Elisabeth of Bohemia 1, Descartes 0

I'm loving reading the 1643 correspondence between Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes! I'm embarrassed to confess that I hadn't read it before now; the standard Cottingham et al. edition presents only selections from Descartes' side. I'd seen quotes of Elisabeth, but not the whole exchange as it played out. Elisabeth's letters are gems. She has Descartes on the ropes, and she puts her concerns so plainly and sensibly (in Bennett's translation; I haven't attempted to read the antique French). You can practically feel Descartes squirming against her objections. I have a clear and distinct idea of Descartes ducking and dodging!

Here's my (somewhat cheeky) summary, with comments and evaluation at the end.

Elisabeth, May 6, 1643:

I'm so ignorant and you're so learned! Here's what I don't understand about your view: How can an immaterial soul, simply by thinking, possibly cause a bodily action?

Specifically,

it seems that how a thing moves depends solely on (i) how much it is pushed, (ii) the manner in which it is pushed, or (iii) the surface-texture and shape of the thing that pushes it. The first two of those require contact between the two things, and the third requires that the causally active thing be extended [i.e., occupy a region of space]. Your notion of the soul entirely excludes extension, and it appears to me that an immaterial thing can't possibly touch anything else.

Also, if, as you say, thinking is the essential property of human souls, what about unborn children and people who have fainted, who presumably have souls without thinking?

René, May 21, 1643:

Admittedly in my writings I talk much more about the fact that the soul thinks than about the question of how it is united with the body. This idea of the union of the soul and the body is basic and can be understood only through itself. It's so easy to get confused by using your imagination or trying to apply notions that aren't appropriate to the case!

For a comparison, however, think about how the weight of a rock moves it downwards. One might (mistakenly, I hope later to show) think of weight as a "real quality" about which we know nothing except that it has the power to move the body toward the centre of the earth. The soul's power to move the body is analogous.

Elisabeth, June 10, 1643:

Please forgive my stupidity! I wish I had the time to develop your level of expertise. But why should I be persuaded that an immaterial soul can move a material body by this analogy to weight? If we think in terms of the old idea of weight, why shouldn't we then conclude by your reasoning that things move downward due to the power of immaterial causes? I can't conceive of "what is immaterial" except negatively as "what is not material" and as what can't enter into causal relations with matter. I'd rather concede that the soul is material than that an immaterial thing could move a body.

René, May 28, 1643:

This matter of the soul's union with the body is a very dark affair when it comes from the intellect (whether alone or aided by the imagination). People who just use their senses, in the ordinary course of life, have no doubt that the soul moves the body. We shouldn't spend too much time in intellectual thinking. In fact,

I never spend more than a few hours a day in the thoughts involving the imagination, or more than a few hours a year on thoughts that involve the intellect alone. I give all the rest of my time to the relaxation of the senses and the repose of the mind.

The human mind can't clearly conceive the soul's distinctness from the body and its union with the body simultaneously. The comparison with weight was imperfect, but without philosophizing everyone knows that they have body and thought and that thought can move the body.

But since you remark that it is easier to attribute matter and extension to the soul than to credit it with the capacity to move and be moved by the body without having matter, please feel free to attribute this matter and extension to the soul -- because that's what it is to conceive it as united to the body.

Still, once you do this, you'll find that matter is not thought because the matter has a definite location, excluding other matter. But again, thinking too much about metaphysics is harmful.

Elisabeth, July 1, 1643:

I hope my letters aren't troubling you.

I find from your letter that the senses show me that the soul moves the body, but as for how it does so, the senses tell me nothing about that, any more than the intellect and imagination do. This leads me to think that the soul has properties that we don't know -- which might overturn your doctrine... that the soul is not extended.

As you have emphasized in your writings, all our errors come from our forming judgments about things we don't perceive well enough. Since we can't perceive how the soul moves the body, I am left with my initial doubt, that is, my thinking that perhaps after all the soul is extended.

There is no record of a reply by Descartes.

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Zing! Elisabeth shows up so much better than Descartes in this exchange. She immediately homes in on the historically most important (and continuing) objection to Cartesian substance dualism: the question of how, if at all, an immaterial soul and a material object could causally interact. She efficiently and elegantly formulates a version of the principle of "the causal closure of the physical", according to which material events can only be caused by other material events, connecting that idea both with Descartes' denial that the soul is extended in space and with the view, widely accepted by early modern philosophers before Newton, that physical causation requires direct physical contact (no "action at a distance"). Jaegwon Kim notes (2011, p. 49) that hers might be the first causal argument for a materialist view of the mind. To top it off, she poses an excellent objection (from fetuses and fainting spells) to the idea that thinking is essential to having a soul.

Descartes' reply by analogy to weight is weak. As Elisabeth notes, it doesn't really answer the question of how the process is supposed to work for souls. Descartes' own theory of weight (articulated the subsequent year in Principles of Philosophy, dedicated to Elisabeth) involves action by contact (light particles spinning off the rotating Earth shoot up, displacing heavier particles down: IV.20-24). At best, Descartes is saying that the false, old idea of weight didn't involve contact, so why not think souls can also have influence without contact? Elisabeth's reply implicitly suggests a dilemma: If downward motion is by contact, then weight is not an example of how causation without contact is possible. If downward motion is not by contact, then shouldn't we think (absurdly?) that things move down due to the action of immaterial souls? She also notes that "immaterial" just seems to be a negative idea, not something we can form a clear, positive conception of.

Elisabeth's response forces Descartes concede that we can't in fact think clearly and distinctly about these matters. This is a major concession, given the centrality of the standard of "clear and distinct" ideas to Descartes' philosophy. He comes off almost as a mysterian! He also seems to partly retract what is perhaps the most central idea in his dualist metaphysics -- that the soul does not have extension. Elisabeth should feel free to attribute matter and extension to the soul, after all! Indeed, in saying that attributing matter and extension is "what it is to conceive [the soul] as united to the body", Descartes seriously muddies the interpretation of his positive view about the nature of souls.

It's also worth noting that Descartes entirely ignores Elisabeth's excellent fetus and fainting question.

I had previously been familiar with Descartes' famous quote that he spends no more than a few hours a year on thoughts involving the intellect alone; but reading the full exchange provides interesting context. His aim in saying that is to convince Elisabeth not to put too much energy into objecting to his account of how the soul works.

Understandably, Elisabeth is dissatisfied. She even gestures (though not in so many words) toward Descartes' methodological self-contradiction: Descartes famously says that philosophizing requires that we have clear ideas and that our errors all arise from failure to do so -- yet here he is, saying that there's an issue at the core of his metaphysics about which it's not possible to think clearly! Shouldn't he admit, then, that on this very point he's liable to be mistaken?

If Descartes attempted a further reply, the reply is lost. Their later correspondence treats other issues.

The whole correspondence is just 15 pages, so I'd encourage you to read it yourself. This summary necessarily omits interesting detail and nuance. In this exchange, Elisabeth is by far the better philosopher.

[image source]

Can a Rat Walk Down "Memory" Lane?

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

In my first post I introduced the issue of rising public anger at science due to the apparently cavalier way in which empirical results affecting issues the folk hold dear -- silly things like human nature and the nature of the universe -- are being disseminated. I'd like to provide examples of the forms this miscommunication can take, which due to my philosophical interests focus on neuroscience (although the Krauss-Albert tussle over the term "nothing" is clearly germane).

Sometimes miscommunication is one-off. While researching the paper described below, I came across a 1956 Scientific American article in which the scientist, reporting his results to the public, credits B.F. Skinner with refining the methods for measuring pleasurable and painful feelings (Olds 1956). I thought this was hilarious (Skinner?!) until I tried to come up with a good explanation for why he would describe Dr. Radical Behaviorist this way, let alone in a news outlet where the audience is not casual and space is not at such a premium. I couldn't, or at least not in a way in which the scientist came out looking good. (Note: this criticism has nothing to do with the brilliance of the research.) Again, while searching for a related cognitive neuroscience article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Comparative Neurology, I was taken aback to find it in a special issue entitled "The Anatomy of the Soul". Were they serious? Were they joking? Which answer is less bad?

But a systematic source of foreseeable public confusion stems from the use of folk psychological terms to report neuroscience results in professional contexts. Such terms are coopted into neuroscience discourse to report results and translational implications and recycled back into public discourse via the popular science press without mention of possible shifts in meaning. In this paper I compared uses of some terms ("reward", "fear", and "memory") in bibliographically linked studies and found that it is at least an open question whether syntactically identical terms taken from the folk mean what they ordinarily mean, or even whether they remain semantically identical across studies and over time. Unless the public is clearly warned not to assume these words mean what they ordinarily do, miscommunication is pretty much guaranteed.

Here's one example. In a 1954 study of brain areas associated with "reward" with rats, "reward" is behaviorally defined as a stimulus associated with increased frequency of response, and electrical stimulation in certain brain areas is "rewarding in the sense that the experimental animal will stimulate itself in these places frequently and regularly for long periods of time if permitted to do so.” (Olds & Milner 1954) By the time of a related 2005 fMRI study on romantic love, human subjects who self-report being madly in love are scanned while passively viewing photographs of their loved ones. The reported result is that areas of the brain associated in earlier studies (including the 1954 rat study) with motivation to acquire a "reward" are among those associated with being in love. But is love "rewarding" the way electrical stimulation of the brain is "rewarding"? Is a photograph passively viewed by a lover a "reward" the way an electrical brain stimulus self-administered with increasing frequency a "reward"? There's certainly self-stimulation to photographs in the vicinity, but my guess is that this sort of "reward" and "rewarding" feeling isn't what subjects felt in the experiment. So while I don't doubt the septum and caudate nucleus are part of a "reward and motivation" system, I'm not at all sure what "reward and motivation" means that would cover all these cases. Of course, the public has no way of figuring out (and should not be expected to) that "reward" and cognates have undergone shifts in meaning since such terms were seized from the public sphere.

Poor, Unloved Auguste Comte

... still, almost two centuries later, has no scholarly-quality English translation of his (1830-1842) magnum opus, Cours de Philosophie Positive.  This is, I think, rather a scandal for such an important philosopher.

(How important? Well, Dean Simonton's mid-20th-century measure of the historical importance of thousands of philosophers, according to textbook pages dedicated to them and similar measures, ranks him as the 17th most important philosopher in history, between Rousseau and Augustine -- though I'd guess that Anglophone philosophers in 2010 wouldn't rank him quite so high.)

The standard translation of Cours de Philosophie Positive is The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, "freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau" in 1896. Wait, what?!  Freely translated and condensed? What is this, the friggin' Reader's Digest version? You're not planning to quote from it, I hope.

Probably Comte's most famous contribution to philosophy of psychology is his brief argument against the possibility of a science of introspection. Here is Martineau's translation of the passage in which Comte lays out his argument:

In the same manner, the mind may observe all phenomena but its own.  It may be said that a man's intellect may observe his passions, the seat of the reason being somewhat apart from that of the emotions in the brain; but there can be nothing like scientific observation of the passions, except from without, as the stir of the emotions disturbs the observing faculties more or less. It is yet more out of the question to make intellectual observation of intellectual processes. In order to observe, your intellect must pause from activity; yet it is this very activity that you want to observe. If you cannot effect the pause, you cannot observe: if you do effect it, there is nothing to observe (vol. 1, p. 12).

I won't inflict the original French upon you (it is available in Google books here, if you're interested), but for comparison here is William James's translation in his Principles of Psychology:

It is in fact evident that by an invincible necessity, the human mind can observe directly all phenomena except its own proper states.  For by whom shall the observation be made? It is conceivable that a man might observe himself with respect to the passions that animate him, for the anatomical organs of passion are distinct from those whose function is observation. Though we have all made such observations on ourselves, they can never have much scientific value, and the best mode of knowing the passions will always be that of observing them from without; for every strong state of passion... is necessarily incompatible with the state of observation. But as for observing in the same way intellectual phenomena at the time of their actual presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons while other other observes him reason.  The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could observation take place? This pretended psychological method is then radically null and void. On the one hand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from every external sensation, especially every intellectual work, -- for if you were to busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what would become of internal observation? -- on the other hand, after having with the utmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, you must begin to contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when nothing there takes place!  Our descendants will doubtless see such pretensions some day ridiculed upon the stage (1980/1981, p. 187-188).

(The ellipses above mark one phrase James omits: "c'est-à-dire précisément celui qu'il serait le plus essential d'examiner" which, in my imperfect French I would translate as "that is to say, precisely that which it would be the most essential to examine". It is perhaps also worth remarking that no emphasis on "passions" or "intellectual" appears in my edition of Comte, though "intérieure" is italicized.)

Not only does the Martineau translation lose the detail and the color of the original, it is philosophically and psychologically sloppy. For example, Comte makes no reference to the "brain" or the "seat of reason"; instead -- as James indicates -- he talks about "the organs... whose function is observation" ("les organes... destinés aux fonctions observatrices"). And what is this that Martineau says about "the stir of the emotions disturbs the observing faculties more or less"? There is no trace of this clause in the original text. Martineau has inserted into Comte's text an observation that she evidently thinks he should have made.

We should no longer cite Martineau's translation as though it were of scholarly quality. There is no scholarly translation of Comte's most important work.

Wundt on Self-Observation and Inner Perception

Wilhelm Wundt was a founding father of laboratory psychology and a grand visionary of psychology as a discipline -- of how it fit among the sciences, of the structure of its object (the mind), of its methods, most centrally introspection -- and also an author so vastly prolific that most of his work remains untranslated despite his importance. Among those untranslated works is his essay "Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung" [Self-Observation and Inner Perception"] (1888), with which I've been struggling. The essay is key to Wundt's view of "introspection" -- the usual English translation of the German Selbstbeobachtung -- since here he contrasts it with the seemingly related process of "inner perception". And unfortunately, the secondary sources are all over the map on this. I can find no good treatments.

To understand Wundt's distinction, it helps to know two bits of historical context. One is August Comte's influential criticism of the introspective method of psychology:

But as for observing in the same way intellectual phenomena at the time of their actual presence, that is a manifest impossibility. The thinker cannot divide himself into two, of whom one reasons whilst the other observes him reason. The organ observed and the organ observing being, in this case, identical, how could observation take place? The pretended method is then radically null and void (1830, using James's translation of 1890/1981, p. 188).

The other is Franz Brentano's (1874/1973) distinction between "inner observation" [innere Beobachtung] and "inner perception" [innere Wahrnehmung]. Brentano asserts that inner observation involves attending to conscious psychological processes as they transpire. This, he says with Comte, is impossible, or at least fails as a psychological method, because the act of attending to the process inevitably destroys or at least objectionably alters the target process. In "inner perception", in contrast, psychological processes are noticed while one's attention is dedicated to something else. They are noticed only "incidentally" [nebenbei], and thus undisturbed.

Wundt agrees with Brentano and Comte that observation necessarily involves attention and so normally interferes with the process to be observed, if that process is an inner, psychological one. Contra Brentano however, Wundt does not envision scientific knowledge of mental processes arising without attention of some sort, including planful and controlled variation -- attentive planned exploration, if not of the process as it occurs, then at least to a reproduction of that process as a "memory image" [Erinnerungsbild]. No science by sideways glances for Wundt. The psychological method of "inner perception" is, for Wundt, the method of holding and attentively manipulating a memory image of a psychological process. This method, he thinks, has two crucial shortcomings: First, one can only work with what one remembers of the process in question -- the manipulation of a memory-image cannot discover new elements. And second, new elements may be unintentionally introduced through association -- one might confuse one's memory of a process with one's memory of another associated process or object.

Therefore, Wundt suggests, the science of psychology must depend upon the attentive observation of mental processes as they occur. He argues that those who think attention necessarily distorts the target mental process are too pessimistic. A subclass of mental processes is relatively undisturbed by attentive observation -- specifically the basic mental processes, especially of perception. The experience of seeing red is more or less the same, Wundt suggests, whether or not one is aware of the psychological fact that one is experiencing redness. Wundt also thinks the basic processes of memory, emotion, and volition are largely undisturbed by introspective attention. These alone, he thinks, can be studied by introspective psychology. More complicated processes, in contrast, must be studied non-introspectively -- through the obsevation of language, history, culture, and human and animal development, for example.

Wundt's students tended to disregard his admonition to restrict introspective observation to such basic processes. E.B. Titchener, for example, held that practiced introspectors could observe even their "higher" cognitive processes without disturbing them. Arguably, the eventual fall of introspective psychology in favor of behaviorism (focusing only on outward stimuli and behavioral response, nothing "inner" at all) was hastened by the ambitious attempts of Wundt's students to extend introspective method to such higher cognitive processes, about which methodological and substantive disputes proved intractable.

On "Steep" Learning Curves (Or: Hackling at Tilted Petards)

Okay, time to tilt against the windmills -- actually just one small, stupid windmill. But it's a windmill that particularly raises my hackles because it brings together my distaste for ignorant distortions of stock phrases with my interest in the history of psychology.

(You can bet that I double-checked the OED, after saying this, to confirm my use of "tilting" at windmills and raising "hackles". I don't want to be hoisted by my own petard. [Yep, double-checked that too.] Shouldn't we know what we are saying? -- what tilting and hackles and petards are?)

Here's a picture of a typical learning curve (from Stroop 1935):

(This curve charts the increasing speed with which subjects can name the colors of words on a list of color words printed in colors different from those named by the word [e.g., saying "blue" when seeing the word "red" printed in blue ink]. But the particular nature of the task is irrelevant to my point.)

Now consider this: If the curve were steeper, would that mean subjects were learning more quickly -- i.e., that the task was easier to learn -- or would it mean that the subjects were learning less quickly and the task was harder?

Next time you hear someone talk about a "steep learning curve" to mean the opposite of its proper meaning, tell her you're going to hackle her tilted petard!