Cavell on Outsiders and Others

In Part Four of The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell charts the parallels and the divergences between two forms of skepticism : skepticism with respect to the "external world", which pictures the inquirer as sealed within his own circle of experiences, unable to break out to the world outside, and skepticism with respect to "other minds", which pictures the inquirer as locked outside of the mind of another, unable to break into this circle of experience. This paper examines Cavell's understanding of the relations between these two basic forms of skepticism from the perspective of the imaginative device he calls the "Outsider". In the case of external world skepticism, this device is a way of imagining the position occupied by some personage outside the illusion or dream, which helps give content to the idea of illusion itself. The problem Cavell raises in these sections of The Claim of Reason is : is the idea of a comparable Outsider with respect to "other minds" truly imaginable or not ? And if not, what can that tell us about the accuracy of seeing the problem of "other minds" as a skeptical problem in the first place ?