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

B.A.

Honors Designation

yes

Program of Study

Philosophy

Language

English

First Advisor

Thomas Teufel

Second Advisor

David Neely

Third Advisor

Sandeep Sreekumar

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that the persuasiveness of solipsism—understood as skepticism of the existence of anything or anyone outside of one’s own private mental life—rests not on its intrinsic argumentative force, but on the degree of commitment to a certain philosophical dogma. I use the problem of solipsism to tease out this dogma, which I dub the Primacy of Privacy. It is characterized by the conviction that in dealing with what there is and what we know, the mental, be it construed in terms of perceptions or thoughts, is the only certain datum from which most if not all else we claim to know must be adjudicated.

I first examine what I take to be the underlying logic of the Primacy of Privacy and its faults by connecting it to Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given and G.W.F. Hegel’s rejection of instrumental models of cognition. Using the arguments of these two thinkers, I argue that the only way to hold onto the Primacy of Privacy is not only to presuppose shaky epistemological assumptions, but also strange, if not incoherent, metaphysical ones as well. I then go over two influential figures in analytic philosophy, both of whom pay a price in assuming some form of the Primacy of Privacy. Using the analysis built thus far, I examine how these thinkers leave themselves vulnerable to solipsism.

In the final part of my thesis, I will return to Sellars and Hegel and develop a fuller positive account of introspective knowledge that is freed from this dogma. This account will be unintuitive, especially for readers who are more familiar with contemporary philosophy than German Idealism, but I make the case that it avoids the same pitfalls as the Primacy as Privacy while being consistent with, on the one hand, epistemological fallibilism and scientific realism with respect to the mind sciences, and, on the other, a preservation of the irreducibility of mind qua subjectivity. This position I consider to be a properly dialectical understanding of mind, characterized as what Hegel calls a self-relating negativity.

Recommended Citation

Marcoux, Michael, "We Are Not What We Think: Solipsism & the Concept of Mind" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/bb_etds/223