Midgley specifically challenged Descartes' famous thought experiment where he sits by his fireplace and questions everything he can possibly doubt, including the existence of other people. Descartes concludes that the only thing he can know with absolute certainty is that he is thinking (and therefore exists) - the famous "Cogito, ergo sum."

Midgley argued this conclusion was fundamentally flawed and reflected Descartes' isolated bachelor lifestyle. She believed that someone living a "normal domestic life" with close family relationships would never seriously question the existence of other people. She was particularly pointed about pregnancy as an example, noting that someone who has experienced:

Being pregnant and having another being literally living inside them

The physical connection between parent and child during nursing

The direct physical impact of one person's actions on another (like how a parent's diet affects a nursing child)

would find it absurd to question whether other minds exist. As she puts it in the article, when you're "constantly faced with questions like, 'What have you been eating to make him ill?'" and experiencing "that strange physical sympathy between child and parent," the very idea that you need to philosophically prove the existence of other minds becomes almost nonsensical.

She saw this as a prime example of how the bachelor lifestyle of many philosophers led them to create abstract philosophical problems that might never occur to someone with more embodied, interconnected life experiences. For Midgley, the certainty of other people's consciousness would be as evident as one's own consciousness for anyone living intimately as part of a family unit.

This critique connects to her broader argument that philosophy has been shaped by the specific life experiences (or lack thereof) of its practitioners, rather than being purely objective or universal as traditionally claimed.

Claude