[lit-ideas] : Popper's 'Philosophy of Mind' III: Dualism and the 'Cartesian Turn'
- From: "Adriano Palma" <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:40:42 +0200
** For Your Eyes Only **
** High Priority **
** Reply Requested by 11/3/2011 (Thursday) **
it seems essentially correct (up to and excluding physics) Descartes
does have a real argument (see e.g. J. Perry on pre-conceived
naturalism)
most of what you say is rather well known (I myself did not notice the
Rylean claim that Descartes is original and new in his dualism, do you
have a quote somewhere supporting the claim you made?)
>>> Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> 11/2/2011 6:23 PM >>>
Popper on the ‘Cartesian Turn’: “A Shift in the Mind-Body Problem”
An interesting thesis (or several) in the history of ideas may be
extracted from Popper’s concluding and fifth chapter of TSAIB, P5,
“Historical Comments on the Mind-Body Problem”. Dualism was out of
fashion when Popper wrote (and perhaps remains so) and for a variety of
reasons. Some arguments centre on its alleged metaphysical extravagance,
which can easily be disparaged [cf. Rylean booing away the “ghost in the
machine”], especially as the ‘mind’ or ‘mental events’ are not
inter-subjectively observable, unlike physical events: when we dissect
or observe the brain we only ever observe physical entities like tissue
or electrical waves, we never ‘see’ mental events (even if we
‘experience’ mental events from the inside, that ‘experience’ is not
inter-subjectively observable, only its physical effects may be
observed). Other arguments centre on doubting how such a physically
undetectable ‘mental stuff’ could causally affect or interact with
physical events. Both kinds of arguments are given particular weight
against dualism in its Cartesian form.
Popper has always been an opponent of fashions (indeed his role in
twentieth century philosophy may be as the leading critic of the leading
intellectual fashions of the age – from Marxism and psycho-analysis to
Logical Positivism and the school of Language Analysis) and in P5 he
very much takes the longer view, “to make the present problem situation
concerning the relation of mind and body better understandable by
showing how it arose out of earlier attempts to solve problems.”[p.151].
In this longer view, from the dawn of human history onwards, “All
thinkers of whom we know enough to say anything definite on their
position, up to and including Descartes, were dualist interactionists”
[p.152] [contra the Rylean myth that dualism is a new-fangled Cartesian
legend]. Then Descartes produced a version of dualism that was so
influential that even modern philosophers continue to assume that
mind-body dualism must denote some form of ‘Cartesian Dualism’; but
‘Cartesian Dualism’ created such difficulties that Descartes’
successors [notably Spinoza and, especially, Leibniz] sought escape by
abandoning dualism in favour of either a mind-body parallelism [Spinoza]
or mind-body identity [Leibniz].
The difficulties of Cartesian Dualism arise, foremost, from (a)
Descartes’ essentialist theory of ‘causation’ as being ‘push’ (which in
turn arises from his essentialist theory of physical substance as
‘extension’); and (b) Descartes’ essentialist theory of physical and
mental substances. This leads to an apparent and fundamental
inconsistency, for “how could the unextended soul exert anything like
push on an extended body?” [p.180]. In Popper’s view both (a) and (b)
are mistaken and are untenable in the light of scientific developments:
for example, as regards (a), modern science tells us that even what
looks like ‘push’ is in fact a form of ‘action at a distance’ as the
repelling effect of one body on another depends on fields of forces that
are not themselves ‘matter’; a fortiori the idea that all causation is
by ‘push’ has long been abandoned; as regards (b), modern science, since
Newton, has abandoned the idea of there being an essential physical
substance that must lie at the root of physical explanation [“…in the
present state of physics (which operates with conjectural explanations)
we are faced, not with a plurality of substances, but with a plurality
of different kinds of forces, and thus with a pluralism of different
interacting explanatory principles”].
Nevertheless, Popper suggests “that it is only the Cartesian idea of
physical causation (admittedly, derived by Descartes from the essential
property of physical substance) that creates a serious problem, and not
the idea of an essential difference of substances. Even if we were to
presuppose the idea of ultimate explanation based on ultimate
essentialist substances, even then the dissimilarity of substances would
not necessarily create an argument against the possibility of their
interaction; but from the point of view of conjectural explanation, this
difficulty simply does not arise.” [pp.181-2]. That is, while Popper
opposes the idea of mind as some peculiar ‘mental substance’ (and finds
dualism no more entails this than contemporary ‘physicalism’ entails a
Cartesian ‘physical substance’), it is the problem of causation that
renders dualism untenable in its Cartesian form, for “how could the
unextended soul exert anything like push on an extended body?” But
though the problem of mind-body interaction cannot be solved by a causal
theory of ‘push’, the (perhaps insoluble) problem of mind-body causation
cannot be used further as a valid argument against such interaction –
after all, we do not claim that the (perhaps insoluble) problem of
explaining how non-material forces [like gravity] could possibly
interact with matter is a valid argument that such interaction does not,
in fact, take place; nor should we be unduly frightened by the ‘ghost in
the machine’ being never ‘seen’ empirically, for we do not take the fact
we cannot ‘see’ gravity [only its physical effects] as an argument that
invisible gravity does not actually exist.
From the POV of a cosmology of “different interacting explanatory
principles”, and where the problems of causation as regards physical
interactions remain unsolved in any fundamental sense (either
philosophically or scientifically), the problem of causation for
mind-body interaction is severely weakened as any kind of argument
against dualism, even if a specific version of this problem proves
decisive for rejecting dualism in its Cartesian form.
[Similar considerations, as to negligible weight of attendant problems
of causation as arguments against interaction, apply of course to
Popper’s defence of the causal interaction of World 2 with World 3.]
What we find, perhaps, is that though a leading proponent of dualism,
the difficulties of Descartes’ specific theory were one of the main
factors in the rise and even dominance of theories of mind and body that
do not admit of a dualism in the sense of separateness of mind and
body.
Please find our Email Disclaimer here: http://www.ukzn.ac.za/disclaimer/
Other related posts:
