Solipsism is the position that only your own mind is certain to exist — and that talk of anything beyond it may be meaningless.
No individual is credited with the English word. The Latin ancestor appears in Giulio Clemente Scotti's satire Monarchia Solipsorum (1645); the German Solipsismus is attested by 1817 and reached English through Kant translations around 1869.
// Where it sits
Nobody lives here. It's the wall arguments hit, not a room anyone furnishes.
What it really means
Solipsism is the most famous philosophical position that essentially nobody has ever held.
No major philosopher has ever actually defended solipsism. It exists as a reductio — the place an argument is not allowed to end up. If your epistemology delivers you here, your epistemology has broken, and the history of modern philosophy is partly a history of people building escape routes.
Descartes constructed the trap and then needed God to get out of it: having doubted everything down to a single thinking thing, he could only rebuild the external world by first proving a benevolent deity who wouldn't systematically deceive him. Which is an expensive way to establish that your kitchen exists.
Wittgenstein went at it differently and, arguably, more decisively — not by proving other minds exist but by arguing the solipsist cannot say what they mean. If meaning requires a public practice, then a wholly private vocabulary never gets started, and the doctrine collapses before it can be stated.
The modern drift is worth flagging too: online, solipsistic now often just means self-absorbed. The actual doctrine is stranger and more precise: that the only thing the word exists can attach to, for me, is myself and my own mental states. Not that other people don't matter. That the sentence other people exist has nothing to attach to.
Where it comes from
Literally 'alone-self-ism'. A modern Latinate manufacture, not a classical word — the Romans had no such term.
Myths & misconceptions
Some famous philosophers were solipsists.
No major philosopher has ever actually defended solipsism. It functions as a reductio — the place an argument must not end up — though solipsistic reasoning lies implicit in many post-Cartesian philosophies without anyone actually defending it.
Solipsism just means being self-centred.
That's the loose sense, and it long predates the internet. The technical doctrine is that the only thing the word 'exists' can attach to, for me, is myself and my own mental states. It's a claim about what the word 'exists' can mean, not a personality flaw.
Compare & contrast
Solipsism vs the problem of other minds
Same wound, different depth. The problem of other minds asks how you know others are conscious — a hard epistemological question with proposed answers. Solipsism is the collapse you get if the answer turns out to be 'you don't, and the question is empty'.
| // | Solipsism | The problem of other minds |
|---|---|---|
| Is a | Position | Question |
| Anyone holds it | No | Everyone has it |
| Asks | Does anything else exist? | How would I know? |
| Status | Reductio | Live problem |
How it connects
- Tabula Rasaboth come out of the early modern attempt to rebuild knowledge from scratch.
- Absurdismboth are what you get when a demand for certainty goes unanswered.
Tell it apart
Questions people ask
- Has anyone ever actually believed solipsism?
- Essentially no — the standard scholarly statement is that no great philosopher has espoused it. It survives as the destination philosophers steer away from: Descartes needed God to escape it, Wittgenstein needed public language. Its role is as a failure condition for a theory of knowledge.
- How do you refute solipsism?
- The classic move is Mill's argument from analogy: others have bodies like mine and show the outward signs I know are produced by feelings, so they likely have minds. Three weaknesses are usually noted — the conclusion can't be checked, it generalises from a single case, and the premise that 'I know from my own case' is itself questionable.
- What did Wittgenstein say about solipsism?
- He attacked its coherence rather than its truth, by demonstrating that language is necessarily public. If meaning requires a shared practice, then a private vocabulary in which the solipsist could even state their position doesn't get off the ground — the doctrine can't be said, not just can't be proved.