Aula

1: O Mito de Descartes
Prof. Marcelino Pequeno, 2015-1

Referncia

Gilbert Ryle, The Official Doctrine. Section 1 of Chapter 1, Descartess Myth, in The
Concept of Mind. Routledge, 2009. First Edition 1949.

A Doutrina Oficial

Corpo e Mente: Mundos Distintos

1. Todo ser humano tem um corpo e uma mente, ou melhor, um corpo e

uma mente. Corpo e mente so intrinsecamente unidos, entretanto, aps a
morte do corpo, a mente pode continuar a existir e funcionar.

The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the
doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a
mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and a mind. His body
and his mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may
continue to exist and function.

2. O corpo extensional e est sujeito s leis da fsica (mecnica). O corpo
um objeto pblico que pode ser observado pelos outros seres humanos.

Bodies are physical and public.

3. Mentes no so extensionais, e suas operaes no esto sujeitas s leis

da fsica. As operaes da mente no so observveis por outros
observadores que no eu mesmo.

4. Mentes so indivisveis e indestrutveis. Corpos so infinitamente
divisveis. Mentes so livres (livre arbtrio), corpos so determinados
pelas leis da fsica.


But minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws.

The workings of one mind are not witnessable by other observers; its career is private. Only I
can take direct cognisance of the states and processes of my own mind.

5. Uma pessoa, portanto, vive uma vida dupla, por assim dizer. Uma consiste
no que acontece ao corpo, outra no que acontece com mente. A primeira
pblica, a segunda, privada. Eventos da primeira acontecem no mundo
fsico, da segunda, no mundo mental.

A person therefore lives through two collateral histories, one consisting of what happens in
and to his body, the other consisting of what happens in and to his mind. The first is public,
the second private. The events in the first history are events in the physical world, those in the
second are events in the mental world.

Acesso Privilegiado

6. Uma pessoa tem acesso imediato, e no mediado, aos estados e operaes
de sua prpria mente. Temos conhecimento direto e certo do que se passa
em nossas mentes. No podemos nos enganar sobre ns mesmos.

according to the official doctrine, of at least some of these episodes he has direct and
unchallengeable cognisance.

In consciousness, self-consciousness and introspection he is directly and authentically

apprised of the present states and operations of his mind.
He may have great or small uncertainties about concurrent and adjacent episodes in the
physical world, but he can have none about at least part of what is momentarily occupying his
mind.

Dois Mundos Separados: Interno e Externo

4. Uma pessoa, portanto, vive uma vida dupla, por assim dizer. Uma consiste
no que acontece ao corpo, outra no que acontece com mente. A primeira
pblica, a segunda, privada. Eventos da primeira acontecem no mundo
fsico, da segunda, no mundo mental.
7. Eventos que acontecem no mundo fsico so ditos serem externos.
Eventos mentais so ditos serem internos. Esta classificao apenas uma
metfora, uma vez que mentes, no senso espaciais, no podem
(espacialmente) estarem no interior de qualquer coisa, nem podem
(espacialmente) conter qualquer coisa.

A person therefore lives through two collateral histories, one consisting of what happens in
and to his body, the other consisting of what happens in and to his mind. The first is public,
the second private. The events in the first history are events in the physical world, those in the
second are events in the mental world.

It is customary to express this bifurcation of his two lives and of his two worlds by saying that
the things and events which belong to the physical world, including his own body, are external,
while the workings of his own mind are internal.

This antithesis of outer and inner is of course meant to be construed as a metaphor, since
minds, not being in space, could not be described as being spatially inside anything else, or as
having things going on spatially inside themselves.

Relao Corpo e Mente

8. Como a mente e o corpo podem influenciam-se mutuamente um

problema terico de difcil soluo. A influncia recproca facilmente
observvel, mas como isto se d, dados que so dois mundos separados?

Even when inner and outer are construed as metaphors, the problem how a persons mind
and body influence one another is notoriously charged with theoretical difficulties.

What the mind wills, the legs, arms and the tongue execute; what affects the ear and the eye
has something to do with what the mind perceives; grimaces and smiles betray the minds
moods and bodily castigations lead, it is hoped, to moral improvement.

But the actual transactions between the episodes of the private history and those of the public
history remain mysterious, since by definition they can belong to neither series.

They are theoretical shuttlecocks which are forever being bandied from the physiologist back
to the psychologist and from the psychologist back to the physiologist.

Dualismo: Dois tipos de existncia

9. Ontologia (existncia) dual. Existem substncias ou eventos fsicos e
substncias ou eventos mentais. O que fsico ocorre no tempo e espao;
o que mental ocorre no tempo, mas no no espao. O que fsico
composto de matria (ou uma funo da matria); o que mental
consiste de conscincia (ou uma funo da conscincia).

It is assumed that there are two different kinds of existence or status. What exists or happens
may have the status of physical existence, or it may have the status of mental existence.

It is a necessary feature of what has physical existence that it is in space and time; it is a
necessary feature of what has mental existence that it is in time but not in space. What has
physical existence is composed of matter, or else is a function of matter; what has mental
existence consists of consciousness, or else is a function of consciousness.
There is thus a polar opposition between mind and matter.

Mentes so isoladas

10. Objetos materiais existem no espao e se relacionam com outros objetos.

Eventos mentais so isolados dentro de cada pessoa e no se relacionam
com os de outra pessoa.

Material objects are situated in a common field, known as space, and what happens to one
body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in
other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as minds, and
there is, apart maybe from telepathy, no direct causal connection between what happens in one
mind and what happens in another. Only through the medium of the public physical world can
the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is its own place
and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see,
hear and jolt one anothers bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of
one anothers minds and inoperative upon them.

Conhecimento direto e certo de sua prpria mente

11. Uma pessoa tem conhecimento direto da melhor qualidade das operaes
de sua prpria mente. Somos conscientes e no temos dvida do que se
passa mentalmente conosco mesmos.

What sort of knowledge can be secured of the workings of a mind? On the one side, according
to the official theory, a person has direct knowledge of the best imaginable kind of the
workings of his own mind. Mental states and processes are (or are normally) conscious states
and processes, and the consciousness which irradiates them can engender no illusions and
leaves the door open for no doubts. A persons present thinkings, feelings and willings, his
perceivings, rememberings and imaginings are intrinsically phosphorescent; their existence
and their nature are inevitably betrayed to their owner. The inner life is a stream of
consciousness of such a sort that it would be absurd to suggest that the mind whose life is that
stream might be unaware of what is passing down it.

12. Esqueamos o insconsciente Freudiano por um instante.

True, the evidence adduced recently by Freud seems to show that there exist channels
tributary to this stream, which run hidden from their owner. People are actuated by impulses
the existence of which they vigorously disavow; some of their thoughts differ from the
thoughts which they acknowledge; and some of the actions which they think they will to
perform they do not really will. They are thoroughly gulled by some of their own hypocrisies
and they successfully ignore facts about their mental lives which on the official theory ought
to be patent to them. Holders of the official theory tend, however, to maintain that anyhow in
normal circumstances a person must be directly and authentically seized of the present state
and workings of his own mind.

Percepo Interna ou Introspeco

13. Alm de perceber o mundo externo, uma pessoa pode praticar sua
vontade, uma percepo interna ou introspeco para inspecionar o
contedo de sua mente.
Besides being currently supplied with these alleged immediate data of consciousness, a person
is also generally supposed to be able to exercise from time to time a special kind of perception,
namely inner perception, or introspection. He can take a (non-optical) look at what is
passing in his mind. Not only can he view and scrutinize a flower through his sense of sight
and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through his sense of hearing; he can also
reflectively or introspectively watch, without any bodily organ of sense, the current episodes
of his inner life. This self- observation is also commonly supposed to be immune from illusion,
confusion or doubt. A minds reports of its own affairs have a certainty superior to the best
that is possessed by its reports of matters in the physical world. Sense-perceptions can, but
consciousness and introspection cannot, be mistaken or confused.

Solipcismo

14. Uma pessoa no tem nenhuma evidncia racional para acreditar que
existem outras mentes alm de sua prpria. Solido absoluta o destino
inexorvel da alma. Somente nossos corpos podem se encontrar.
Entretanto, ningum, em s conscincia, um solipcista.

he has no good reason to believe that there do exist minds other than his own.

Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can
meet.

A Teoria official est obviamente errada. Mas aonde est o erro? Como critic-la?
E, principalmente, como consert-la?

Os ltimos 300 anos da Filosofia e Cincia da Mente se ocupam exatamente disso,
e ainda no se pode dizer, de que chegaram a uma formulao satisfatria de
uma alternativa para Descartes. Nosso curso sobre isso.

The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine

The dogma of the ghost in the machine.

It is entirely false.

It is a mistake in principle, a category mistake.

It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or
category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another.

A philosophers myth.

Category-mistake

The university example

A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of
colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific depart- ments and
administrative offices. He then asks But where is the University? I have seen
where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the
scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in
which reside and work the members of your University.

He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to
which the other institutions belong.

The university is not in the same category of the other Colleges.

The double life theory, Physical and mental, is a category-mistake.

The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine
derives from this argument.


Because, as is true, a persons thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be
described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology, therefore
they must be described in counterpart idioms.

As the human body is a complex organised unit, so the human mind must be
another complex organised unit, though one made of a different sort of stuff and
with a different sort of structure. Or, again, as the human body, like any other
parcel of matter, is a field of causes and effects, so the mind must be another field
of causes and effects, though not (Heaven be praised) mechanical causes and
effects.

Origin of the categorical mistake

When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to
provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space,
Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius
he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral
man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those
claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from
clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.

Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence
of mechanical processes, they must be construed as signifying the occurrence of
non-mechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements in space as
the effects of other movements in space, other laws must explain some of the
non-spatial workings of minds as the effects of other non-spatial workings of
minds.

The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as intelligent
and those which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their
causation; so, while some movements of human tongues and limbs are the effects
of mechanical causes, others must be the effects of non-mechanical causes, i.e.
some issue from movements of particles of matter, others from workings of the
mind.

The differences between the physical and the mental were thus represented as
differences inside the common framework of the categories of thing, stuff ,
attribute, state, process, change, cause and effect. Minds are things, but
different sorts of things from bodies; mental processes are causes and effects, but
different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements. And so on.
Somewhat as the foreigner expected the University to be an extra edifice, rather
like a college but also considerably different, so the repudiators of mechanism
represented minds as extra centres of causal processes, rather like machines but
also considerably different from them. Their theory was a para-mechanical
hypothesis.

That this assumption was at the heart of the doctrine is shown by the fact that
there was from the beginning felt to be a major theoretical difficulty in explaining
how minds can influence and be influenced by bodies. How can a mental process,
such as willing, cause spatial movements like the movements of the tongue? How
can a physical change in the optic nerve have among its effects a minds
perception of a flash of light? This notorious crux by itself shows the logical
mould into which Descartes pressed his theory of the mind. It was the self-same
mould into which he and Galileo set their mechanics. Still unwittingly adhering to
the grammar of mechanics, he tried to avert disaster by describing minds in what
was merely an obverse vocabulary. The workings of minds had to be described
by the mere negatives of the specific descriptions given to bodies; they are not in
space, they are not motions, they are not modifications of matter, they are not
accessible to public observation. Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just
bits of not-clockwork.

Minds are spectral machines

As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they
are themselves just spectral machines.

Though the human body is an engine, it it not quite an ordinary engine, since
some of its workings are governed by another engine inside itthis interior
governor-engine being one of a very special sort. It is invisible, inaudible and it
has no size or weight.

It cannot be taken to bits and the laws it obeys are not those known to ordinary
engineers. Nothing is known of how it governs the bodily engine.

Determinism: Free Will

A second major crux points the same moral. Since, according to the doctrine,
minds belong to the same category as bodies and since bodies are rigidly
governed by mechanical laws, it seemed to many theorists to follow that minds
must be similarly governed by rigid non-mechanical laws. The physical world is a
deterministic system, so the mental world must be a deterministic system.
Bodies cannot help the modifications that they undergo, so minds cannot help
pursuing the careers fixed for them. Responsibility, choice, merit and demerit are
therefore inapplicable concepts unless the compromise solution is adopted of
saying that the laws governing mental processes, unlike those governing physical
processes, have the congenial attribute of being only rather rigid. The problem of
the Freedom of the Will was the problem how to reconcile the hypothesis that
minds are to be described in terms drawn from the categories of mechanics with
the knowledge that higher-grade human conduct is not of a piece with the
behaviour of machines.