➀The other - minds problem

Suppose a surgeon tells a patient who is about to undergo a knee operation that when he wakes up he will feel a sharp pain.

➁when the patient wakes up, the surgeon hears him groaning and contorting his face in certain ways.

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➂Although we are naturally inclined to say that the surgeon knows what the patient is feeling, there is a sense in which he does not know, because he is not feeling that kind of pain himself.

➃Unless he has undergone such an operation in the past, he cannot know what his patient feels. ➄Indeed, the situation is more complicated  than this, for even if the surgeon has undergone such an operation, he cannot know that what he felt after his operation is the same sort of sensation as what his patient is feeling now. ➅Because each person\'s sensations are in a sense "private," for all the surgeon knows, what he understands as pain and what the patient understands as pain could be very different. ➆(Similar remarks apply to our use of color terms. ➇For all a person knows, the colour sensation he associates with "green" could be very different from the sensations other people associate with that term. ➈This possibility is known as the problem of the inverted spectrum.)