The seventeenth century is described by historians as a time when the ideas of Galileo, Newton, Bacon, and other geniuses of science were shaping a new view of nature and the world. The mixtures of science with magic done by Nostradamus and Paracelus were losing followers.

Rene Descartes was schooled in mathematics, philosophy, and logic. He was struck with the certainty of mathematics as opposed to the doubts created in philosophy. His main concern was intellectual certainty and how to achieve it. While he admired poetry and theology, he said they did not provide methods for disovering truths. Nor, in his opinion, did the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and previous authors of scholarly works.

Like Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes ridiculed the writings of the ancients, and saw no need to cite Aristotle. Descartes also rejected the work of the Schoolmen and Scholastics. Descartes was a mathematician and philosopher who invented coordinate geometry. From his proofs that any curve in space can be converted into algebraic terms (and vice versa), he deduced that anything in nature can be reduced to mathematical form.

In Discourse on Method in 1637, Descartes argued that the best way to discover truth is to employ systematic doubt. You do this by trying to doubt everything that can be doubted, sweeping away past ideas and observing what is left that cannot be doubted. Thus, he said that he existed due to the fact that he could not doubt his own existence as a thinking and feeling being (cogito ergo sum; Je pense, donc je suis).

By this kind of systematic doubting, Descartes also deduced the existence of God. He achieved a set of assumptions producing what is known today as dualism. It says that God created two kinds of realities -- one that is thinking substance such as mind, spirit and consciousness, and the other which is extended substance such as objective phenomena outside of the thinking substance. Here we can see the clear emergence of the bifuraction in philosophy of subjectivity and objectivity.

I personally like the idea of systematic doubting, but do not accept the claim that this necessarily leads to what Descartes called a "great renewal." Its value, however, may be in its ability to produce a healthy skepticism of things that are taken for granted without sufficient proof. It also sounds like what Chomsky and other rationalists refer to as "thought experiments." Such mental exercises can use logic rather than data to produce new thoughts or realizations. Of course, one must still question any finality to such processes.

Dualism led people to believe that certain aspects of human experiences such as sensory perceptions and emotions, are somewhat less than explainable and perhaps less than real, while what is outside of the mind is sure, quantifiable, and subject to equations.

Descartes argued two distinct substances in nature -- thought and extension, spiritual vs. corporeal. Each is an "existent thing" and therefore requires only itself to exist, in his view. Thus, data about the body says nothing about the mind and data about the mind says nothing about the body from a Cartesian viewpoint.

According to Descartes, the biological aspects of humans are explained by mechanical and mathematical laws governing everything else in material existence. Accordingly, he reasoned that animals (other than humans) are only automata, incapable of thinking despite how humans thought animals had thoughts and emotions. He argued that human actions are not directed by the mind and that only some body movements are affected by the human soul. Through "vital spirits" he argued, the soul (in the pineal gland) interacts with the body.

Scholastics had argued that mind is form and body is matter and that neither mind nor body could exist without each other. Descartes rejected the Scholastics' reasoning. A Cartesian scholar who developed a theory called occasionalism or parallelism tried to save Descartes from his inconsistency in how separate mind and body are. Arnold Geulinex thus argued that at times the mind can direct the body as when one wills to lift their arm or move their hand.

THE PROBLEM WITH DESCARTES' DUALISM IN GENERAL:

Three distinguished scholars pinpoint the problems with dualism in general. These are Bertrand Russell, the philosopher; Antonio Damasio, a neurologist; and Stephen Rose, a neurobiologist.

Bertrand Russell praises Descartes, as everyone should, for being a major contributor to philosophy and mathematics. Whether correct or not, Russell notes that Descartes was amazingly self-confident in producing what he calls a "philosophic edifice de novo." Russell notes that Descartes viewed the bodies of humans and animals as machines with animals being totally governed by laws of physics. Humans, to Descartes, are affected by the interaction of soul and body made possible only by the linkage of soul to "vital spirits." Essentially, he saw a spurious relationship between mind and body, such that nothing in one causes anything in the other as a rule, yet the covariation of both can be attributed to a third factor, namely God.

Russell notes that Descartes' ideas about physics were replaced by Newtonian principles which would bring into science the concepts of gravity, atoms, vacuum, and elliptical orbits of planets.

According to Russell, Descartes' dualism brought to completion the dualism of Plato. He discusses the strong determinism that is part of dualism. Unlike the arguments made by Aristotle, dualists would declare that living organisms are moved by laws of physics, not by entelechy. Because mental events are simply parallel to the physical events of the body, they are therefore as equally determinate.

Neurobiologist Stephen Rose criticizes what he calls the "Cartesian Rupture." He says that the conceptual split of mind and body articulated by Descartes has clouded scientific and philosophical thought for three centuries. According to Rose, Descartes "debiologized" humans and replaced biological interactions with physics laws. Rose sees a newer version in dualism in discussions which separate mind from brain. Rose argues that neuroscientists assume that the workings of the mind can be studies scientifically as such, but also in terms of properties and structures of the human brain.

Rose also expresses the problematic split between subjective and objective. He argues that what we think and feel is related to both subjective processes in the mind and objective processes in the brain. He sees subjectivity and objectivity as two languages describing the same phenomena.

Antonio Damasio signifies the splits made by Descartes as "Descartes' Error." Damasio argues that the separation of res cogitans (thinking thing) from res extensa (extension) is clearly false. Descartes' Error is the separation of what is not truly separate -- the operations of our minds and the biological operations of our bodies. Damasio argues that the disembodied mind notion has led to fallacies such as the brain as computer metaphor, as well as assumptions about mental activities and structures that need no reference to neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry. Like Rose, Damasio knows that brain and mind and environmental events all influence each other. Damasio even says that Descartes' Error hurt the evolution of medicine since Hippocrates and other Greeks believed that mind influenced body and Descartes boldly rejected the notion.

COMMUNICATION SCIENCE AND DUALISM:

So what does Descartes' Error have to do with human communication? I believe it is the root of much confused thinking about where research and theory foci should be found. For example, it has been debated whether or not communication scientists should study cognition. It is debated whether communication theory should describe only overt behaviors without reference to mental processes or structures. From what I have learned over many years of looking at both social constructions of realities and cognitive aspects of behavior and communication is that scientists will choose whatever aspect of communication they wish to study and dig deeper in that area. There is nothing wrong with that as long as final explanations of communication recognize that dualist separations are not useful.

The study of communication involves the study of interaction between systems and the formation of feedback loops between sub-systems forming a a larger system of interdependent message exchangers. Dualism is problematic for the study of communication once that assertion is accepted.

Communication scientists may find it necessary to look of the connections rather than the separations regarding internal/external, cognition/behavior, verbal/nonverbal, individual/social, etc. etc. I think the developmental pattern is clear; the movement away from transmission models of communication indicates more awareness of how mind and social interaction are interrelated and not cleanly divisible. We see that cognitions are affected by social behavior and vice versa.

According to the brilliant psychologist William James,

Realizing this, we see that the process of control is what makes people do what they do. They have essential variables or preferred perceptions that they seek to maintain. As disturbances occur which challenge the preferred perceptions (stability), actions are taken to restabilize the perceptions. The easiest analogy is driving a car. You do what you do while driving because of purpose such as staying in the right lane. Second by second, you adjust in accordance to a feedback loop involving behavior and perception. The perceptions of what is occurring are compared to the preferred perceptions (what should be happening) and actions move against disturbances (steering the car against turns in the road) in order to maintain equilibrium and stability (control).

As communication science leaves dualist assumptions and moves more toward systems views and views which discover and link loops of structures and processes, we get closer to understanding how humans use social interaction for adaptation. Dualism distinguishes entities to the point that one cannot be defined in terms of the other. This may be useful to avoid tautology and to preserve conceptual distinctions for necessary reductions and analyses of systems. I think it becomes most problematic when it separates entities which require each other for complete explanation. Thus, if we can avoid unnecessary dualism we can avoid false dichotomies and explore systems of communication as well as isolated acts of communication.
 
 

Sources:

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam.

Davis, P. J., & Hersh, R. (1986). Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Rose, S. (1992). The Making of Memory. New York: Doubleday.

Russell, B. (1972). A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Stumpf, S. E. (1983). Philosophy: History and Problems. New York: McGraw-Hill.