Radical Skepticism and the Shadow of Doubt, and Talmudic Philosophies.
Hirsch applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Selves in Doubt, with the following results:
On page 99 of my book, I argue that intuitively strange languages that are often criticized on pragmatic or theoretical grounds as being in some sense “bad,” ought rather to be criticized as “impossible,” that is, impossible as a primary language in terms of which people think. An example is a language containing the words “cubond” and “rindical” that refer, respectively, to anything that is either cubical or round and anything that is either round or cylindrical. I say on page 99:Learn more about Selves in Doubt at the Oxford University Press website.It seems to me that insofar as I can get myself to accept the possibility of people actually thinking in terms of [such a language], I have no definite intuitive feeling that there is anything bad about this. If they are cognitively disposed to think, ‘A cubound object must have twelve edges if it is not rindical,” which is a true statement about cubes, what is bad about that?I’m afraid the Page 99 Test does not work for my book. That page is in a chapter that is largely ancillary to the main topics in the book. The book is primarily about selves, first, about first-person (“de se”) attitudes towards oneself and then, about knowledge of other selves. A main conclusion of the first part is that a language suitable for rational beings must contain the first-person pronoun. Chapter 4, containing page 99, is essentially a kind of postscript to that main conclusion, arguing against more familiar claims in the literature about rational constraints on languages that have nothing to do with the first-person pronoun.
As I just noted, the first part of the book is about first-person attitudes, and the later part is about knowledge of other selves. In the later part, chapter 6 has been found by readers to be especially provocative. I argue in this chapter that it is a priori metaphysically impossible to be “sane” – to be a “genuine self” – if one is not certain of the existence of other selves. This claim becomes even more provocative and perplexing when I argue in the following chapter in favor of traditional skeptical arguments that raise doubts about the existence of other selves. How all of this can coherently work together is something I try to explain in the final chapter.
--Marshal Zeringue