Cartesian rationalism and dualism

René Descartes (1596-1650, 1623) thought of the mind as an active, reasoning entity.

• Cartesian dualism: The body is an automaton, a machine. The mind stands apart from and operates independently of the body.

  The rational mind, an immaterial entity, controls, interacts with and reacts to a material entity like the body. How? One idea of Descartes': through an intermediary consisting of representations (ideas and symbol structures - maps that stand in place of real objects).

  Today's cognitive science has adopted a methodological - rather than the original metaphysical - Cartesian dualism. The environment has to be recreated as ``knowledge'' before a thinking entity can deal with it.

• Cartesian rationalism: Descartes further believed in a set of formal operations, or ``laws of thought'', which act on mental representations. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) contemporary of Descartes, added, ``All reasoning is but reckoning.'' The search for such a formal system was much later taken up by Frege, Russell, Whitehead and Boole.

  Descartes's rationalism was soon challenged by a group of British empiricist philosophers in the 17th and 18th C - John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753), David Hume (1711-1776).

Anticipating other dichotomies that appear in cognitive science debates:

• Rationalism vs Empiricism

• Dualism vs Materialism

• Realism vs Idealism (+ Constructivism, Instrumentalism ...)

• Structuralism vs Functionalism

• Reductionist/ (Mechanistic) vs Holistic

• Formalist (symbols are sufficient) vs Interpretative or hermeneutical (eg. Winograd)