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Rationalism The Geometry of the Mind

Rationalism The Geometry of the Mind. Empiricism vs. Rationalism Basic differences between empiricism and rationalism Empiricists describe a somewhat

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Page 1: Rationalism The Geometry of the Mind. Empiricism vs. Rationalism Basic differences between empiricism and rationalism  Empiricists describe a somewhat

Rationalism

The Geometry of the Mind

Page 2: Rationalism The Geometry of the Mind. Empiricism vs. Rationalism Basic differences between empiricism and rationalism  Empiricists describe a somewhat

Empiricism vs. Rationalism

Basic differences between empiricism and rationalism Empiricists describe a somewhat passive mind which acts in mechanical

way Rationalists proposed an active mind that acts on information from the

senses and gives it meaning Empiricists proposed that experience, memory, associations, and

hedonism determine not only how a person thinks and acts but also his or her morality.

For rationalists, there are rational reasons some acts or thoughts are more desirable than others

Empiricists emphasize mechanical causes of behavior Rationalists emphasize reasons for behavior

Epistemological distinction: Innate ideas: cannot arise from experience and upon which, given

sufficient developmental maturity, will come to be known as certain Methodological distinction:

Relative roles of induction vs. deduction

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Chronological distinction

Plato’s nativism (truths are within our souls, such that through discovery, we ‘remember’ them) vs. Man as the measure of all things Aristotle’s ‘common-sense’ approach- senses

are accurate and reason can grasp the truth by means of sense information

In middle age Scholasticism we had the problem of universals If there are universals one is assuming some

‘extra-sensory’ knowledge Now, Empiricism vs. Rationalism

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Rene Descartes

1596-1650 Discourse on Method, Meditations Descartes sought to devise a

system of explanation of the universe that could not be questioned and developed by self-exploration and observation.

Method was to determine that which was certain and then deduce other certainties (deductive method) Like Bacon, the enemy for Descartes

was Renaissance skepticism, though is going about his battle in opposing fashion

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Rene Descartes

Method: Accept nothing as true but that which is so

clear no uncertainty regarding it remains Divide a problem into more simple elements Solve the smallest problems first and work

your way up Make sure that the conclusion is general

enough to have no exception

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Rene Descartes

Starting point: skepticism, distrust of the senses

How far can we go? Can we even doubt ourselves?

We cannot doubt ourselves, for that which doubts must exist; ideas must exist or doubt is impossible Cogito ergo sum

Reason provides undeniable proof to existence

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Rene Descartes

Through analysis of own thoughts he determined that some ideas are innate (natural components of the mind) Among innate ideas were unity, infinity, perfection,

axioms of geometry, and God. Was also a phenomenologist

Studied the nature of intact, conscious experience In addition to the validity of rational processes,

knowledge gained through the senses could be accepted because God, being perfect, would not and could not deceive us

Sensory information had to be analyzed rationally to determine its validity Opposite Bacon, we must first begin with reason before

conducting experiments Essentially the hypothetico-deductive method of today

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Rene Descartes

Descartes explained the behavior of animals including humans employing mechanical principles The nervous system was a set of hollow tubes

connecting the sense receptors with cavities in the brain (the ventricles)

The system contained animal spirits which flow through the nerves resulting in sensation and movement

By explaining both animal and human behavior in terms of mechanistic principles and reflexes he made comparative psychology legitimate

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Rene Descartes

For Descartes an important difference between animals and humans was that only humans have a mind which provided consciousness, free will, and rationality

The mind, however, was nonphysical and the body was physical Mind consists thought, which is that which compels us to act or is

that which is responsible for feeling The nonphysical mind and the physical body can influence

each other, thus, regarding the mind-body issue he was a dualist and an interactionist

Having no real way of showing how this could be, he determined that the mind/soul influenced the body at the pineal gland in the brain as it was not duplicated like all other brain structures We now know it to have its own hemispheres

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Rene Descartes

Among Descartes’ contributions to psychology are: 1. The mechanistic explanations of behavior and

many bodily functions which could be said to have led to stimulus-response explanations and behaviorism.

2. The focus on the brain as an important mediator of behavior.

3. His description of the mind-body relationship which provided others the opportunity to support or refute it.

4. His study of the bodies of animals as a means to understand the functioning of human bodies led to physiological and comparative psychology.

5. He paved the way for the scientific study of consciousness.

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Blaise Pascal

1623-1662 Pensees Although accomplishments more of the science and

mathematical nature, was also staunchly against the rationalism of Descartes "I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy he did his best to

dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him set the world in motion with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use for God."

“Experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics."

Pascal’s wager Believe in God just in case. What do you have to lose?

Note that although we might put Pascal as anti-Cartesianism, he was in general anti-reason, whether a priori (rationalism) or based on sense (empiricism) Sense argument as usual, but the a priori ‘truths’ assume others,

which assume other truths and so on, such that we can’t really get to the original truths

Tweener

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Spinoza

1632 – 1677 Descartes had clearly separated mind,

matter and God and Spinoza, while being placed in the rationalist camp, offers what would be a much different take on matters

For him he saw no experiential or rational reason for that distinction

The ‘new’ science must in some way take on God or remove him completely

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Spinoza

Proposed that God, nature, and mind were aspects of the same substance (inseparable). “Things which have nothing in common cannot be one the

cause of the other” If God is the author of all things, His presence must be in

all God was nature, to understand nature is to

understand God. Pantheism- God is present everywhere and in everything.

The mind-body issue was dealt with by assuming that the mind and body were two aspects of the same thing (double aspectism)

Upon death, one survives as the idea of their essence is retained in the mind of God

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Spinoza

As God is the cause of all things we do not have free will. Nature (God) is lawful, humans are part of nature, thus

thoughts and behavior are lawfully determined. “The mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause,

which has also been determined by another cause… and so on to infinity.”

Man’s idea of free will is due to ignorance regarding possible causes

Our “freedom” is realizing that everything that is must necessarily be and everything that happens must necessarily happen - because everything results from God. Stoic

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Spinoza

Categories of Spinoza’s psychology Passion

A feeling about which we have no idea attached (blind rage) Emotion

Shaped by a distinct idea (love for fellow man) Reason Intuition

Learning and memory Memory is enhanced or degraded based on the contextual

details of the material to be memorized Interference from learning similar material Memory is a brain process Every idea has a correlate in the real world

Distinguishes sensation from perception

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Spinoza

In terms of good and evil, they are ‘nothing else but the emotions of pleasure and pain’ Pleasure and pain as the mind’s recognition of

its strengths and weaknesses Ordinary folk go about seeking for pleasure

without the application of reason (a clear idea) The goal of human psychology is self-

actualization Driven to create pleasure in the mind and work toward

our essence, pain arising due to its denial

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Nicolas de Malebranche

1638 - 1715 "We must follow reason despite the caresses,

the threats and the insults of the body to which we are conjoined, despite the action of the objects that surround us....I exhort you to recognize the difference there is between knowing and feeling, between our clear ideas, and our sensations always obscure and confused."

God mediated mind – body interaction. When a person has a desire to move a part of

the body, God is aware of this and moves the body part (occasionalism).

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Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

1646 - 1716 Voted best hair in philosophy 1700-

1702 Specifically disagreed with Locke

and the notion of a tabula rasa Some thing has to have an experience

and be prepared in some way to have experiences of varying kinds

Empiricist thinking “Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.”

Leibniz “Nothing except the intellect itself.”

Was also not so keen on Descartes’ brand of dualism

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Leibniz

Ideas, being immaterial, cannot be caused by the senses Nonreductionist- ideas/perception cannot be reduced to

sensations Experience allows us to discover or take notice of ideas that

are in us Provides a context for thought

Regarding the mind-body issue, he proposed a psychophysical parallelism with a preestablished harmony Parallelism The mind and body appear to influence each other but they do

not, work in parallel Work in harmony established by God

There are perceptions (which are purely psychological events driven by reason) which are conscious and those which are below consciousness Reach a threshold and become conscious Note that this is not in any way a precursor to Freud’s

unconscious as there is no talk of motivation or psychopathology

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Leibniz

For Leibniz, the universe consisted of an infinite number of simple/irreducible/ dimensionless units called monads Can be seen as a ‘living atom’, active and

conscious Mind as monad

Monads differ in clarity of consciousness in a hierarchy In general the hierarchy goes from God, the

highest, to humans, followed by animals, plants, and nonliving matter

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Immanuel Kant

1724 – 1804 One of the most influential

philosophers of all time Critique of Pure Reason Had done much philosophical and

scientific work up until age 46 when realized that he hadn’t really addressed the argument of the senses vs. the intellect

Spent 10 years on the Critique in an attempt to solve the problem

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Immanuel Kant

Initial distinction Analytical statements

Predicate is contained within the subject, the proposition adds nothing to the subject

Cars are motorized vehicles Synthetic statements

Do add something Milk does a body good

The empiricists (Hume in particular) suggest analytical statements are Logically necessary (if true are necessarily so) Certain as opposed to probable A priori as opposed to experiential

Synthetic statements are Contingently, not necessarily, true Probable, never certain A posteriori

Kant was to suggest that some synthetic statements can be a priori truths

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Immanuel Kant

Kant agrees with the Empiricists as we have presented them (e.g. sense as starting point, judgments of experience are synthetical etc.), however wants to determine the limits of empiricism

Causality- how do we get to it? Recall Hume’s stance:

There is no necessity to an assessment of causation

Causality (including moral law derived from it) is a result of experience only, and we can never prove a causal relationship

Page 24: Rationalism The Geometry of the Mind. Empiricism vs. Rationalism Basic differences between empiricism and rationalism  Empiricists describe a somewhat

Immanuel Kant

Starting point ‘Experience is possible only through the

representation of a necessary connection of perceptions’

‘Everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule’

Recall that Hume suggested causality is derived from things like contiguity in space and time B always follows A

Kant asks, From whence time?

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Immanuel Kant

The argument: A. An object must exist in time to have any real existence

(following our second starting point, it follows something else in time necessarily)

B. We can distinguish an event from an enduring state of affairs in serial fashion, and such a change has a cause

C. Hume states that for a cause and effect relation to be determined, C & E must be contiguous in time (and space), and through repetition we can inductively conclude the relation.

However time is not given to our experience by the object itself, but rather permanence is understood a priori such that we can see it as existing in time

The reply: Unless there was some a priori category of understanding (time) how would we make the association in time to begin with? Hume’s stance (B&C) implies Kant’s (A), i.e. an a priori

understanding must be available in order to experience a causal event psychologically

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Immanuel Kant

Kant proposed that the mind must add something to sensory data before knowledge could be attained, that something was provided by a priori categories of thought Empirical knowledge, though granted, is not sufficient to explain

the attainment of all knowledge without reference to an a priori understanding

These categories contain the possibility of all experience in general

Concept of Quantity Concept of Quality

Unity

Plurality

Totality

Reality

Negation

Limitation

Concept of Relation Concept of Modality

Inherence & Subsistence

Cause and Effect

Community

Possibility-Impossibility

Existence-Nonexistence

Necessity-Contingency

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Immanuel Kant

Our mental experience is always structured by the categories of thought

Thus our phenomenological experience (subjective mental experience) is an interaction of sensations and the categories of thought

We can never know the true physical, objective reality (noumena), just appearances (phenomena) that are controlled by the categories of thought

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Immanuel Kant

A basis is now provided to move away from the ‘pleasure principle’ stance of the Empiricists Laws of experience are authored by those of reason

Not enough to judge good and evil based on feeling unless can explain how the feeling attaches to the act

The attachment assumes a rule, a rational principle which governs or should govern moral behavior

The Categorical Imperative: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action could

serve as a universal law

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Immanuel Kant

Such ideas had wide ranging influence on later psychologists The concepts of innate logical structure to language and

thought, a priori principles of perceptual organization etc. affect every branch save perhaps physio and strict behaviorism

However while giving us back mind (over the senses), he did to some extent stall the study of it Not too sure about a true science of the mind Provided the Psychological Uncertainty Principal

Merely observing the contents of mind alters it Furthermore, the a priori categories are not amenable to

empirical investigation by definition

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The Rationalist Legacy

Science would initially draw upon both rationalistic and empiricist tenets while not strictly adhering to either, though empiricism would in a sense win out

In fact, much of psychology implicitly assumes a materialistic stance

However we do see it’s resurgence in current developmental psychology and our understanding of language

Furthermore cognitive psychology as a whole explicitly assumes the Kantian contribution of having both bottom-up (sense-driven) and top-down affects on experience and understanding