The private inner mind is a historically recent construct rather than a universal

Evidence

The last division we might call the private mind, or FP-P. This appears to get the bulk of attention for mind reading, although it can be just as easily cast as what’s left over from the various public ways that folk psychology is institutionalized. The assumption that private minds are fundamental seems to arise from adult experience. Infants have private worlds of experience, too, but their experience is constantly undergoing change as their sensorimotor systems and awareness are more finely attuned in development. Surely the difference in experience between adult and infant is far closer to the quandary of other minds than the adult experience of ordering dinner in a restaurant. The private experience of the infant may not lead in any continuous way to the private mind of the adult. Moreover, we might expect that the psychology of FP-P has undergone more dramatic changes over historical time than have other dimensions of folk psychology. For example, humans have moved from oral cultures of experience to the private consumption of experience in books. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 427

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the private mind is ‘what’s left over’ after institutionalized public folk psychology, and that it has changed more over history than other mind dimensions, is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframing of theory of mind.
• XREF: Strongly echoes Julian Jaynes’ ‘bicameral mind’ thesis and also the oral-vs-literate culture distinction from Ong, and Walter Ong’s ‘Orality and Literacy’ about interiority arising with literacy. — connects to: Man’s privilege now rests on monopolizing the unconscious, not consciousness. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 450; Inner form is a hermeneutic concept, not a positivist truth. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 765
• SEED: Article angle: reading as a technology that invented the private self — the move from communal oral experience to private book consumption as the hinge of introspection.
• ADDENDUM: Ties to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ in the sense that both deal with how institutionalized shared practice (vs private interiority) structures experience across history.
• SHARE: Someone working on historical psychology or the history of introspection would find the claim that private mind is culturally and historically contingent highly relevant.