Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation

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Perceiving the World Bence Nanay.

Homo Prospectus Martin E. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. The Impossible Mark Jago.

Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation - Raffaella De Rosa - Google Книги

The Innocent Eye Nico Orlandi. The Spiritual Automaton Eugene Marshall. Our Faithfulness to the Past Sue Campbell. The Sources of Intentionality Uriah Kriegel.

Mereology and Location Shieva Kleinschmidt. Being Realistic about Reasons T.

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The presentational content of intelligible ideas, on the other hand, is clear and distinct, in that it consists of geometric representations of material bodies that do exist in the world outside the mind. Thus, whenever one has a clear and distinct intelligible perception of a material body that exists outside the mind, one also has at the same time an obscure and confused sensible image of that body as hard, sweet, squeaky, odiferous, and colored.

Nothing like these sensible images actually exists in bodies. De Rosa says that the role of sensible imagery is to individuate and differentiate material bodies from one another, which would be difficult to do for geometric representations of similar bodies if all that were presented were their intelligible geometric properties. Sensory representation comes from the causal connection of our sense organs with external material bodies, and intelligible representation comes from the innate idea of matter in our minds. Thus, individual sensory ideas provide obscure descriptions of material bodies in the world external to our minds.

The build-up to this conclusion and the arguments De Rosa poses against other interpretations are beyond succinct abbreviation. The amount of intellectual interaction among these four scholars is intense and impressive. Although De Rosa meets and argues against at least a dozen opposing positions, this does not necessarily provide an argument for her own position, which needs independent confirmation.

In most cases, these passages are not easily reduced to a clear and coherent doctrine. This is certainly true of Descartes' diverse remarks on sensation. Anyone hoping to distill a unified doctrine from these remarks must first determine what he understood by sensus Latin for "sensation" -- though it can also mean "sense faculty".

First-level "sensation" is the purely corporeal action of the environment on the body's sense organs, culminating in certain processes or states in the brain; such "sensations" do not involve consciousness, and even non-rational animals have them. At the opposite extreme, third-level "sensations" include all habitual and commonly unnoticed judgments -- acts of pure intellect -- that are occasioned by the relevant sensory brain-state these include judgments concerning external bodies' size and distance occasioned by the brain-states that cause visual sensations.

But the only thoughts that we should attribute to the sense faculty, "should we wish to distinguish it accurately from the intellect" " nihil aliud ad sensum referendum, si accurate illum ab intellectu distinguere vellemus ", ibid.

2010.06.41

For Descartes, application of the term sensus to the processes, states, or acts of the first or third level -- e. For the rest of this review, the word 'sensation' will be taken to mean "second-level sensation," unless otherwise noted. It used to be assumed that Descartes considered sensations to intentionally represent nothing outside the mind few readers will require the reminder that in the philosophy of mind "intentional" and its cognates normally designate not volition, but the attribute of thoughts in virtue of which they have an object or content.

This is how he was read by early Cartesians such as Malebranche. I will call this "the received interpretation" "RI". According to RI, Descartes took sensations to be more or less reliable signals of certain conditions in the environment, but did not think that they themselves made these conditions present to or in the mind, and so did not count them as intentional representations or intentional misrepresentations of such conditions. For him, only concepts were intentional representations of this kind.

Over the past twenty years, RI has been challenged by several prominent commentators, for whom Descartes took sensations, as well as concepts, to be capable of intentionally representing or misrepresenting certain aspects of the external world. Raffaella De Rosa's Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation is at once a critique and an endorsement of this new, "anti-RI" line of interpretation.

At least a third of the book is an attack on the views of some of its best-known representatives, especially Margaret Wilson, Tad Schmaltz, and Alison Simmons the views of Martha Bolton, Andrew Pessin, and Paul Hoffman are also considered, but in less detail. Yet De Rosa agrees with them in rejecting RI. She sets forth a novel anti-RI interpretation, which she calls "descriptivist-causal" hereafter, "DCI" , designed to capture the strengths of earlier anti-RI readings while avoiding their defects.

Limitations of space prevent me from commenting on De Rosa's critique of competing anti-RI interpretations. This review is restricted to a summary and brief critique of DCI.

Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation

According to DCI, sensations of colors, sounds, etc. But sensory representation of these features does not consist in being normally caused or occasioned by those features, pace Wilson and Schmaltz ch. Instead, it consists in the sensation's containing innate concepts of extension and its modes. Since all such concepts are intentional representations of actual or possible extension or extension-modes, Cartesian sensations contain intentional representations of such items pp.

But for DCI Cartesian sensations misrepresent the nature of matter, by mingling the clear and distinct idea of extension with an obscure and confused qualitative content pp. More precisely, Cartesian sensations are ideas, and as such have "both a presentational and referential content" pp.

A Cartesian sensation's presentational content is two-fold, comprising a the presentational content of the sensation's constituent concepts and b the aforementioned phenomenal aspects.

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