Week 7 Mechanism and Linguistic Creativity Flashcards
Descartes’ model for science
Experience plays a crucial role. Methodology Based on models and mechanisms. Mechanism Avoidance of any recourse to the occult or mysterious (e.g.: the analogies used are clocks, fountains, ...).
God:
He is the first cause, the initial trigger.
He is the first cause, the initial trigger.
Theology vs. Physics:
Division of labour.
Genetic/Evolutionary Approach
To understand a phenomenon is to understand how it occurred in accordance with the simple and universal principles of Cartesian physics.
God’s creative power is nonetheless required to set up the initial system and triggers all their initial motions to the various parts of matter.
Automatic machines
The chief way to understand the bodily movement is the nervous system.
Bête-Machine
In the case of non-human animals the model of the machine is all we need to investigate and understand their observed movement and behaviour.
Animals and Feeling
Contrary to the received view, there is no evidence that Descartes holds the thesis that animals do not suffer (i.e. do not have feelings).
Seven Theses to be distinguished
- Animal are machines
- Animals are automata
- Animals do not think
- Animals have no language
- Animals have no self-consciousness
- Animals have no consciousness
- Animals are totally without feelings
Why not Homme-Machine?
Humans cannot be explained in purely mechanical terms because of linguistic creativity.
Linguistic competence is stimulus-free
This is one of the lessons of Cartesian linguistics.
Humans vs. Animals: Linguistic Creativity
Human beings (unlike animals) can think and express their thought in language because humans are endowed with a “rational soul”. But the soul is immaterial; it is not something which derives from the structure/function of our brain. It is implanted in each human being by God.
Turing Test
It should help to distinguish a thinking mechanism from a non thinking one.
Chinese room (Searle)
In two rooms a Chinese and a non-Chinese speaker answering questions coming from outside the room. The non-Chinese is capable, following instructions on where to go and what to take when such sign comes in, to give out the right papers/answers (she passes the Turing Test). Yet, she doesn’t understand Chinese.
Linguistic competence doesn’t reduce to mere syntactic manipulation.
First test.
The first is that they could never use words or put together signs as we do in order to declare our thought to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine that it utters words corresponding to bodily actions causing a change in its organs (e.g. if you touch it in one spot it asks what you want of it, if you touch in another it cries out that you are hurting it, and so on). But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do
Second test.
Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kind of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is for all practical purposes impossible for a machine to have enough different organs to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act. (Discourse of the Method; CSM 1: 139-40)
