IntroPhil2ndExam

Sample Third In-Class Exam Questions on Meditations and Related Matters. Answer three of the following questions. Just give the number of the question; don’t write it out.. Exam on November 9. Remember to include your name.

1) What three or more problems were posed by the rise of modern science in early modern (Christian) Europe (1600s and 1700s). How does Meditations seem to solve these problems?

2) Understanding that he has in the past held mistaken beliefs, Descartes proposes to discard (temporarily) all doubtful kinds of beliefs. Describe the four or more stages in which he discards beliefs and give and assess his reasons at each stage for discarding them. What crucial distinction among the sciences is marked in his doubting stages? What obvious kind of doubt does he fail to mention?—and how does his letter to the Sacred Faculty of theology go about explaining this omission?

3) Explain and assess in detail what Descartes takes himself to be (in Meditation 2) as a “thinking being.” What characteristics distinguish a physical object from a thinking being? Describe his “wax experiment” and indicate what he thinks this shows about our knowledge of physical objects (and in parallel about our knowledge of “other minds”)? In what one way are the ultimate constituents of the physical and the mental world alike?

4) Indicate, explain, and assess Descartes’ two “proofs” of the existence of God. In what way are they “rationalist” arguments? – and how might an empiricist “prove” God’s existence? What do you make of such proofs?

5) How does Meditation 6 strengthen the distinction between clear and distinct ideas and images that derive from the senses. In particular, characterize what he has to say about triangles and chiliagons. How differently would an empiricist think about this?

6) Summarize and evaluate Leibniz’s “proof” that this is the best of all possible worlds. What is Voltaire’s response in his Candide? Summarize the distinction between Rationalism and Empiricism. Update this into a description of the views of Chomsky and Skinner.

7) At the end of his doubting, Descartes reaches a point where all he is absolutely sure of is that his mind exists. Several decades this skepticism was updated by an argument that you (as a modern Descartes) cannot be sure that you are not a brain in a vat. A few months ago the New York Times Science Section raised the possibility that you (as an even more modern Descartes) cannot be sure that you are not a virtual reality simulation on a future super-duper computer. Explain, compare, and assess these arguments.

8) Why does Descartes write, “For this reason alone the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in physics.”? (page 37). What is he excluding and why does he do so?

9) Noting that language is a species-specific, species-wide human characteristic and allows minded humans to “reply appropriately [to the infinity of questions] to whatever might be said in its presence,” while purely mechanical animals could not survive this test, Descartes concluded that minds could not be reduced to (or explained by) purely mechanical means. But a purely mechanical physics gave way, incorporating in natural science a stream of non-mechanical stuff (gravity, electricity, and magnetism, and the twentieth century has brought into the physical or natural truly weird stuff). Sketch and respond to Chomsky’s claim that this means we no longer have a characterization of “physical” so that the question “Can mind reduce to body?” is no longer a meaningful question, while unification of science is possible.

Early Modern Europe (1450-1750):

1) Christian aristocratic states; Protestant rebellions (Henry VIII & Elizabeth (Armada), Luther, Calvin); Lepanto (1571) ends the now weakened Islamic control of Mediterranean.

2) Persecution of heretics, "witches," free thinkers; unending religious wars. Malius malifacarem. Hysteria. [Salem and today.]

3) Vigorous increases in trade and technology. Rise of Europe to World Dominance. Astronomy, Clocks, Machines. Artificial animals. "Scientific determinism"; the secular state, modernity.

4) Heart & circulation understood. Brain. Dissections (for the first time since Roman times). Anatomical studies and growth of modern medicine (Leiden, Borhaave). Descartes (1596-1650): animals are meat machines. Heliocentric solar system established (Copernicus, Galileo). Matter & motion suffice.

Big Problem: IF universe a smoothly running machine (clock), IF scientific determinism: everything in principle predictable, following from previous conditions, THEN,

1) Doesn't seem to be a place for God & prayer. The world is a gigantic machine, running by and completely explained by scientific laws; miracles do not happen and are unneeded (God got it right first time around; Deism [even Darwin in his Origin of Species].

2) If humans are machines like animals in general, then nothing survives death.

3) If humans deterministic machines and all human action determined by mechanical causality, then no moral praise or blame (any more than we praise a computer for correct operation or morally censure it for erroneous operation (we fix the computer)).

Descartes' solution in MEDITATIONS:

1) I doubt the existence of material objects: I can't be sure whether I am awake or asleep.

2) But I am certain that I, as doubter & thinker, exist; I think; therefore I am (a mind).

3) Therefore, minds and bodies distinctly different substances: dualism

Mind: not sensed, unextended (no shape), indivisible.

Body: sensed, extended, divisible

[Rationalism: high road of science through our innate clear & distinct ideas, not our senses.]

4) THEREFORE: I am certain I have (am) a mind, which may well survive death; while my body is a machine, my mind (somehow) interacts with it, causing my voluntary actions, which can be truly praised or blamed because I have free will and I am not a machine but rather essentially a mind.

[Pointer for understanding Descartes: He distinguishes clear and distinct ideas, which are native, from adventitious ideas, which come from our senses or our imagination. Consider a chiliagon (thousand-sided regular polygon). You can understand it clearly and distinctly OR as an image or sensory picture. Hint: Descartes invented analytic geometry – the algebraic version of geometry – Cartesian coordinates, protractors vrs. compass & straight edge (Proof).]

DOUBT STAGES FOR DESCARTES:

Since I have held false beliefs in the past, I shall discard any class of beliefs where have I less than absolute certainty.

(0) I doubt my beliefs, based on my senses, about things far away or very small.

[Discarding testimony is not mentioned because that would question religious authority;

Descartes is concerned with natural religion (religion from reason as opposed to revelation)]

Big Question: What is Descartes not explicitly doubting????]

(1) I doubt beliefs based on my sense experience about things far away or very small.

(2) I am not absolutely sure whether I am awake or asleep, so I doubt particular facts directly

produced by my senses. I doubt whether I am now at my writing desk writing rather than asleep.

(3) I doubt the existence of complex kinds of things. Doubting whether writing desks or humans exist

at all. Maybe I am a brain in a vat. Maybe the simplest kinds of things surely exist: spatial location,

shape, tiny atomic particles, etc. Mathematics of all possible physical things highest truth available.

(4) Maybe a malignant demon has so clouded my thinking that even math seems threatened.

(5) But I cannot doubt that I doubt, think, imagine, speculate, have sensory experience (even if false

experience is still real.

(6) I think; therefore I (as a mind) exist. (I am still doubting the existence of my body/brain)

Stages in doubts distinguish knowledge of particular sensed facts from knowledge of complex kinds

of things (non-mathematical physics, biology, geology, geography, etc.). Knowledge of complex kind

of things allows more doubt than knowledge;

But Clear and Distinct Ideas (mathematics & mathematical physics) are unavoidable. I can always be guarded in entirely trusting my senses but I cannot do this about my clear and distinct ideas.

[Important note: Descartes believes that geometry is clear and distinct and must hold of the physical world; today we have non-Euclidian as well as Euclidian geometry and either one could be true of the actual physical universe.]

SECOND MEDITATION:

Since I cannot doubt the existence of my mind but I CAN Doubt the existence of my body,

mind and body must distinct and separable. Mind are unsensed, indivisible, and have no

spatial shape (extension); bodies are sensed, divisible, and have shapes or extension.

THE ALL IMPORTANT WAX ARGUMENT: WHEN HEATED THE WAX CHANGES WITH RESPECT TO EVERY SENSE, BUT I STILL KNOW IT AS THE SAME WAX (THE SAME SUBSTANCE). THEREFORE, EVEN MY IDEA OF SUBSTANCE ITSELF COMES FROM MY NATIVE INTELLECT (MY MIND) NOT FROM MY SENSES. MY GEOMETRICAL KNOWLEDGE OF SPACE AND EXTENDED SUBSTANCE COMES FROM MY NATIVE CLEAR AND DISTINCT IDEAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AND IN PARALLEL: WHEN I SEE (SENSE) CLOTHED BIPED THINGS, I HAVE NO BASIS FOR ASSUMING THESE THINGS HAVE MINDS. I CANNOT SEE, TOUCH, TASTE, HEAR, SMELL A MIND. A MIND IS SHAPELESS AND INDIVISIBLE.

MY IDEA OF MIND IS ALSO NATIVE (INNATE TO REASON). [In other works Descartes maintains that there is “ONE CLEAR TEST AS TO WHETHER SOMETHING HAS A MIND (AND IS NOT AN AUTOMATON (A FINITE MACHINE: WHETHER IT CAN REPLY APPROPRIATELY TO THE INFINITY OF THINGS WE CAN SAID IN ITS PRESENCE.” Compare to Alan Turing’s Turing Test.

BACK TO GOD (MEDITATION THREE)

Cosmological, or Cause-of-the-Idea, Argument:

(1) I have the idea of God (infinite being: all powerful, all knowing, all good).

(2) “the cause of my idea of God must have as much reality

as the effect.” [Hint: what sort of idea is this and how do we know it is true?]

(3) Given my finitude, I could not have created the idea of God; only God could do that.

(4) God exists. [What kind of God is this]

Belief in clear and distinct ideas is justified; beliefs about the possible mathematical structure (or logic) of things

are build into us and unavoidable. If God gave us false clear and distinct ideas then God would be

a deceiver (imperfect, etc.) because he would have made it impossible for us to think clearly or rationally.

God is no deceiver; hence our clear and distinct ideas must be true. I can however doubt any beliefs based

on my senses because this does not threaten my reasoning powers or make me inconsistent. (Compare:

a computer robot might receive false or misleading sensory data and could use its CPU to sift and test

to assign probabilities to parts of this data. However, if the CPU itself contains false logic circuits then

falsity is inevitable (God would have made us so we had to fall into falsity (hence God would be a deceiver)).

(Is there some circularity in this argument? Look at step (2) about and the hint provided --- compare (letter to Sacred Faculty): “Granted, it is altogether True that we must believe in God’s existence because it is taught in the Holy Scriptures, and, conversely,

that we must believe the Holy Scriptures because they have come from God. …This reasoning cannot be

proposed to unbelievers because they would judge it to be circular.”

Ontological Argument (fifth meditation):

(1) God has all perfections (definition of what God is).

(2) Existence is a perfection (something is more perfect if it exists)

(3) Therefore: God exists. (God is a necessary being (non-contingent).

MEDITATION FOUR:

1) IF GOD CREATED ME WITH FALSE CLEAR AND DISTINCT IDEAS, I WOULD INEVITABLY BE DECEIVED (LIKE A COMPUTER ROBOT WITH A BAD CPU.

2) GOD IS NO DECEIVER.

3) MY CLEAR AND DISTINCT IDEAS ARE NOT ONLY INEVITABLE FOR ME BUT THEY MUST BE TRUE.

[I can be guardedly skeptical about my sensory derived beliefs. Whether my eyes, for example, pick out a triangle or not is a matter of probabilities; but I know what the properties of a triangle have to be (a clear and distinct idea)]

[Note (page 37): “For this reason alone the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s ‘end,’ I judge to be utterly useless in physics.”

FORMAL. Credited to Plato. Things are understood to the degree that they participate in the forms. True knowledge is of the forms.

MATERIAL. Credited to the materialists, Democritus in particular. A thing is understood by determining what atoms compose it. Necessity.

EFFICIENT. Credited to the sophists. A thing is understood relative to a human’s intentions for it. Opinion is king. Source, designer, intent.

FINAL. Credited to Aristotle himself. A thing is understood by knowing what it is for, its end, its goal. Teleology. (Telos=Goal).

(The Sophists recognized all four causes because they are all ways humans think but efficient explanations are fundamental;

The Aristotelians recognize all four causes because all come up in inquiries or sciences, but since all inquiries or sciences aim at (often different) goals, final causes organize them.

For Platonists, since humans and inquiries or sciences have forms, they recognize efficient and final causes as subordinate to the forms, while material causes drop off the map.

Similarly, since Materialists see opinions, or scientifically organized beliefs, as really just individual or collective neurological brain states, they recognize efficient and final causes as superficial, “seems as if” talk. The “forms,” on the other hand, are simply non-existent.

[Important footnote. Historically, long after Aristotle the term “efficient cause” was sometimes used to mean material causality, causal necessity, one billiard ball hitting another. ]]

Descartes' solution in MEDITATIONS:

1) I doubt the existence of material objects: I can't be sure whether I am awake or asleep.

2) But I am certain that I, as doubter & thinker, exist; I think; therefore I am (a mind).

3) Therefore, minds and bodies distinctly different substances: dualism

Mind: not sensed, unextended, indivisible.

Body: sensed, extended, divisible

[Rationalism: high road of science through our innate clear & distinct ideas, not our senses.]

[Note that Meditations was dedicated to the Sacred Faculty of Theology at Paris; Descartes suppressed his life work, Le Monde after Galileo (1640) recanted the heliocentric theory under torture threat; Galileo's Dialogue on Two Worlds and Meditations on Papal Index until 20th century.]

Note also that there seem to be two Descartes:

1) The dualist of cogito ergo sum: the primacy of mind ("the ghost in the machine")

2) The neurophysiologist. As we will see, La Mettrie thought Descartes a closet materialist

1) More Rationalists:

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). In Ethics, he "deduces" the nature of the world from self-evident axioms; the physical & mental are two attributes of God.

Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). Nature full of "monads" (souls) which reflect the entire universe, past, present & future. All truths necessary. Calculus. This must be the best of all possible worlds. Mocked by Voltaire in Candide

(Leibniz's argument: God is all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good, and he created the world; therefore this must be the best of all possible worlds, for otherwise God would have lacked power, or foresight, or goodness.) Problem of evil. This problem exists for all monotheist religions.

2) Empiricists (all knowledge from sense experience; mind a blank tablet at birth)

John Locke (1632-1704). Dualist. [Voltaire & La Mettrie thought him a closet materialist] Locke's Treatise on Government formed the intellectual basis of the US revolution.

Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753). Since all we ever have is (mental) experience, matter is unknowable. God essentially provides the glue which our mental experience in harmony.

David Hume (1711-1776). Since all I have is my own experience, I can't know about bodies or other minds.

Causality is a secondary impression or mental habit that arises because A (the cause) precedes, is close to, and is

constantly conjoined with B (the effect). Pavlov's dog. Skepticism reigneth.

DESCARTES: THE SMEAR AND RELATED MISCONSTRUALS

Justin Leiber

For many, Descartes initiated modern philosophy in his Meditations, tersely and coherently setting the budget of central problems, the method of Cartesian doubt, and the quest for certainty. On the other hand, Descartes’ rationalism and dualism supposedly gets nearly everything wrong and nonetheless his Cartesian mistakes spread robustly albeit covertly, as Gilbert Ryle suggests in attributing to Descartes the Ghost in the Machine myth, which myth gets it wrong about both the mental and the physical but nonetheless subliminally prospers (Ryle 1948) --- or, more commonly in English speaking countries, Cartesian becomes a label for a jumble of deplorable lines of thought. Indeed in a literal sense Descartes did get it wrong about physics (the Machine is inoperable); more about that later. Perhaps Descartes is too familiar; and apart from Cartesian scholars, too unread, remembered from a brief undergraduate encounter withMeditations. Here I will try to show you four important, enduring, and related ways in which Descartes’ views are characteristically misconstrued, even occasionally in this Journal. All four address central issues about mind/brain, so they are instructive, and are more likely to be agreed to or at least understood, by today’s reader rather than that of the first two-thirds of the Twentieth Century.Occasionally, indeed, some misconstruals almost seem to have a touch of willful malice.

About the smear however there can be no doubt, the persons involved including the original fabulator Nicholas Fountaine (Fountaine 1736), who invented a captivating story with clear malice, the commendable S. Rosenfield, who inadvertently passed the smear story along in the very process of making clear several reasons why the story was a fabulation, and about finally the zealots, who righteously snatch up the story word by horrifying word, citing Rosenfield, while culpably ignoring Rosenfield’s many clear and cogent reasons for dismissing the fabulation and dismissing the larger implications about Descartes’ and other Cartesians’ conduct, about Descartes’ views about what he called automata, and about animals’ experience of perception, feelings, and (yes) pain, and, apparent in the very title of Rosenfield’s book, From Beast Machine to Man Machine, her amply buttressed claim that it was the beast machine thesis that inevitably developed into the man machine thesis, the continuity of animal and human that eventuated in the spread of serious anti-cruelty to animals sentiments.

Nicholas Fountaine hatched the fabulation in what became, sometime after his death, Memories Pour Servir A L’Histoire de Port-Royal(1736). Fountaine’s righteous hatred of Descartes and new science also appears one page from the fabulation. The passage also suggests how different medieval science was from modern mechanistic science. Fontaine’s hero and mentor, M Souci pronounces,

God made the world...to manifest his greatness and to depict the invisible in the visible. Descartes destroys both. “The sun is a beautiful thing,” one says to him, to which he replies, “No, it’s just a mass of toenail clippings.” Instead of recognizing invisible things in the visible, as in the sun, the God of nature, and to see Him in its effects on plants, he, on the other hand, tries to provide a reason for everything. (Fontaine 1736, II, p. 54).

Fountaine’s editors, introducing his Memories, suggest that his edifying stories simply cannot be expected to be true (Fountaine 1736, Vol. I, v). While alive, Fontaine’s publications floridly depicted the lives of miraculous saints.

Despite Souci’s toenail clippings, it is Descartes’ mechanistic view of animals that most incensed his critics in the century following Descartes death and in this century as well. Since he relays the fabulation and effectively dramatizes its larger implications, I will let Peter Singer, in his vigorous and enormously influential book, Animal Liberation(1976), introduce the fabulation,

[Montaigne is] the first writer since Roman times to say that cruelty to animals

is wrong in itself.

Perhaps, then, from this point in the development of Western thought the status of nonhumans was bound to improve? The old concept of the universe, and man's central place in it was, slowly giving ground; modern science was about to set forth on its

now-famous rise.

But the absolute nadir was still to come. The last, most bizarre, and --for the animals --most painful outcome of Christian doctrines emerged in the first half of the seventeenth century, in the philosophy of Rene Descartes …

In the philosophy of Descartes the Christian doctrine that animals do not have immortal souls has the extraordinary consequence that they do not have consciousness either. They are mere machines, automata. They experience neither pleasure nor pain, nor anything else. Although they may squeal when cut with a knife, or writhe in their efforts to escape contact with a hot iron, this does not, Descartes said, mean they feel pain in these situations... For Descartes, the scientist the doctrine had still another fortunate result. It was at this time that the practice of experimenting on live animals became widespread in Europe. Descartes’ theory allowed the experimenter to dismiss any qualms he might feel. Descartes himself dissected living animals in order to advance his knowledge of anatomy, and many of the leading physiologists of the period declared themselves Cartesians and mechanists. The following eye-witness account of some of these experimenters, working at Port-Royal, makes clear the convenience of Descartes’ theory

They administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference, and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said animals were clocks. They nailed them up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them and see the circulation of the blood which was a great subject of conversation. (Singer, p. 118-20)

The only citation Singer gives us for this blood curdling supposed ‘eye-witness’ account is to L. C. Rosenfield’s scholarly From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie (Rosenfield 1940, 54), (and not to N. Fontaine’s Memories Pour Servir A L’Histoire de Port-Royal, the work from which Rosenfield herself quotes). Stephen Clarke makes the same reference via Rosenfield (Clarke 1977, p. 197) and that just begins a long list of referees. Clarke, who is surely perhaps more right historically, sees Descartes’ views as a scientistic departure from Christianity rather than a fulfillment of it. Indeed, despite Singer, those who led the original charge against the animal-machine, or beast-machine, hypothesis argued like Fontaine that it threatens Christianity, and the immortality and non-physical character of the human soul.

Singer stresses the ‘eye witness’ nature of the account and he gives every indication that he thinks it is true. What is wrong?

1) Rosenfield says that the story has to be a fabulation. No participants are named, no year let alone day is indicated, or location. All there is in Fountaine’s book is the account you here read. Rosenfield thinks it a play upon words of a well-known syllogism of the time purported to establish that animals have no souls. Fountaine’s editors agree that his stories could not be expected to be true literally.

2) Rosenfield, a well-known scholar, attests that Descartes was never accused of cruelty to animals and that he was devoted to his pet dog.

3) More generally, Descartes frequently insisted that, physically speaking, man is a machine as well and that human and animal machinery are the same. Recent Cartesian scholarship stresses that Descartes held that animals experienced sensation, emotions, pain, hunger, etc. For Descartes and his contemporaries “automata” were not by definition lacking in feeling, sensation, etc. Descartes, however, did deny that animals could reason, think, or have minds. [For Descartes, the there was one sure test to show something had a mind was whether he/she “could reply appropriately to whatever might be said in its presence.” He did not deny that animals could suffer, he denied that they could think, at least certainly in the sense that they might pass this infinitistic test (Harrison 1992; Cottingham 1978).]

4) From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine: The Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie, Rosenfield’s book title, suggests that once animal machine theory was introduced, the move to man machine was inevitable – and a salient basis for the rise of anti-cruelty to animals sentiment.

But Singer does not even mention let alone dispute these claims of Rosenfield’s book. To cite approvingly and as unquestionably true an account from a book that denies the truth of the account, provides evidence for this denial, and pervasively denies the indictment of Descartes that Singer wants to draw from the account, all seems a cheat. This is an overture to the four

Misconstruals.

THE SKIN AS NATURAL BOUNDARY

Visually, at least in our perception of others, the skin is an important boundary.

It acts as a barrier to our gaining access to what it is they have in mind. In

applying his method of radical doubt Descartes doubted that others had minds,

because he had no way of gaining direct access to them. The only thing that

he could not doubt was the fact that he did doubt. The only mind to which he did have direct access was his own. The body is a distinct entity because it is bounded by the skin. We are here at the inter-face between mind and behaviour. Descartes was there, at this particular inter-face, before either Heider or ourselves. (Farr 1997, 308)

Descartes not only does not support the skin as border between physical and mental, he did more

than anyone to break it down. Pavlov, among others, claims him as the father of

neuro-physiology, writing that ‘‘Descartes evolved the idea of the reflex. Starting from the

assumption that animals behaved simply as machines, he regarded every activity of the organism

as a necessary reaction to some stimulus, the connection between the stimulus and response

being made through a definite nervous path.’’ (Pavlov 1960, p. 4). Inside the skin, Descartes was

able to trace the nervous pathway from, for example, the foot, upward through the leg, torso, eventuating in the brain where it was experienced; the nervous impulse may originate anywhere along the pathway but still be felt in the foot, even if the foot no longer existed. Similarly, light particles reflected off some object may hit the retina and are then relayed into the brain via the optic nerve. In any case the connection between the light reflected, the retinal stimuli, and the eventual mind/brain registration makes the connection quite indirect but also subject to physical third party discovery and description. Indeed many philosophers think that “How can I be sure that I am not a brain in a vat with nervous impulses that simulate an external world orchestrated by mad scientists?” is the 20^th century replacement for the malignant demon of Meditations. Perhaps, but Descartes had a clear sense of the logic of some such skeptical suppositions, the dream argument of the first meditation lacks the generality and foundation of this neurological argument.

Indeed the skin boundary supposition belongs to empiricist tradition, psychological behaviorists like W. V. O. Quine. In his famous rendition of context for radical translation, gavagai, the radical translator/anthropologist has the following data with which to conclude that “gavagai” means something like “Lo, a rabbit”: a rabbit runs through the local environment, producing a “retinal irradiation” on the native’s eyes, and the native ‘affirms’ “gavagai” (Quine 1960, 29-35). The “retinal irradiation” on the skin boundary, the auditory input to the native’s ears, and the eventual bodily response -- the behavioral scientist takes all this to be objective data, reaching the native’s skin, and counted as stimuli, but going no further into the unseen subjective depths. To the contrary for Descartes, the brain and nervous system are central causal controllers, initiating, moderating, and correcting the musculature and other physical systems that most superficially cause sense-observed behavior, which behavior is merely the ultimate output of the brain and nervous system and of course, when voluntary actions action are involved, also the substantial mind. (So far as the emotions characterized in On the Passions of the Soul, they have a substantial physical component, also interacting with the immaterial intellect and will.) Whatever this is, it is not behaviorism.

The radical empiricist sources of behaviorism and logical positivism, and most specifically David Hume, disdain substance, the un-sensed supposed bearer and cause of the sensible properties that constitute “material objects.” After all, Ockham’s razor suggests do not multiply entities beyond the necessities of explanation, and that may suggest that un-sensed substance is one of those unneeded entities. Or, to put it in twentieth century philosophical idiom, always when possible substitute logical constructions (out of sense data) for inferred entities, those supposed underlying un-sensed foundations of sensory properties. Instructively, the rationalist Descartes reverses this empiricist logic. (Or maybe I should not say reverses because Descartes’ view might seem to be common sense or the subject-predicate logic that appears in the grammar of natural language, one which the empiricists triumphantly reverse.)

Paradoxically, precisely what convinces empiricists that what they have is a nullity or illusion (because it does not derive from repeated sensory experience) is what convinces the rationalists that what they have is a part of reason itself, native to the intellect, a priori and unavoidable because it does not stem from the senses. What rationalists find to be certain knowledge the empiricists do not regard as knowledge at all because it is not learned and accumulated, or explicable as, repeated sensory experience.

All this contrast appears in stark relief in Descartes’ famous wax example in the second meditation. Descartes takes the wax “fresh from the hive,” with (his senses report) a sweet smell, white color, solid shape, hard enough to tap. He heats the wax and it changes with respect to every one of his senses. But, he knows, it is the same wax, the same enduring objective physical stuff (the substantial inferred entity) that is also the cause of his subjective sensory experiences. Today in philosophy and science, “anti-foundationalism,” inferred entities, and causal theories of perception are well regarded. More doubtfully in some philosophical quarters, Descartes also finds his experiment to affirm nativism and mentalism, for the idea of the enduring, un-sensed, underlying objective, and causally powerful substance, is an intuition of the mind, not the senses.

And at the end of the wax as substance discussion Descartes makes a remarkable transition, more briefly suggesting that a parallel argument can be run for the mind.

[I might fall back into believing] that I knew the wax by means of vision and not simply by the intuition of the mind; unless by chance I remember that, when looking from a window and saying I see men who pass in the street, I really do not see them, but infer that what I see is men, just as I say that I see wax. And yet what do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines? Yet I judge them to be men. And similarly solely by the faculty of judgment which rests in my mind, I comprehend that which I believed I saw with my eyes. (Descartes 1643, 155-156).

Descartes, of course, could be more careful about judging that these are minded humans and not

automata. His sure and certain test is that a candidate should be able to reply appropriately to whatever might be said in their presence. Of course, Descartes makes clear, an automata could be designed to say “I am in pain” or “I see a yellow spot” or even “I think; therefore I am.” It is the on-going substantial capacity to “reply appropriately” to a potentially infinite variety of questions that constitutes the mind.

So while, as Descartes suggests, he is superficially most familiar with his own mind, it is the underlying capacity, and reliable tacit knowledge and reasoning fluencies (the inferred substance) that constitute his mind, not some finite string of actual performances. The upshot is that mind is indeed a native idea, one which the human child naturally applies on much the same grounds to his/her self and others, although of course the child has a more extensive experience of itself.

THE CHILD DISCOVERS MINDS NOT A MIND

In applying his method of radical doubt Descartes doubted that others had minds, because he had no way of gaining direct access to them. The only thing that he could not doubt was the fact that he did doubt. The only mind to which he did have direct access was his own…. The Cartesian inheritance in psychology is a mental philosophy of the Self (which is accessible to introspection) and a behavioural science of the Other One. (Farr 1997, 308)

When Descartes is engaged in his systematic doubt, his meditation, he presents this as a one-time occasion, an extended doubting designed to get him down to absolutely certain beliefs and also to build up a gradation of the sciences according to the absolute certainty and, missing that, moral certainty, knowledge that may be based partially on the senses but established well enough for daily life and decision making, and, of course, for the sciences that in part depend on our senses. This task entails theoretical doubting more than actual palm-sweating psychologically real doubt (indeed that sort of doubting might require, as he remarks, madness, the seriously held belief that you are a king or a teapot, etc.). This account is not an exercise in determining how a child (or backwoods adult) might acquire knowledge of the world around it, including minds. Descartes proceeds to temporarily and theoretically clean house, throwing almost everything out, eventually arriving at, at least, “I think; therefore I am.”

But one must here resist the empiricist and atomistic tendency to interpret this as “there is a thought,” or even a collection (or logical construction) of thoughts, and not what it has to be for Descartes, an underlying mental substance that has, not is, these thoughts (an inferred entity, not a logical construction). I am, he says, that which thinks, doubts, wonders whether, deduces, imagines that, reasons etc. (the gamut of the intentional idiom; not just the verbs but also the propositional content).You see how this connects with Descartes’ “one sure and certain” test for determining whether something before him is minded and not just a cleverly made automata, namely, that it can reply appropriately to whatever is said in its presence. Once a doctrinaire empirirefore, not up to the high standard of the cogito (Farr more elegantly expresses the same assessment). But now I can see that on Descartes’ view there is no fundamental difference between you knowing you have a mind and you knowing someone else has a mind (you see this particularly when he parallels the wax case with the human bodies and behaviors he sees, both require an un-sensed substance that is natively understood). In the wax case, the sensory properties all change but the physical substance persists; the un-sensed physical substance is known through the native rational idea supplied by reason, i.e., mind. In the “hats” and “overcoats” case (everyday recognition of minded persons), I can tighten up my causal assumption that what wears a hat and an overcoat is minded. That means the “reply appropriately to whatever…” test, in which just as in the wax case, my senses do provide information (subject’s lips and voice box produce the following utterances), and un-sensed mental substance is known through the native rational idea supplied by reason, i.e., mind.

In Meditations, Descartes is applying a variant of the “sure and certain” test to himself. His substantial mind is what reliably exhibits or generates reasonings and generates or has thoughts, answers questions, entertains propositional attitude statements (introspective speech), puts together coherent chains of deduction, provides a self-narrative. Descartes can be said to have “direct access” to his thoughts but just as he has direct access when he is speaking out loud and reading something he has written. But what he doesn’t have is direct access to his mind, the un-sensed substance that generates his thoughts, although via a native idea of reason he knows that he has, or perhaps, even is this substance. He is on much the same footing with other minds. He may, as they, hear or read their thoughts. He may, as they, introspect (which is I suppose little different from writing or saying something while no one else is around). But, as with physical substance, there is nothing that can be called direct access.

Well so much for Meditations’ one-time assessment of the certainty and grounding of knowledge and belief in the structure of the sciences of the mental and the physical and secondarily for everyday life. How do people actually come to know or believe whatever they do about the mental and the physical? Twentieth century philosophers have criticized 17^th and 18^th century philosophers of conflating the genetic or psychological account of knowledge and belief from the logical assessment of what is thought to be knowledge or belief, this latter the proper philosophical task. Over the last few decades, on the other hand, philosophers have become interested in empirical results and with putting philosophy into, especially, the burgeoning field of cognitive sciences. So there is now an interest, shared of course by the cognitive science community, in empirical investigation in particular of baby/child development When Descartes claims that the idea of mind is a native intuition of the mind, something distinctively mental and not any sensory-derived notion, this suggests that there is something dubious about the claim that the child learns all about its own mind and then reasons by analogy that other humans probably have a similar inner life. If the idea of mind is indeed built in the child does not learn it from sensory experience. Over the last few decades empirical research has suggested even three and four year old children have a “Theory of Mind,” a powerful natively developing faculty, one that affords tacit knowledge, not conscious, justified, learned belief. The three/four year old natively develops knowledge of the minds of the children around it in tandem to its developing knowledge of itself. The child needs to know what these minds, individually, know or don’t know, possessed by this or that mind/person. What cognitive/developmental psychologist callthe Theory of Mind is the child’s faculty of thinking about the world of minds, a thinking that employs the intentional idiom, or folk psychology, tounderstand the minds, including its own. It is a powerful and useful faculty, with a genetic and physiological foundation, that akin to the language faculty, with which it is intertwined, develops early, burgeoning with little explicit training or explanation, and it deals in un-sensed mental qualities, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, etc.

As “Theory of Mind” suggests it concerns what the child tacitly knows about minds, its own and others. This usage of “knows” can disturb philosophers, who want to restrict knows to conscious, explicitly justified, and certain knowledge, whereas clearly the child’s “knowledge” of minds is tacit or unconscious, inarticulate, and certainly not rationally justified as philosophers might require (the same of course is also true of the child’s linguistic knowledge). The children have the knack of telling what other child, and of course themselves knows or doesn’t know, how they feel, what they would like to do, what emotional state they are in, and on and on. The autistic child, with a genetic or physiological disorder that, to a greater or lesser degree cancels the development of this native intuition, does not deploy a Theory of Mind (Baron Cohen 1995). Such a child sees the same physical world as the others, its sensory appearances and underlying substance, but more or less does not “see” the world of minded persons nor grasp their mental substance. Not unnaturally such children fear and lack understanding of other people, feeling much more comfortable with machinery and inorganic items. They have trouble with language and especially the intentional idiom.

HOW IT COULD BE THE CASE THAT NON-HUMAN ANIMALS CAN EXPERIENCE SENSATION, SUFFER PAIN, ETC. BUT NOT THINK, HAVE MINDS, OR IN SOME SENSE, CONSCIOUSNESS?

This question begs for resolution; it clearly asks for the dividing line that Descartes wants to make out. Research of the past half century has been kind to Descartes’ view that language is a species specific human characteristic, one that carries with it, or is, a number of cognitive capacities.Someone can, dogmatically and simplistically, insist that if an animal can be awake, experience perceptions, feel pain, hunger, etc., then inescapably, the animal also thinks, reasons, is self-conscious and conscious, has a mind, etc., etc. (and vice versa).For minds, it’s all or nothing. One can agree, with Descartes, that this is too crude.

Supposing one rejects the entailment, if awake, then conscious, how could that be plausible? Or, what useful this distinction could be made here? Recent cognitive science is much taken up with what Jerry Fodor calls informationally-encapsulated cognitive modules – e.g. the input is sonic vibrations in the inner ear and in milliseconds the output is the grammatically-structured sentence the fluent speaker/hearer hears (consciously and psychologically), the whole intervening process irrecoverably unconscious (. Similarly for visual perception, which starts with near flat retinal irradiation, goes through processing stages and is delivered, in even less milliseconds, to consciousness as a three dimensional representation (for humans, the last stage consciousness, the theatrical eminently and usefully describable to others). Most large animals have visual perception but it is not at all clear that the conscious/unconscious perceptual distinction has any clear purchase here. For humans, such perceptions are ubiquitously and valuably convertible into propositional representations, importantly conveyable to other humans; but nonhuman animals hardly if ever communicate propositions (and still less propositional attitude propositions) to each other, nor again naturally enough, carry on lives convenient to such exchanges. Equally it surely might be usefully suggested that nonhuman animals lack consciousness or thought in the sense sketched above (our words here are vague, ambiguous, and loose, so one might say that nonhuman animals lack reflective or self- consciousness, reserving conscious or consciousness to mean awake or aware).Similarly, one might say that non-human animalsdo not reason (or think) in the sense, very roughly speaking, of entertaining propositions and working out their logical relationships.

Returning to our beginning, let us agree that nonhuman animal suffering counts against

a contemplated course of action and that this suffering, in itself, counts against it, apart

fromthe dangers of easing one into cruelty to humans or being aesthetically reprehensible.

Among others an issue significantly and clearly remains which I will call the “stuck pig

problem,” as in “He hollered like a stuck pig.” Pigs are not given to stoicism. Does this mean

that if the pig out-hollers, out-suffering all, then the pig’s suffering counts for more than any

other animal involved (including humans, perhaps real stoics)? (Contemplating such questions

may well have been one factor in leading J. S. Mill to add quality of pleasure to quantity, thus

one supposes, rating an aesthete’s quiver over Bach’s Tocca and Fugue more highly than the

raucous, thigh-slapping, working man’s reception of a polka.)

There is, I suggest, a way out of the stuck pig problem that Descartes might have found

attractive. Why not emphasize the continuity between organic and inorganic? If animals are machines, why not say inorganic machines are, after all, machines as well? Utilitarianism is often read as suggesting that the psychological experience of pleasure is the only thing good in itself (as opposed to instrumental good – as a means to what is good in itself),while pain and suffering is the only thing that is “bad in itself.” But although there may fairly soon be computer robots that feel pleasure and pain, the most salient evaluative features of machines in general are functionality, efficiency, complexity, beauty, simplicity, etc. Take that Stradivarius violin over there, quietly gleaming, impeccably-crafted. Think of smashing it. Would not that be bad in itself? I love Picasso’s Guernica. Does that mean what I really just love is the psychological experience it occasions (which might as well be achieved taking a pill)? Does not that stand of ancient red woods make the world a better place even if no sentient creature enjoys it? Or Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine (as recently reconstructed in stunning brass? Or Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, which I imagine is good in itself?

Descartes’ Mechanistic Physics Totaled; “Can Mind Be Reduced to Body?” no longer a real question

When Descartes posed this question it was a real question, and in principle, answerable. The new mechanistic science, in a commanding position, explicitly hewed to a reasonably clear cut characterization of the physical (or material) and of physical explanation, one defined by its rejection of medieval science, entangled with theology and the view that the natural world was infused with reflections of the triune God. The new mechanistic science discarded final causes, sticking to efficient and material causes taken to mean strictly impersonal mechanical explanation, paradigmatically the interacting gears of clocks and the impact physics of billiard balls, looking to deterministic chains of inexorable causes and effects, and excluding action at a distance, mystifying non-mechanical forces, and “it is better so” talk. Thus, when Descartes posed his question, his answer, plausibly enough, was no. He particularly focused on natural language, a species-wide, species-specific human proclivity, a capacity that powered the human being to “reply appropriately to whatever might be said in its presence,” what seemed an infinitistic, creative and non-reflexive performance of mind, inexplicable in strictly mechanistic terms, while he expected that the physical nature of both humans and animals could be mechanically explained.

The heady days of strict mechanistic physics eventually waned and adapted.

Newton’s mathematically and predictively-exacting characterization of matter in motion including gravity (a non-mechanical action-at-distance force) put quit to it, at least for some. There were also other non-mechanical discoveries ahead, magnetism and electricity for starters. La Mettrie, a century after Descartes, straightforwardly reacted,

To be a machine, to feel, think, know good from evil like blue from yellow, in a word, to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality, yet to be only an animal, are things no more contradictory than to be an ape or parrot and know how to find sexual pleasure. . . . Thought is so far from being incompatible with organized matter that it seems to me be just another of it properties, such as electricity, the motive faculty, impenetrability, extension, etc. (La Mettrie 1748/1994, 71-72).

But others were more circumspect, sanctioning as “physical” the rest of the non-mechanical phenomena but not including mind. “Does mind reduce to body?” or better “Can mind be physically explained?,” is ill-formed because “physical” lacks a definition. Unification of the sciences will still be sought (and something even achieved, e.g., between physics and chemistry, a particularly instructive case because physics had to adopt the quantization ubiquitous to chemistry but anathema for physicists) but it will be of aspects of “nature” to aspects of the “nature,” rather than reduction, while retaining methodological homilies of what could be called the spirit of the mechanistic world view (viz, “scientific determinism,” rejection of final causes, replication, elimination of observer bias, etc.).

Justin Leiber, Philosophy Department, Florida State University (jleiber@fsu.edu).

La Mettrie (1709-1751) & the philosophes (18^th Century philosopher/sciences who wished for a generally educated populace, sought to collectively spread scientific understanding, and to collectively change the political, social, and economic structures of their age and of France in particular.)

Context: France, the cultural, commercial, and scientific center of Europe, with a muddled & corrupt monarchy.

Philosophes admired Britain's parliament & constitutional monarchy and the 17^th century empiricist philosopher John Locke; The philosophes had a characteristic zeal for the advancement of science & technology, public education, freedom of speech; they opposed organized religion and religious fanaticism, bigotry, & savagery; they were atheists, skeptics, or deists. (Deists believed in an impersonal, master architect God, who stood apart from all received religion and did not directly intervene in the world (prayer ineffective, no miracles); the first five US presidents were deists; deism was regarded as no real religion by most followers of organized religions.

Here are some important philosophes:

Voltaire (1694-1778). Poet, playwright, etc. Public figure who fought for justice for individuals and groups, and against the religious and political authorities of his time. Although Voltaire argued for deism, he also wrote that "if there were no God, we would have to invent him."

Pierre Maupertius (1698-1759). Newtonian physicist and astronomer.

Jean D'Alembert (1717-83). Astronomer and mathematician. Appears in Diderot's D'Alembert's Dream, which emphasizes Trembley's polyp and other ideas originally put forward by La Mettrie.

Denis Diderot (1713-1784). Wrote much of the first great Encyclopedia. Popularized science, wrote intellectual fiction, was perhaps the leading philosophe.

Frederick the Great (1712-1786). King of Prussia from 1730, who was also a political theorist, philosopher, and brilliant general. Wrote bad poetry, but his musical compositions for the flute are still performed. Founded the Berlin academy of science and collected intellectuals.

Frederick's Eulogy on La Mettre

La Mettrie's Materialism. Universally condemned in his time but routine to science and medicine today:

1) Heart understood as pump (Harvey) - broad sense paradox. Muscles & sinews mechanisms and "strings." Clear anatomical descriptions.

2) Clocks, mechanical toys, microscopes.

[Spontaneous generation, pro and contra (John Needham); vitalism; Dr. Charboneau in Life of Louis Pasteur]

3) "A machine that winds its own springs."

4) "Soul"/mind affected by the body; therefore it is physical. Disease, diet, age, sex, temperature, climate, etc.

[climatic and temperature theories, "beef-eaters"]

5) Localized brain damage or abnormality has specific effects on "soul" ("animating principle"; de amina).

6) Albrecht Haller's "muscular irritability." Electricity bridges gap between animate & inanimate;"Thought is a property of matter" (La Mettrie).

7) Another Prometheus may make a "talking man." Descartes' "one sure test: reply appropriately to whatever is said [to it]." Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1820); P. B. Shelley's interference. Hollywoodization, 2001, Isaac Asimov, Alan Turing. [Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (Mind 1950); Turing Test for machine intelligence. Leiber, Can Animals & Machines Be Persons? (1984)]

8) Language is what makes us what we are. So why not teach chimpanzees to talk? Adopt methods used to teach the deaf. Use young, not infant, chimpanzees. Make "a little man about town." (Hayes 1945, A. & B. Gardeners 1960-70s, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh today.).

[Genetically we humans are very closely related to chimpanzees (note behavioral distinctions between humans, chimps, and bonobos). Less related to gorillas, still less to orangutans. Failure to teach spoken language to apes. Sign language works a little (or a lot?) better. Washoe, Nim Chimpsky. Herb Terrace (1975). Real and pidgin sign language, and natural language. The Signs of Language (Bellugi and Klima 1980). Recent work on chimpanzee intelligence (Ponelli, Folk Physics for Chimpanzees.]

9) Abraham Trembley's polyp. Plant/animal continuity. Every cut makes two more "souls";

[In our time, commissurotomy creates two personalities; two "souls"]

10) More needs, more equipment. Life evolves from simpler to the more complicated.

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch By JOHN TIERNEY Published: August 14, 2007 New York Tiimes Science Section