Solipsism Links
These links were relevant, in my opinion, to a discussion of solipsism and rationality. Also check out what David Deutsch has to say.
“Indeed, one might even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would implicitly have to affirm the very thing in which he purportedly refuses to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria, and of a public, extra-mental world.”
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/solipsis.htm
“[Solipsism is t]he theory that I am the sole existent. To be a solipsist I must hold that I alone exist independently, and that what I ordinarily call the outside world exists only as an object or content of my consciousness”. Antony Flew, A Dictionary of Philosophy, 1979.
“The theory that the self is the only reality.” [“The American Heritage Concise Dictionary,” (c) 1994 Houghton Mifflin Company. (c) 1994 INSO Corporation.]
’Solipsism: The view that “My world is the world,” or more technically, that one only has access to the contents of one’s own mind, hence one has no good reason to believe in the existence of anything other than one’s own mind (Palmer)’
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~sgandrus/guide10.html
“The idealist/sceptic first makes a distinction between ‘sense-data’ and ‘reality’, then criticises the realist for inferring an external world from what is really just an
array of sensations. Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument leads inescapably to solipsism — nothing outside one’s ‘inner life’ can be said to exist.”
http://www-ctp.mit.edu/~alford/jjapp.html
“They would either deny the subjective or mental nature of human existence, claiming that the physical world was indeed the basis of human knowledge (materialism); or they would deny that any knowledge of an objective physical world existed and further claim that everything was merely a construction of the human mind (solipsism).”
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jmd326/BSch5.htm
“The strength of solipsism, however, lies in the transcendence which it invokes. We should believe that our consciousness represents reality inadequately, that this is a game we play with ourselves, that a productive, omnipotent, absolute, pre-reflexive part of us is cheating the other, conscious and rational part, that ‘behind the back’ of consciousness a dramatic act of absolute constitution is going on which we can only witness in an indirect way. If the solipsist thesis is to have any sense, then this must be proof of the existence of a kind of cunning through which the absolute subject in us cheats us as conscious individual beings.
“Our direct identity represents, as in the case of solipsism, only a limited, alienated experience of the infinite solus, which through cunning relates to itself as to a finite being.”
http://www.usm.maine.edu/~bcj/issues/one/simovic_text.html