Abstract
One cannot discuss contemporary philosophy of mind without the ghost of Descartes skulking around in the shadows. And one cannot understand Descartes without understanding his famous cogito insight, put forward for the first time publicly 350 years ago.1 Twenty-five years ago I showed what the nerve of the Cartesian insight is2. Descartes is not inferring sum from cogito, but demonstrating to himself his own existence by performing an act of thinking. The expression cogito does not mark a premise from which sum is inferred, but a thought-art which reveals (as long as it goes on) to Descartes the entity that he is. Descartes’s little skit is analogous to someone’s, say Mark Twain’s, proving his existence to a skeptic by confronting the doubter and confirming his existence to him by saying: “I exist.” Of course any other thought-act (in Descartes’s case) or language act (in Mark Twain’s case) would have done the trick equally well. This opens the door to Descartes’s dramatic gambit of attempting to doubt, nay, to deny, everything. When he then tries to deny to himself his own existence, by so doing he on the contrary proves that he exists. In Mark Twain’s case an analogous purpose is served by the language act of declaring the rumors of his demise to be exaggerated.
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Notes
René Descartes: 1637,Discours de la méthode, Ian Maire, Leiden. This paper was originally presented as my contribution to the 1987 meeting of IIP on Descartes and the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind.
Jaakko Hintikka: 1962, ‘Cogito ergo sum: Inference or Performance?’, Philosophical Review 72, 3–32.
This immediately explains the curious temporality of Descartes’s insight. “... I had only to cease to think for an instant of time, and I should then (even although all the other things I had imagined still remained true) have no ground for believing that I can have existed in that instant. (Discours, Part IV).
For instance, the well-known criticism by Fred Feldman: 1973 (see his paper ‘On the Performatory Interpretation of the cogito’, Philosophical Review 83, 345–363) is predicated on the mistaken idea that I am trying to explain the nature of Descartes’s thesis simply by acknowledging its character as an existentially self-verifying sentence, almost as if I were trying to present a syllogism with existentially self-verifying as a middle term. This is a radical distortion of what I did in the original paper. A great deal of further argument is needed to show why and when an existentially inconsistent sentence is absurd to utter.
See L. Chr. Lichtenberg and Fr. Kries (eds.): 1800–1803, Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs Vermischte Schriften, 1–5, Göttingen, especially 2, p. 96.
Italo Calvino: 1977, The Nonexisting Knight & The Cloven Viscount, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, especially pp. 3–7.
If it is possible for someone to say, “I don’t exist”, without thereby falsifying what he is saying, how can Descartes’s thought that he doesn’t exist be self-refuting? Yet everything depends here on the precise sense of “exist”.
See Jaakko Hintikka, 1969: Models for Modalities, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, chapter ‘On the Logic of Perception’
The Intentions of Intentionality, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1975, chapters 34
‘Knowledge by Acquaintance — Individuation by Acquaintance’, in D. Pears, editor, Bertrand Russell: Critical Essays, Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., 1972, pp. 52–79.
In ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance — Identification by Acquaintance’ (note 8 above) I argued that perspectivally identified entities were roughly speaking those we are acquainted with in Bertrand Russell’s sense. For Russell, see his (1981) ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description’, in Mysticism and Logic, Longmans, London, 1918, pp. 209–232.
See Saul Kripke: 1980, Naming and Necessity, Harvard University Press. Kripke characterizes his “rigid designators” by saying that each of them necessarily refers to the same individual in every possible world in which this individual exists. But this does not tell us anything whatsoever before we know what counts (in our conceptual system) as being the same individual in different worlds.
See Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic, op. cit., p. 224.
Even though it is a fundamental mistake to think that Wittgenstein in any sense denied the reality of knowability of private experiences, he certainly would not have countenanced private criteria of identification. Cf. here Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka: 1986, Investigating Wittgenstein, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, ch. 10, especially sec. 4.
No wonder Descartes moved (in(the second meditation) immediately from his cogito insight to the thesis sum res cogitans.
See here also the works mentioned in note 8 above plus Jaakko Hintikka: 1976, The Semantics of Questions and the Questions of Semantics (Acta Philosophica Fennica, 28, no. 4), The Philosophical Society of Finland, Helsinki.
In the past, philosophers occasionally quarrelled about whether the subject must have recognized b in order for it to be true to say that she or he has seen b. Cf., e.g., CD. Broad, G J. Warnock and F.N. A. Vesey in Robert J. Swartz (ed.): 1965, Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, pp. 29–83. The controversies were futile, however. All we have is a distinction between two different senses of the English direct-object construction “a sees b”.
See note 10 above.
See here The Semantics of Questions and the Questions of Semantics (note 16 above).
Forthcoming in Synthese Library, Kluwer, Dordrecht. My references are to a draft version of the book. See also John H.R. Maunsell, ‘Physiological Evidence for Two Visual Subsystems’, in Lucia Vaina (ed.): 1987, Matters of Intelligence, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, pp. 59–87.
David Marr’s work is summarised in his book (1982) Vision, Freeman San Francisco. See also David Marr and H.K. Nishihara: 1978, ‘Representation and Recognition of the Spatial Organization of Three-Dimensional Shapes’, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, vol. 200 (1978), pp. 269–294.
Op. cit., p. 9.
Op. cit., p. 11.
Op. cit., p. 15.
Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein: 1953, Philosophical Investigations, Basil Black-well, Oxford, I, sees. 48–49
1958, The Blue and Brown Books, Basil Black-well, Oxford, e.g., pp. 3, 13–14, 86–87, etc.
1977, Remarks on Colour, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, especially I, sec. 59
Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka Investigating Wittgenstein, op. cit., especially ch. 11, secs. 10–14.
Op. cit., p. 14.
Op. cit., p. 14.
See W.V. Quine: 1976, ‘Worlds Away’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 73, pp. 859–863
and cf. Jaakko Hintikka, ‘Quine on Who’s Who’, in Lewis E. Hahn and RA. Schupp (eds.), The Philosophy of W.V. Quine (Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 18), Open Court, LaSalle, Illinois, pp. 209–226.
Vaina, op. cit., p. 16.
Op. cit., p. 17.
Op. cit., pp. 19–20.
Op. cit., p. 18.
Op. cit., p. 18.
Endel Tulving: 1983, Elements of Episodic Memory, Clarendon Press, Oxford, with further references to the literature. The connection between Tulving’s distinction and mine was first pointed out to me by Barry Loewer (personal communication).
Op. cit., pp. 17,41,58.
Op. cit., pp. 25,35.
Cf., e.g., op. cit. p. 49: “... semantic memory develops before episodic memory. Kinsbourne and Wood (1975), for instance have pointed out that people learn ‘word meanings and such semantic information before there is any evidence of episodic remembering’...”. Tulving is not unaware of the pitfalls of the term “semantic”, however; cf. op. cit., pp. 28–29.
In chapter 5, e.g., on pp. 79–83 of op. cit. Tulving describes experiments in which the episodic vs. semantical distinction was tested by testing inter alia subjects’ memory for the meaning of words. This is not at all a representative situation. It would have been better to test the contrast by means of, e.g., comparisons between memories of events involving known and unknown people. In fact, Tulving does rely on the mirror image of such a situation, which is exemplified by the Warrington-Weiskrantz effect. (Op. cit., pp. 30–31, 94–95, 115–116.)
Cf., e.g., Stephen Stich: 1983, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, The MIT Press.
Cf. David Marr and H.K. Nishihara, 1978: ‘Visual Information Processing: Artificial Intelligence and the Sensorium of Sight’, Technology Review 8, pp. 2–22, and the works mentioned in note 21 above.
Cf., e.g., Joseph Y. Halpern (ed.): 1986, Reasoning About Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Los Altos, CA.
The distinction is a well-entrenched part of the folklore of AI. For an early formulation, see R. Paul, G. Falk and J.A. Feldman: 1969, ‘The Computer Representation of Simply Described Scenes’, Reports of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Project AIM-107, Computer Science Department, Stanford University.
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Hintikka, J., Hintikka, M.B. (1989). The Cartesian Cogito, Epistemic Logic and Neuroscience: Some Surprising Interrelations. In: The Logic of Epistemology and the Epistemology of Logic. Synthese Library, vol 200. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2647-9_8
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