Descartes gives a strange argument for the real distinction between mind and body. [Philosophical aside: he specifies “real” as in “res,” as opposed to a modal (as in “mode” of substance) distinction, since he recognizes the former as relevant to his substance dualism.]
The argument is one from divisibility.
(1) All extended things are divisible.
(2) No minds are divisible.
(3) No minds are extended things.
Since he believes that extension is characteristic of matter and only matter, it follows that minds cannot be material.
It’s premise (2) that Descartes really needs. What was his reasoning? He claims that he cannot conceive of half of a mind. So he must be going for something really strong, like the inconceivability of a mind’s being divisible.
Well... what would “a portion of a mind” be like, and why would Descartes think that, whatever it is, was inconceivable?
Jonathan Bennett has an interesting conjecture. He says that perhaps Descartes thought that “half a mind” would have to be mind-like in some relevant sense, where perhaps the most obvious sense would be having mentality or consciousness.
It’s very easy to see that “a portion of an extended thing” itself would be extended in a very straightforward, univocal sense of extended.
Descartes does not consider the possibility (perhaps obvious to us today) that the mind is a complex causal result of a factory of simpler, more basic (non-mental) parts. In short, for Descartes, mentality is basic, but he’s not really argued for this.
This helps explain why he instinctively treats mentality and extension as analogously primitive properties of each alleged substance.
Just as splitting and further splitting of an extended object, say, a cat would result in smaller and smaller parts of an extended object, so also should the splitting of a mind result in smaller and smaller thinking portions of a mind, which Descartes took to be absurd. [Another philosophical aside: I think it’s got to be connected also to the special unity of consciousness, which Leibniz later capitalizes on in some profound ways.]
If Descartes were given the example of splitting the cat, what he may not have considered was that mentality should not be analyzed as analogous to the simplicity/basicity of extension but rather more along the lines of the complexity of “being a living animal” or “being a living cat.”
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Monday, June 2, 2008
musing on Cartesian causation
Here’s a brief meditation on Descartes’ views of causation.
For Descartes’ teachers, the causal alterations of the material world were to be explained by reference to substantial forms. These were the entities that were the causal relata invoked to explain alteration, generation, and corruption.
For many reasons, Descartes came to reject the explanatory value of substantial forms (chief among the reasons, other than the obvious issues concerning mechanistic physics: he considered them to be crass reifications of concepts and hence a huge mistake in metaphysics), but he ended up replacing them with God. There is therefore some truth to the claim that for Descartes God becomes a sort of deus ex machina, at least by our standards of explanation.
Quick points:
1. Descartes affirmed occasionalism (i.e., denied genuine causal powers to material bodies) for body-body causal relations. God is the real and sole cause of alterations in causal phenomena involving bodies and other bodies. [Philosophical aside: What motivated occasionalism? The quick answer is a combination between (a) a pious but overwrought view of divine omnipotence/providence and (b) constrained perspectives on what it would take for passive matter to be affected.]
2. Descartes affirmed genuine causal powers of finite minds to cause alterations in material bodies, in most cases, the body intimately connected to one’s own mind. This is what primarily distinguishes him from the pure occasionalists (such as Malebranche).
3. It’s not clear what Descartes believed about body-mind causal relations. Specifically, he doesn’t seem to have a consistent story to tell about whether or not material bodies cause sensations in minds.
In the Meditations, Descartes appears to commit himself to the view that the ideas of material bodies are genuinely caused by those very bodies that stand outside of the mind. His distinction between innate and adventitious ideas appears to require such a view.
However, in the later Principles, there’s a key entry in the French edition that reads as follows: “...it seems to us that the idea we have of it forms itself in us on the occasion of bodies from without (Principles II.1).”
If we throw into the mix his real views on the radical innateness of ideas, then I think a picture emerges in which Descartes is probably best thought of as a semi-occasionalist with respect to body-mind causal relations.
For Descartes, all ideas are innate, not just the “big” ones like the idea of God, geometry, or the infinite. Even sensory ideas are innate, as he makes explicit in his Notes on a Certain Broadsheet. Here’s a quotation: “Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the shape are innate in us. The ideas of pain, colors, sounds, and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.”
I call this semi-occasionalism because strictly speaking God is not the direct cause of these sensations in a way that is isomorphic with the way in which God is the direct cause of motions in the case of body-body causation.
In this special case of body-mind causation, there is a kind of active principle (a dispositional structure or set of properties) in the soul that, under the right activation conditions, produces all the various ideas—sensory and otherwise. [Another philosophical aside: This is what distinguishes Descartes from being a recollectionist-nativist such as Plato.] The activation conditions are the occasions (of brain stimulation or whatnot) for the dispositional properties to manifest their characteristic expressions. The important things are (a) the relation between the external stimuli and the manifestations (i.e., the mind’s ideas) is non-causal and (b) the relation between the dispositions and the expressions is causal (but that sounds odd too... do dispositions “cause” their manifestations?).
It’s in this sense that it’s semi-occasionalism: God is only involved in an indirect sense in which he is the one who created and placed those dispositions in the soul in the first place, but then they take on a kind of causal independence of their own in their occasionalist brokering of representational relations between mind and world.
For Descartes’ teachers, the causal alterations of the material world were to be explained by reference to substantial forms. These were the entities that were the causal relata invoked to explain alteration, generation, and corruption.
For many reasons, Descartes came to reject the explanatory value of substantial forms (chief among the reasons, other than the obvious issues concerning mechanistic physics: he considered them to be crass reifications of concepts and hence a huge mistake in metaphysics), but he ended up replacing them with God. There is therefore some truth to the claim that for Descartes God becomes a sort of deus ex machina, at least by our standards of explanation.
Quick points:
1. Descartes affirmed occasionalism (i.e., denied genuine causal powers to material bodies) for body-body causal relations. God is the real and sole cause of alterations in causal phenomena involving bodies and other bodies. [Philosophical aside: What motivated occasionalism? The quick answer is a combination between (a) a pious but overwrought view of divine omnipotence/providence and (b) constrained perspectives on what it would take for passive matter to be affected.]
2. Descartes affirmed genuine causal powers of finite minds to cause alterations in material bodies, in most cases, the body intimately connected to one’s own mind. This is what primarily distinguishes him from the pure occasionalists (such as Malebranche).
3. It’s not clear what Descartes believed about body-mind causal relations. Specifically, he doesn’t seem to have a consistent story to tell about whether or not material bodies cause sensations in minds.
In the Meditations, Descartes appears to commit himself to the view that the ideas of material bodies are genuinely caused by those very bodies that stand outside of the mind. His distinction between innate and adventitious ideas appears to require such a view.
However, in the later Principles, there’s a key entry in the French edition that reads as follows: “...it seems to us that the idea we have of it forms itself in us on the occasion of bodies from without (Principles II.1).”
If we throw into the mix his real views on the radical innateness of ideas, then I think a picture emerges in which Descartes is probably best thought of as a semi-occasionalist with respect to body-mind causal relations.
For Descartes, all ideas are innate, not just the “big” ones like the idea of God, geometry, or the infinite. Even sensory ideas are innate, as he makes explicit in his Notes on a Certain Broadsheet. Here’s a quotation: “Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the shape are innate in us. The ideas of pain, colors, sounds, and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.”
I call this semi-occasionalism because strictly speaking God is not the direct cause of these sensations in a way that is isomorphic with the way in which God is the direct cause of motions in the case of body-body causation.
In this special case of body-mind causation, there is a kind of active principle (a dispositional structure or set of properties) in the soul that, under the right activation conditions, produces all the various ideas—sensory and otherwise. [Another philosophical aside: This is what distinguishes Descartes from being a recollectionist-nativist such as Plato.] The activation conditions are the occasions (of brain stimulation or whatnot) for the dispositional properties to manifest their characteristic expressions. The important things are (a) the relation between the external stimuli and the manifestations (i.e., the mind’s ideas) is non-causal and (b) the relation between the dispositions and the expressions is causal (but that sounds odd too... do dispositions “cause” their manifestations?).
It’s in this sense that it’s semi-occasionalism: God is only involved in an indirect sense in which he is the one who created and placed those dispositions in the soul in the first place, but then they take on a kind of causal independence of their own in their occasionalist brokering of representational relations between mind and world.
Friday, May 30, 2008
a plea for the obvious
This is a very brief plea for what should be obvious...
In the early modern period, there were very strange theories of causation that systematically attempted to link together the new mechanistic principles of explanation, theories of material substance, and theologically pious convictions about the nature of God’s governance over the created world.
None of these theories of causation were primarily intended to be solutions to a “mind-body problem.” Instead, these theories, as baroque as they appear (e.g., Descartes’ semi-occasionalism, Malebranche’s occasionalism, and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony), were part of a systematic attempt to unify phenomena under general, complementary laws. The “mind-body” cases were simply special instances of causal explananda.
To be sure, these cases were especially salient. However, to suggest that these cases motivated the bizarre (to our eyes) causal theories of the early moderns is to have the tail wag the dog.
In the early modern period, there were very strange theories of causation that systematically attempted to link together the new mechanistic principles of explanation, theories of material substance, and theologically pious convictions about the nature of God’s governance over the created world.
None of these theories of causation were primarily intended to be solutions to a “mind-body problem.” Instead, these theories, as baroque as they appear (e.g., Descartes’ semi-occasionalism, Malebranche’s occasionalism, and Leibniz’s pre-established harmony), were part of a systematic attempt to unify phenomena under general, complementary laws. The “mind-body” cases were simply special instances of causal explananda.
To be sure, these cases were especially salient. However, to suggest that these cases motivated the bizarre (to our eyes) causal theories of the early moderns is to have the tail wag the dog.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
is Boyle a mechanist?
In the famous passage in OFQ concerning the lock and key, Boyle says that when Tubal Cain had fashioned the first lock and key, both things “obtained a new capacity.” [“The Origin of Forms and Qualities,” 310.] What does Boyle mean by this? This question is a tricky affair. Any positive proposal goes far beyond what Boyle explicitly says. So, with the risks inherent in conjecture, perhaps he is highlighting two facets of the grand mistake of the Scholastic-Aristotelians.
The first facet of the grand mistake of the Scholastic-Aristotelians is to attribute to bodies a real quality for every conceivable alteration that the body can undergo. If a body obtains a new capacity, their error is to attribute that capacity to a real quality. This is especially true of sensible alterations, such as when a body turns from green to red. On the Scholastic-Aristotelian account, the body must be possessed of a green accident, lose that green accident, and acquire a red accident. Moreover, those accidents must be caused by accidental forms underlying them. In the case of a power of a key to open a lock, the power itself is a real accident constituent in the body itself. It is likely that Boyle’s understanding of what it means for a real quality to be in a body for a Scholastic-Aristotelian is that it is some physical constituent. Consider when he writes:
...and yet by these new Attributes there was not added any Real or Physical Entity, either to the Lock, or to the Key... [“The Origin of Forms and Qualities,” 310.]
A natural interpretation is that Boyle believes a Scholastic-Aristotelian analysis of the powers of the lock and key requires that the powers be supported by qualities in the lock and key, qualities that would be really present and distinct from the real and physical mechanical qualities (shape, size, texture, motion, etc.) of the lock and key. Boyle aims to reject both the explanatory vacuity and the causal ontology of the Scholastic-Aristotelian account of alteration.
To be sure, Scholastic-Aristotelians would raise vociferous objections that Boyle has misinterpreted the way that they take qualities to inhere in substances. Nevertheless, Boyle’s possible misunderstanding is an integral part of his critique of their “grand mistake.”
What Boyle may have in mind to replace Scholastic-Aristotelian explanations and their causal aetiology is an account which appreciates the following story. Consider four propositions and two laws of nature.
(1) In a world α there is a body B with mechanical affections M1.
(2) In α there is a body C with mechanical affections M2.
(L1) As a matter of law, when M1 of B interacts with M2 of C in α, an effect E is caused in C.
(1’) In a world β there is a body B with mechanical affections M1.
(2’) In β there is a body C with mechanical affections M2.
(L2) As a matter of law, when M1 of B interacts with M2 of C in β, an effect F is caused in C.
What explains E or F being caused in C by B in the two worlds? In each world, there is a law that interrelates the mechanical affections of the relevant bodies. Boyle is a voluntarist concerning laws of nature.
Nor will the force of all that has been said for God’s Special Providence, be eluded, by saying, with some Deists, that after the first formation of the Universe, all things are brought to pass by the Setled Laws of Nature. For tho’ this be confidently, and not without colour, pretended; yet, I confess, it does not satisfie me. For, beside the insuperable difficulty there is, to give an Account of the first formation of things, which many (especially Aristotelian) Deists will not ascribe to God; and besides that the Laws of Motion, without which the present State and Course of things could not be maintain’d, did not necessarily spring from the Nature of Matter, but depended upon the Will of the Divine Author of things: Besides this, I say, I look upon a Law, as a Moral, not a Physical, Cause, as being indeed but a Notional thing, according to which, an intelligent and free Agent is bound to regulate its Actions. [“Christian Virtuoso, chapter I,” in The Works of Robert Boyle, eds. M. Hunter and E. B. Davis, vol. 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 301-2.]
In another context where Boyle is talking about the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, he writes:
...it cannot be incredible that the most free and powerful Author of those laws of nature, according to which all the phenomena of qualities are regulated, may (as he thinks fit) introduce, establish or change them in any assigned portion of matter... [“Possibility of the Resurrection,” in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, second edition, ed. Thomas Birch, volume 4 (London: J. and F. Rivington, 1772), 201; quoted in Peter R. Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle, 175.]
Since the laws of nature bear no necessary relationship to M1 and M2 but only to the hypothetical necessity of the volitions of God, the laws do not primarily depend on the mechanical affections of bodies. Laws could secondarily depend on the mechanical affections if God forges a real connection to those mechanical affections vis-à-vis other mechanical affections that renders cause and effect relations rooted in those very mechanical affections—but still contingently. Alternately, God could simply set up brute correlations of the events, such that the causes and effects on account of the relations of the mechanical affections turn out really to be divinely instituted regularities.
On either account, laws of nature are contingent on the will of God. If laws of nature are simply “more-or-less” exceptionless regularities for Boyle, it is a mistake to look for some constituent or mechanism in body itself for the grounding of the laws. There is no grounding other than the perfect will of God. Bodies are related causally to other bodies by virtue of mechanical affections related by God’s will. Is this, however, a mechanistic explanation? This question requires a more specific context in order to be meaningful. A better question is whether this is an explanation that is better than a Scholastic-Aristotelian rival. For Boyle, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He writes in “Of the Systematicall or Cosmicall Qualities of Things,”
And to prevent mistakes I shall adde, that under the name of Catholick and unminded Causes or Agents, I comprehend not only divers invisible Portions of Matter, but also the Establisht Lawes of the Universe, or that which is commonly called the Ordinary Course of Nature. [“Of the Systematicall or Cosmicall Qualities of Things,” 289.]
E and F are explained by reference to properties that either belong to the fundamental level of bodily phenomena (the mechanical affections) or, at the very least, fail to be synonymous with E and F. These properties are connected by the will of God (laws of nature) in a causal relationship to E and F, where “causal” is given some regularity interpretation. While it is true that these properties, in and of themselves, have no essential connection to E and F, God’s willing that they have such a regular connection is no shabby form of necessity. On some understandings about the nature of God, voluntaristic necessity might even be stronger than ordinary nomological necessity. Certainly it would explain (though not in a purely mechanistic manner) why such a collection of properties would cause E rather than F. Is it more mechanistic than Scholastic-Aristotelianism? Insofar as the explanation does not cite a fictive entity that is, by Boyle’s lights, a mere synonym for the explanandum, and insofar as the explanans is not merely a reified concept, it sure is closer to the mechanistic ideal. Since the explanation draws from concepts at home in the “new sciences,” downplaying for rhetorical effect the real differences between the various strains of mechanism, it sure is closer to the mechanistic ideal. In those qualified ways, Boyle’s possible story counts as a mechanistic explanation.
The first facet of the grand mistake of the Scholastic-Aristotelians is to attribute to bodies a real quality for every conceivable alteration that the body can undergo. If a body obtains a new capacity, their error is to attribute that capacity to a real quality. This is especially true of sensible alterations, such as when a body turns from green to red. On the Scholastic-Aristotelian account, the body must be possessed of a green accident, lose that green accident, and acquire a red accident. Moreover, those accidents must be caused by accidental forms underlying them. In the case of a power of a key to open a lock, the power itself is a real accident constituent in the body itself. It is likely that Boyle’s understanding of what it means for a real quality to be in a body for a Scholastic-Aristotelian is that it is some physical constituent. Consider when he writes:
...and yet by these new Attributes there was not added any Real or Physical Entity, either to the Lock, or to the Key... [“The Origin of Forms and Qualities,” 310.]
A natural interpretation is that Boyle believes a Scholastic-Aristotelian analysis of the powers of the lock and key requires that the powers be supported by qualities in the lock and key, qualities that would be really present and distinct from the real and physical mechanical qualities (shape, size, texture, motion, etc.) of the lock and key. Boyle aims to reject both the explanatory vacuity and the causal ontology of the Scholastic-Aristotelian account of alteration.
To be sure, Scholastic-Aristotelians would raise vociferous objections that Boyle has misinterpreted the way that they take qualities to inhere in substances. Nevertheless, Boyle’s possible misunderstanding is an integral part of his critique of their “grand mistake.”
What Boyle may have in mind to replace Scholastic-Aristotelian explanations and their causal aetiology is an account which appreciates the following story. Consider four propositions and two laws of nature.
(1) In a world α there is a body B with mechanical affections M1.
(2) In α there is a body C with mechanical affections M2.
(L1) As a matter of law, when M1 of B interacts with M2 of C in α, an effect E is caused in C.
(1’) In a world β there is a body B with mechanical affections M1.
(2’) In β there is a body C with mechanical affections M2.
(L2) As a matter of law, when M1 of B interacts with M2 of C in β, an effect F is caused in C.
What explains E or F being caused in C by B in the two worlds? In each world, there is a law that interrelates the mechanical affections of the relevant bodies. Boyle is a voluntarist concerning laws of nature.
Nor will the force of all that has been said for God’s Special Providence, be eluded, by saying, with some Deists, that after the first formation of the Universe, all things are brought to pass by the Setled Laws of Nature. For tho’ this be confidently, and not without colour, pretended; yet, I confess, it does not satisfie me. For, beside the insuperable difficulty there is, to give an Account of the first formation of things, which many (especially Aristotelian) Deists will not ascribe to God; and besides that the Laws of Motion, without which the present State and Course of things could not be maintain’d, did not necessarily spring from the Nature of Matter, but depended upon the Will of the Divine Author of things: Besides this, I say, I look upon a Law, as a Moral, not a Physical, Cause, as being indeed but a Notional thing, according to which, an intelligent and free Agent is bound to regulate its Actions. [“Christian Virtuoso, chapter I,” in The Works of Robert Boyle, eds. M. Hunter and E. B. Davis, vol. 11 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 301-2.]
In another context where Boyle is talking about the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, he writes:
...it cannot be incredible that the most free and powerful Author of those laws of nature, according to which all the phenomena of qualities are regulated, may (as he thinks fit) introduce, establish or change them in any assigned portion of matter... [“Possibility of the Resurrection,” in The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, second edition, ed. Thomas Birch, volume 4 (London: J. and F. Rivington, 1772), 201; quoted in Peter R. Anstey, The Philosophy of Robert Boyle, 175.]
Since the laws of nature bear no necessary relationship to M1 and M2 but only to the hypothetical necessity of the volitions of God, the laws do not primarily depend on the mechanical affections of bodies. Laws could secondarily depend on the mechanical affections if God forges a real connection to those mechanical affections vis-à-vis other mechanical affections that renders cause and effect relations rooted in those very mechanical affections—but still contingently. Alternately, God could simply set up brute correlations of the events, such that the causes and effects on account of the relations of the mechanical affections turn out really to be divinely instituted regularities.
On either account, laws of nature are contingent on the will of God. If laws of nature are simply “more-or-less” exceptionless regularities for Boyle, it is a mistake to look for some constituent or mechanism in body itself for the grounding of the laws. There is no grounding other than the perfect will of God. Bodies are related causally to other bodies by virtue of mechanical affections related by God’s will. Is this, however, a mechanistic explanation? This question requires a more specific context in order to be meaningful. A better question is whether this is an explanation that is better than a Scholastic-Aristotelian rival. For Boyle, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He writes in “Of the Systematicall or Cosmicall Qualities of Things,”
And to prevent mistakes I shall adde, that under the name of Catholick and unminded Causes or Agents, I comprehend not only divers invisible Portions of Matter, but also the Establisht Lawes of the Universe, or that which is commonly called the Ordinary Course of Nature. [“Of the Systematicall or Cosmicall Qualities of Things,” 289.]
E and F are explained by reference to properties that either belong to the fundamental level of bodily phenomena (the mechanical affections) or, at the very least, fail to be synonymous with E and F. These properties are connected by the will of God (laws of nature) in a causal relationship to E and F, where “causal” is given some regularity interpretation. While it is true that these properties, in and of themselves, have no essential connection to E and F, God’s willing that they have such a regular connection is no shabby form of necessity. On some understandings about the nature of God, voluntaristic necessity might even be stronger than ordinary nomological necessity. Certainly it would explain (though not in a purely mechanistic manner) why such a collection of properties would cause E rather than F. Is it more mechanistic than Scholastic-Aristotelianism? Insofar as the explanation does not cite a fictive entity that is, by Boyle’s lights, a mere synonym for the explanandum, and insofar as the explanans is not merely a reified concept, it sure is closer to the mechanistic ideal. Since the explanation draws from concepts at home in the “new sciences,” downplaying for rhetorical effect the real differences between the various strains of mechanism, it sure is closer to the mechanistic ideal. In those qualified ways, Boyle’s possible story counts as a mechanistic explanation.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
MPS student conference
Eric Snider and I took a group of students to the Minnesota Philosophical Society Student Conference held this year in Saint Peter, MN (at Gustavus Adolphus College) where each presented a paper.
It was a fun trip for me partly because I was able to see parts of the state I've not yet experienced. I also had a good time getting to know everyone a little better. It was a fantastic group of people.
great shots of the drive
Some of the students
presenting on moral responsibility and free will
after a delicious vegetarian lunch
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