Philosophy of Mind

A Middlebury blog

35 Comments

  1. The most interesting aspect of Descartes’ writing is the Christian influences evident in his meditations that (at least so far) don’t seem to have fallen under the same scrutiny as his own existence. The religious aspect of his argument for me calls into question some of the validity in his points regarding infallible knowledge. The idea that if there is no infallible proof of something’s existence then it is possible that it may not exist doesn’t seem to apply to God in Descartes writing and I’m curious to know why that is. What about God’s existence is infallible to Descartes? Is this merely a product of his time or is it the fear of persecution by the church? Descartes’ sometimes seems to use God as a literal Deus Ex Machina towards the end of his second meditation where when something is unable to be explained he simply attributes it to God’s creation. His entire argument therefore can be called into question; if one confusing point can be answered by simply pointing to the existence of a creator, why can’t all of them? However, the view presented by Gopnik is something that I can’t totally get behind as well. Gopnik never properly connects her findings about toddlers to the behaviors and world views of adults. Gopnik’s point would be stronger if she completely connected the construction of a child’s worldview to the way adults construct their world views. The developing mind of a child can’t possibly possess the same level of complex thought as an adult. Neither argument, to me, is an infallible explanation of the relationship between mind and body and I would perhaps choose a middle ground between the two ideologies.

  2. I am inclined to agree with DesCartes’ position that knowledge of one’s own mind is infallible, even given the possibility of an evil deceiver or that I am merely a brain in a vat. Although either of these conditions would mean that every sensation I receive is false in an absolute sense, the presence of those sensations and thoughts in my mind is true. One thing that I struggled with while contemplating this question is the fact that, in my own experience having a mind, I don’t always know what exactly is going on in it. However, I now attribute this more of a failure in analyzing my thoughts. I can still perceive them, and truthfully, I believe. All this lends credence to the idea that I am a thinking being that indubitably exists. I am less convinced by the alternate “series of thoughts” idea. Mostly in that the difference between a series of thoughts and a thinking being seems largely semantic to me. Does not a series of thoughts with some level of continuity constitute a thinking being?

  3. I think it is important to think about the evolution of the self-awareness of our own thoughts before we ascribe it to any particular force. As children grow up, their thoughts and opinions about things (including their own minds) develop. I believe this could be due to the increased retention of experiences, as well as the gradually increasing capacity for introspection. Whatever the reasons, as Gopnik says in her article, we must look at evidence from a variety of sources before we can conclusively assert something.

    I am hesitant to accept, outright, Gopnik’s point that our knowledge of our own mental states is based only on external experience and interaction with others. The idea that we can understand ourselves in the context of another does sound plausible to me, yet I am certain that in the development of our own introspection, we come across times when we form an opinion or belief about our own minds that might be contrary to evidence gleaned from the outside world. Gopnik uses the evidence of a change in the mind of a 3-4 year old child to show her point. Despite this, I cannot seem to shake the opinion that knowing our own minds is but a combination of external experience and internal thoughts. Sure, those thoughts are probably informed from elsewhere. But that does not mean that we are solely inferring things about our own minds by looking at the external evidence we have around us. I would like to believe I have infallible knowledge of my own mind, and Gopnik shows us how that knowledge arises. But I am all too sure that there is enough out there in the external world, enough experiences, and enough personal introspection to go through before I even come close to having complete, holistic and unwavering knowledge of my own mind.

    So I would have to disagree with Descartes’ view that our knowledge of our own minds is infallible. Although we alone have the best knowledge of our own minds, it is certainly not infallible, for we are always learning new things, whether through experience or introspection. I don’t think there is ever a time when we learn, completely, everything there is to know about our own mind. But we are always getting closer to finding out.

  4. After reading about both Descartes’ and Gopnik’s perspectives on the infallibility of our own minds, although I disagree with aspects of both theories, I feel that Descartes is closer to being correct.

    I will begin with my analysis of Gopnik’s theory first. I disagree that we only come to know and understand our own mental states through the development of a “theory of mind” that comes from interpreting the behavior of others. For example, if an individual were to grow up in total social isolation, which somewhat occurred in the well-known case of Genie, this person would still have a competent understanding of their own mental states. Just because an individual is isolated during a critical period of development, it does not mean that they do not understand their own emotions I believe that an individual raised in isolation would still understand when they felt sad, happy, or scared. Clearly, that individual would lack knowledge about what to call those emotions and how to perceive them in others, but that individual would still know what emotional state they were in because those mental states would be fundamentally their own. Thus, even without developing a theory of mind from interpreting the behaviors of others, humans inherently possess certain knowledge of their own mental states. I cannot accept that my knowledge of my own mental state and my knowledge of another’s mental state are equally likely to be correct. I disagree that I only know my own feelings through the application of a theory of mind and that there is some possibility that I could be mistaken about my own mental experience. The only way this would be possible is if there were a supernatural deceiver distorting everything.

    Moving on to Descartes’ theory, I certainly agree more with the idea that our knowledge of our own minds is infallible. However, the infallibility of our minds in spite of the evil demon does bother me on some level. If there were such a demon that deceived me on every level, such that I were wrong about my mental representation of every object and idea, it seems very farfetched to me that this demon would simply leave my mind and powers of reasoning untouched. It seems much more likely to me that such a demon would utterly contort my mind and thinking processes such that I would only be able to think what he intended. In other words, all of my logical musings and deductions to conclude that my mind is infallible would not actually have any significance. I would only be able to go through that thinking process because the demon allowed me to do so, and the truth about the existence of my mind and its infallibility could very well be far beyond my comprehension. I am more apt to accept that, “there is this experience now”, but in the presence of an omnipotent demon I question even the infallibility of our own mental states.

  5. Is Descartes right that our knowledge of our own minds is infallible? Why or why not?

    In studying Descartes’ theory of the infallibility of the knowledge of our own minds, I have gathered that he states that the truth of our own mind is the only thing we can truly rely on in terms of our ability to prove our existence. He contrasts the infallible knowledge of our own minds with the fallibility of the minds of those around us. I agree with Descartes’ theory, due to the fact that sensations involved in perceiving the thoughts of others affect our perception of what is going on inside the mind of someone else. We can never be positive of what someone else is thinking. Even if someone were to report their thoughts, how would we be sure that these thoughts were not altered by this person, possibly even subconsciously, before or during the person’s reports. We are not able to “read” a person’s mind or somehow “tap into” a person’s thoughts in order to see the world through their eyes. Each individual can only be sure of their own experience because each person is so unique in their perceptions of the world around us, due to the varying past experiences, beliefs, and knowledge that a person possesses.

    The argument presented by Gopnik revolves around the minds of children. A child uses constructs about the environment around them and observes the actions of others in order to construct his or her own reactions to the environment. Imitation, being a prominent behavior in children adapting to the world around them, can influence this child’s own perceptions. I agree with this aspect of Gopnik’s theory. However, as a person develops his or her own sense of self, or personal identity, I believe that the tendency for a person to base his or her experience or “mental state” on a construct obtained from others’ actions dwindles, if not disappears completely. The idea of a “cognitive construction” guiding one’s own perceptions may be commonplace in a child’s world; but once the child grows into his/herself, the ability to create first-person perceptions and opinions independent of others develops. Most of the experimental evidence from the studies that Gopnik uses to develop her theory is obtained through observation, which is, in itself, a way of perceiving the actions of others—not a first-person account. A researcher cannot possibly know exactly what a child is thinking or perceiving because one cannot just experience the environment surrounding us through the eyes of another.

    We “know our own minds” once we develop a sense of “self”. Our thoughts are not an illusion. We, as children, may have found it easier to base our actions and perceptions on observations of those surrounding us. However, our experiences cannot be based upon a construct. I believe that we posses the ability to act as a result of our own first-person knowledge–a knowledge which is not the product of a “theory of mind” that we develop. The interpretation of the behavior of someone else is based upon our opinions of that person’s mental states, not a universal knowledge of their actions being based upon a specific state.

  6. I disagree with Descartes’ assertion that our knowledge of our own minds is infallible. To start, the idea of ‘cogito ergo sum’ in itself is flawed. My main issue with his argument of “I think, therefore I am” is the subject “I”. Having thoughts can only prove that ‘there is this experience now’. Although you cannot be deceived about having thoughts, it is possible to be deceived about the substance making the thoughts. Gopnik’s assigned reading supports this idea.
    Descartes follows the logic of “I know myself, therefore I do not need to prove I exist”. However, it is impossible be sure of yourself and the knowledge of your mind. Gopnik asserts that as children our understanding of others and even our experience of ourselves are incorrect. She states that “the idea of intentionality is a theoretical construct, one we invent in our early lives to explain a wide variety of evidence about ourselves and others” (2). It appears as though the origins of first-person knowledge are extremely similar to the origins of third-person knowledge. This observation calls into question our adult understanding of self. If we didn’t understand our experiences as kids, then what makes us think we understand ourselves now?
    In Armstrong’s open peer commentary on Gopnik, he states, given Gopnik’s finding that children often report false beliefs, it is impossible to know our own minds (30). In addition, the majority of our mind’s thoughts are unconscious. It is impossible to be aware of all the small hormonal changes, neural firings and thoughts that pass through our minds at any given moment. Having infallible knowledge our our minds is simply unmanageable.

  7. I have to agree with Gopnik in the assertion that we grow into our ability to introspect, and then infallibly know our own mental states and their respective representational content. This knowledge of one’s own mental state and the effect it has on your own behavior is gained through trial and error interactions with the world. As we grow, we interact with other people, are exposed to new situations, and gain language to put our experiences into words. We come to experience the world through multiple methods (language, other people, growing consciousness of our own perceptual experience, real or not). The more this occurs, the more these inform our introspection of our own realities/mental states. We use our many different ways of interacting with the world to inform our introspection and personal internal understanding of our own experience. However, I do not believe, as Gopnik posits, that our introspection and knowledge of our own mental states hinges on our interpretation of others actions and mental states. Regardless of what we experience others doing, we will always interpret those actions in the context of what we believe, or at least believe we believe. Ultimately, at any given moment, we can only know our own beliefs, even if those change over time and cause us to interpret the actions of others. Thus, our knowledge of our own mental states is not dependent on our knowledge of others’, but rather our interpretation of others behaviors in terms of their mental states is dependent on our current knowledge of our own mental state and the relationship between that state and our external behaviors and experience of the world.

  8. I have infallible knowledge of my own mind. Although Gopnik argues that I may only understand my own mind through my understanding of others, that my knowledge of myself is only as good as my interpretation of others (which could be entirely false) I still believe I do have the only infallible knowledge of my own mind. Children do learn more about our their own minds as they develop and start to interact with others, but this entirely depends on their individual minds. This informing knowledge is purely representational. I don’t know how other peoples minds work; my thoughts of them are merely mirrors of my own thought processes. In this way, I can only have true knowledge of my own mind.
    I agree entirely with Descartes in that “I think, I exist”. My mind only exists in my own thought of it. Anything anyone else thinks of it is just a representation. I have the highest access. It must be infallible knowledge because my mind is only made up of my thoughts of it, and therefore unless one argues that we do not think (and therefore that we don’t exist), this knowledge is true. Perception informs how I think about my mind, and this experience is all valid. All I know for sure though is my interpretation of experience, perception of some reality. So although I may “wrongly” perceive something, it still makes up my experience that I call real. My mind is made up entirely of these experiences, my thoughts, and even if someone else were to say they were misperceptions, they are the reality that I live in and therefore provide the only knowledge I have of my mind. This knowledge is infallible because it is entirely dependent on my own experience, and I am the only one who can have that experience. Other people may think they have ideas about how I know my mind, but I am the only one who can know for sure, and as my real thoughts comprise my mind, I must have real knowledge of it.

  9. I agree with Descartes that we can be certain of our own minds, but not necessarily by the same argument he gives. Setting aside his ideas on the evil demon deceiving us, I know that I am currently having experiences that I accept as my reality. Whether the things I sense are true or not, they are being experienced. And to be able to be present in this moment, and have these experiences, I believe that a mind of some sort or another is necessary. Evil demon or not, I also agree that we cannot be one hundred percent certain of the realities we experience, and the things we accept as true from day to day. I cannot say for certain that I am not dreaming, or insane, or just a brain in a vat. But, is this really pertinent to my life? Let’s pretend for a moment that I am a brain in a vat being controlled by mad scientists, with my body lying safely beside me. And let’s say that in the artificial reality being created by the scientists, I break my leg. Although my real leg is unharmed, the “me” who is experiencing this still registers all of the adverse aspects of this event. Whether my leg actually is broken or not, in my reality it is. So is this reality truly artificial? I would argue that this reality is true for me, regardless of whether it is happening to my “true” body. So in this regard, I would assert that we can be certain of our minds, as well as the experiences we are having in the current moment- by this I do not mean that we can be sure that what we are experiencing is technically “real”, but we can be sure that it is what we are experiencing. In her article “How we know our minds”, Alison Gopnik brings up some interesting points about what we really know about our minds. She cites studies on the inabilities of children to know and comprehend their own beliefs and those of others. Her evidence shows that children seem to lack the ability to comprehend the difference between their mind, the minds of others, and reality. If children do not understand their own minds, what is to say that we as adults do? It seems to follow that we cannot actually know that we overcame this deception, of sorts, and now understand the nature of our own minds. I do not think this necessarily contradictory to Descartes’ assertions. Gopnik’s claims point towards a misunderstanding of the mind, not a denial of the mind. I do not think Descartes claimed that he completely understand the inner workings of the mind, rather that he could be certain of its existence and its role in our perceptions.

  10. Rene Descartes’s idea of infallible knowledge (at least in first-person perspective) has some truth to it – for example, we believe that we are aware of every psychological state we experience, and who better knows “you” than “you”? Yet the potential for introspection ends there, according to Descartes, as knowledge about others’ mental states is “impossible” to discern, due to incorrect interpretation of behavior and the imperfection of language. I believe that this last part, the imperfection of language, plays the biggest role in disconnects that occur between the first-person perspective and speculation into others’ mental states. Communicating feelings and thoughts is as subjective as these mental representations are to begin with – it produces a layering effect, construct built upon construct. Is there even an infallible method of which to look inside oneself – in consulting the mind of its complexities, or does the imperfection of language trip us up once again? This confidence Descartes placed in introspection prompted: what is there to “know” in the first place? How powerful is examination of the mind, whether it is directed toward the self or others? I think that infallible knowledge is an ideal but sadly impossible objective.

    Gopnik makes claims about a developmentally based theory of mind, which refers to how we interpret others’ behaviors in terms of their mental states, and from these interpretations, discern our own mental states as well. These interpretations (of others’ and our own psychological states) stem from the same basic principles of this theory of mind. These similar origins (and the potential to “understand” both perspectives) clash with Descartes’s claim that one can “know” and “understand” oneself but cannot perform such actions on another. I have a problem with this article, as I feel it has a number of presumptions that lie contrary to one another: children after a certain age can demonstrate an ability to understand the psychological states through behavior, and before this age, lack the ability to do so. It follows that they gain something in the developmental process, such as more interneural connections, greater capacity for memory, speech, etc. In other words, some physical development makes it a possibility to consider others’ mental states as well as their own. This rise in awareness seems to imply a “closed” universe, in which psychological states are the product of neural connections and activity within the brain. They are chemical reactions and nothing more than that. If a child feels one way and exhibits a certain behavior, then also recognizes another individual displaying a behavior that suggests a certain mental state (or vice versa), does that imply that the psychological states we experience can be replicated in others? Is a psychological state merely a certain combination of neural movements and connections? A developmental approach to the theory of mind is fine (refreshing, too) but also seems to suggest a purely physical basis of brain activity and mental states – which seems to contradict all of Descartes’s back and forth rambling about the coexistence of the mind and body. To approach the mind-body problem with a physicalist view and expect an easy comparison with one that certainly implies at least a bit of spiritualism, is optimistic. It sort of seems like comparing apples and oranges.

  11. Descartes provides a series of assumptions that lead to his famous notion, “I think, therefore I am,” which can serve as the premise for his ultimate philosophy of mind-body dualism. Descartes cleverly assembles the argument that if there were to exist a “demon” whose goal is to deceive him about the external world, then it is certain that his mind exists, because there has to be some thing to deceive in the first place. Since the same cannot be said for “bodily substances”, made of matter and not originated in thought, then one can assume that the mind and body are distinct from one another and thus are separate kinds entities.
    That being said, I am not entirely convinced. In order for these ideas to come together and be logically sound, I believe one must first assume that everyone is capable of thinking introspectively. What good is it for the notion “our knowledge of our own mind is infallible” to be true if it cannot be extended to “everyone’s” knowledge. By this I mean being certain of the minds of others as well. This leaves many possibilities, with my favorite being that the minds of others are merely an extension of my own mind, reality is a figment of my imagination and Descartes and is actually part of my own psyche. That surely can be a stretch, but not so much under Cartesian doubt, in my opinion.
    I believe it’s necessary to have consolidation between knowing ourselves and the external world in order to move forward on the mind and body problem. However, by seeking evidence for his claim of dualism through hyperbolic doubt, Descartes may actually be inhibiting his own quest for an answer. As scientific as it may sound, must observe the external world for what it is and what it isn’t, through constant empirical investigation. But a little introspection can be quite useful as well.

  12. Our knowledge of our own minds is apparently not infallible, as Gopnik points out, when it comes to “very abstract mental states such as jealousy or guilt or love.” We might be very positive when we feel pain as pain is a simple stimulus. But for more abstract feelings, we are less sure. We always ponder, “Do I really love him/her? Do I really have feeling for him/her?” Our uncertainty of these sophisticated human sentiments, the ambiguity of our own heart, is the origin of various romantic or tragic plays.

    However, I don’t think this counterexample hinder Descartes’ project. The philosopher’s intention is to lay the epistemological foundation for science, so the ambiguities of abstract human emotions don’t seem to mess with this project. What really matters is that our knowledge of what we are seeing/hearing/smelling/touching/etc is infallible, since these knowledge is more relevant to the advancement of science than the feelings of jealousy and love. (Well, at least to natural science. Psychology might be a different story.)

    We observe the external world through our senses, and if the knowledge of what we are sensing right now is always infallible, then we can base science upon this foundation. The infallibility of the sensory knowledge seems to anticipate Kant, who wanted to base science upon the “universal subjectivity.”

  13. I have been trying to find a way to argue against Descartes famous line in Meditations, “I think, therefore, I exist.” I have found it personally impossible to negate his statement. Even if I don’t exist in this form, and even if an evil demon is deluding me in every way, I still have to exist to be deceived and to think. However, this does not necessarily mean that I have infallible knowledge of my own mind. There is compelling evidence in neuroscience studies that our brains make subconscious decisions seconds before we can perceive these decisions consciously. This means that our conscious thought is not necessarily aware of everything happening in our brain. However; Descartes is not referring to his brain, he is referring to his mind. We are back to the mind-body problem. For if the mind is something immaterial and we have access through it by thought, then I cannot find a way to refute Descartes. I am aware of my current mental state and how my room around me appears (representational content). Therefore, Descartes is not arguing that we know every subconscious synapse that is happening in our brain, he is arguing that we understand what is going on in our minds.

    Gopnik’s findings led me to question: if we develop an understanding of our minds through our interactions with the environment around us, then how can we have infallible knowledge of our own mind? Gopnik uses examples from developmental psychology to show that children can falter in their understanding of the people around them, as well as, their understanding of their own psychological state. The fault in using her as a counterargument to Descartes is that she is assuming that we can trust the verbalized thoughts of children and that we can say whether they are true or not based on our own representation of the environment. To put this in a different way; everything I think to myself is intrinsically true for me. There is only falsity in my beliefs of my own mind and other people’s minds when/if I present that information to the external world. Even if I am deceived by others or my environment, my internal feelings are true to myself and my representation of the world is true for me. Therefore, I still agree with Descartes that my knowledge my of my mind is infallible based on the context of what mind and knowledge is defined as.

  14. Although I think that Gopnik’s article adds an interesting point of view to the debate about the nature of consciousness and the debate over whether our knowledge of our own mind is infallible, I don’t think she completely refutes the certainty that Descartes asserts at the end of his 2nd meditation. From where I sit, it seems that Gopnik and Descartes are asking two slightly different questions. Whereas Gopnik wants to know if “we (as a species?) know our own minds”, Descartes is simply asking whether he can be certain of himself, as a thinking substance.
    In class we touched upon how his conclusion was technically flawed when we line it up against our definition of a substance. Yes, Descartes’s self-awareness would make him a) a bearer of properties and b) capable of existing independently of other substances. He cannot, however, be certain that he persists through time. In response, the alternative infallible belief proposed is that Descartes can be certain that “there is this experience now”. I do agree that Descartes, or anyone on an explicit quest for absolute certainty, can be certain that they are experiencing their own thoughts while they are experiencing them. In contrast, Gopnik’s line of reasoning applies to infants and children, who, I concede, aren’t capable of knowing their own mind or the minds of others. Perhaps, as is evidenced by the developmental studies that Gopnik mentions, we do infer our psychological experiences indirectly, but I can’t see why this should mean that we can’t be certain we are experiencing them to begin with.
    Gopnik also tries to destabilize our self-knowledge by pointing out how our sense of self changes over our lifespan. Again, I come back to the idea addressed in class: that past experiences do not affect our certainty of the present moment. Indeed, an infant cannot be certain of anything, but the fact that Descartes is capable of the amount of self-reflection necessary to question his entire existence means that he can be certain of what he is experiencing in his present moment.

  15. Descartes is not right that our knowledge of our own minds and mental states is infallible. I think this disagreement comes from a difference between his and my fundamental philosophy. Mind-body dualism treats the mind almost as an abstract being, close to a soul. The knowledge that perception (and therefore personal reality) is created by a set of atoms arranged in a specific pattern might change Descartes’s view in this case—if we accept that the mind is not an abstract concept that can only be defined by personal experience, it is reasonable to propose that our knowledge of our own minds and mental states is not infallible. Behavior, which I would say is heavily influenced by the mind, is often predictable and indicative of an individual’s mental states. Mental states themselves can be predictably changed and/or influenced by simple physical tasks (gripping a pencil in their teeth for a short period of time makes people feel happier, presumably because the brain interprets this sensory input as a smile). Descartes is perhaps right that we will never completely know the minds of others, but he is wrong in saying that we know our own minds perfectly. For example, the heavy influence of subconscious neural processes on behavior and conscious mental states is becoming increasingly clear in the modern scientific literature.
    Gopnik proposes that we learn how to interpret our own psychological states the same way we learn how to interpret those of others. His evidence is the shift in worldview that is observable in children between ages 3 and 4. So, children must be influenced by environmental and developmental factors in a way that makes them change their ability to understand psychological intention. I do not think that this necessarily disproves the theory that adults can know their own minds perfectly, but it does imply that they understand their minds nearly the same way they understand others’.

  16. I believe that Descartes was right in saying that one cannot ever know about another person’s mental states; however, I do not necessarily agree that Descartes’ idea that our own mental state is infallible because the idea that since “I think, I exist” is not justified. In Meditations 1, Descartes mentions how we cannot rely on our senses, and thus our psychological experiences, because they are frequently inaccurate. Furthermore, we cannot completely trust our psychological states, which include beliefs and desires, even though they are not affected by external stimuli, because they phenomena like dreams may confuse our perception of reality.
    While Descartes makes these claims, he goes on in Meditations 2 to point out that although we may never know if our psychological experiences are “real” or put there by a deceiving evil demon, we know of our own existence. Since we have the ability to think and to be deceived, there must be something (someone) to be deceived and therefore we validate our existence. However, I do not agree with this explanation because of the lack of explanation of existence, thinking, and justification with deception.
    If there is doubt as to whether we can distinguish a dream or reality then there is inherently a disjunction between the mind and body (existence). There are some dreams where we can see ourselves but still experience the dream through our own eyes. With breaks in self-identity, how do we define existence and how do we define thinking. Since Descartes defines thinking as being able to doubt, understand, affirm, deny, and etc., just because we may doubt our own thoughts and understand that a demon may be deceiving does not necessarily mean we are thinking. The demon/devil that is able to deceive our reality can also insert deceptive thoughts that make us doubt our own thoughts. Affirming that a demon can deceive, but not that it can also make us believe that we are being deceived goes against the original premise. In this case, every thought that may be present is a by-product of this higher being that controls us, making us a non-thinking being, and thus not confirming our existence.
    While I do not accept Descartes’ rationale, I also do not think that Gopnik’s is entirely accurate about our ability to understand the psychological state of others. This is mainly because of the point that if we believe we cannot trust our senses or our beliefs, then why should we trust a belief about a belief. Gopnik even admits “we may notice that there are cases of self-deception where our beliefs about ourselves, and even our psychological experiences of ourselves, prove to be consistently inaccurate.” Therefore, our belief on the accuracy of our or someone else’s beliefs or psychological states cannot be valid.

  17. Do you agree or disagree with Descartes when he claims that we have infallible knowledge of our own minds?

    To start I wanted to be clear about what Descartes is claiming specifically. In summary I support his claim when I feel that I can never be wrong when I interpret my thoughts and mental states no matter what I think they are. Due to the mere fact that I am thinking a thought, and my own thoughts are the thoughts I am the most certain about in my life, then there can be no honest determiner of the fallibility of my thoughts. In order to understand this question more completely, I looked at a couple of articles that applied research investigating this claim. Some research fails to decipher between perspective and introspective claims about emotions. An example cited talked about how people may tend to take on an emotion after believing their friend has that emotion towards them. For example, becoming angry with a friend because you think they are angry with you. This has happened with my friends frequently and I have found myself confused, but it all started in the process of trying to be perspective about someone else’s thoughts. In this sense I believe it possible to be fallible. This same article also addresses research done by Churchland in 1988. I thought he raised three important factors that can lead to mistaken judgments; expectation, presentation and memory effects. If someone is expecting to feel a certain way they can often misinterpret their emotions to correspond with the expected mental state. In the same way, if something like an emotion or sensation were presented very temporarily it would be almost unavoidable to misinterpret what we were feeling. Lastly, memory because of how easily it escapes us on a daily basis can often lead to mistakes when interpreting our mental states. These points, while they may be accurate, fail to address the brief moment of the present that I hone in on to specifically answer the question. While it is very easy to be infallible about past emotions or interpretations of briefly presented stimuli, I think no present thought can ever be wrong. If our mind is really the only thing we know and it controls what we think, then how can any thought about our thoughts be wrong. Everything we know is a thought of our own and we can never know anything else but our own thoughts, so there really is no way for them to be fallible. I think the Theory of Mind is an interesting theory, but considers too deeply the thoughts of others. While we know scientifically that we have very similar brain structures, we have no way of knowing for sure what another is thinking or if their consciousness truly exists. While others may disagree, I feel that we can only be completely sure about our own present thoughts. This could really be the only truth we can ever know and with this I agree most fully with Descartes claim.

  18. In order to answer the question of whether or not our knowledge of our own mind is infallible, we need to decide on a definition of the term “mind.” If we take the mind to be whatever our perceived mental state is, then clearly our knowledge of our own mind is infallible. If, on the other hand, we define the mind as something beyond our perceived mental state, that is how we are “really feeling” despite how we think we are feeling, then our knowledge of our own mind is not infallible. For example, say that a friend of mine tells me that she has one one million dollars in the lottery. My initial reaction may be to express sympathetic joy and happiness at her fortune and this is what I would be aware of as my mental state–in other words, that would be the knowledge of my mental state. Perhaps, though, underneath this feeling of sympathetic joy is jealousy. Due to repression, however, I am not aware of this jealous state. Therefore, I do not have complete knowledge of my mind at the moment, even though I have complete knowledge of how I think I am feeling.

    Perhaps the distinction of whether or not we define the mind as what we perceive it to be versus something beyond what we perceive it to be seems silly, but it has interesting implications for what we consider to be the mind. Would it really make sense to have a conception of the mind that defines the mind as something beyond what we can perceive it to be? How, then, can we be sure that this hidden part of the mind exists if we cannot perceive it?

    So, with regard to Descartes assertion that our knowledge of our mind is infallible and Gopnik’s assertion that our knowledge of our own mind is fallible depends on how we define the term mind.

  19. Descartes is steadfast in making the point that a person has infallible knowledge over his or her mind, a point in which I agree with. In accordance with Descartes, I believe that a person knows what she or he believes, even if what they believe is not necessarily right. Whatever we may be thinking, whether it be controlled by someone else, or augmented in another way, we still know what that thought/sense or emotion is. To use a very simple personal example, right here as I am typing this blog post I know that I am cold. I know that I am worried my words will not make sense, and that I am very excited to see my parents tomorrow. I do not know if I have any reason or right to this “knowledge”, but I know that I am the keeper of it. On the other hand, another person’s knowledge is not nearly as accessible, and certainly not infallible. We can only judge another persons knowledge by their behaviors, which may not allow us to read them correctly. We cannot feel, sense or read inside their minds. Gopnik introduces the “Theory of Mind” in her article, “How we know our minds”. I do not agree with this theory because it assumes that every behavior we witness from another person is telling of the mental state the person is in. Many people exhibit behaviors that are not aligned with their mental states, so it would be impossible to judge their state through a certain behavior.
    Although I think (or at least think I think) I agree with Descartes that only our own knowledge is infallible, I am not completely opposed to other aspects of Gopnik’s article. In the piece Gopnik proposes that the route to one’s own beliefs, thoughts and knowledge may not be as simple and direct as Descartes presents. I was very interested by a few of Gopnik’s overarching points, for example when she says, “We must look beyond an analysis of the conceptual structures that we have as adults”. I completely agree with this point that Gopnik makes, that our thoughts are more complex than we can ever imagine, and we need to analyze them from an angle different than simply introspectively. Instead Gopnik proposes, “We must look to actual evidence about how we develop such knowledge.” He looks to children and their developmental trajectories as another supplementary source to obtain knowledge about where knowledge comes from. I think that by doing this he is creating another lens to view the acquisition of knowledge through, which allows us to question our assumptions of where knowledge is derived. Even if his use of another lens did not convince me in this debate, he is moving in the right direction by gathering data from untapped sources.

  20. Descartes is the irrational rationalist, the one who takes introspective knowledge to the highest level by proposing that perhaps the only think we can truly know is that our own minds exist (and God, but let’s not dive into that mess…), that any other meaning or reality can only be sought through thought rather than experience. I’ve always had trouble with rationalism, probably because I’m not willing to let it taint the value I’ve put on my external experiences, which is why I’m surprised to be writing that, against my better instinct, I think Descartes is right.

    We do have infallible knowledge of our own minds, at least according to the two tenets presented in class: the type of mental state and its representational content. Gopnik makes a strong case against those claims by providing examples of changing beliefs and misunderstanding of those beliefs, and very nearly had me when she chalked up an expert’s knowledge to a well-toned habit. I understand that perhaps as young children we simply applied theories of interpreting others’ minds in order to understand ourselves, but I’m not sure that a three year old’s faulty memory of optical illusions proves that they did not know that A) they were using their sight and B) they had an idea of what they thought they saw, at the present time of their seeing it. It seems Gopnik bases most of her thesis off of confusion noted post hoc, rather than the current states of the children.

  21. It seems to me that the difference between the arguments of Descartes and Gopnik lies in the origins of how we come to know our own minds. Do we develop concepts of others’ minds (theory of mind), and then later apply these to learn about our own mind (Gopnik)? In this way, Gopnik suggests our concepts of others’ mental states and our own mental states stem from the same knowledge and happen at the same time through a shared process. She argues that young children under age 4 are unable to understand the psychological states of themselves and others; this is due to the fact that the brain, especially the frontal lobes where consciousness and the nature of the self are, is still in the process of developing at this age. Her logic follows that, later, if we form incorrect understandings about others’ minds, these inaccuracies will carry over to our understanding of our own minds, and therefore, our knowledge of our own minds is fallible and uncertain.

    Or, on the flip side, do we innately have the ability to understand our own minds, and then later apply this information to understand others (Descartes)? In this way, Descartes says we can only know our own minds for sure, and can only infer the mental states of others, using the tools we have developed for understanding our own minds.

    It seems Gopnik is more concerned about the truthfulness of what we know about ourselves, whereas Descartes is looking at the issue on a more basic level– is our knowledge that we even have a mind (and exist) infallible? Descartes seems to recognize this discrepancy by conveying that he can be sure that he is seeing a beech tree and that the way it seems to him is real, however he cannot be sure that what the beech tree seems to represent in his mental state actually matches up with reality (i.e. is there really a beech tree in front of him?). Therefore Descartes is in a way saying that he cannot know the accuracy of his mental experience (especially because senses can be deceiving), but he can be sure that he is having one, and that as a current, thinking being, he has a mind that gives him the capacity to form these mental representations.

    So far, my reasoning with this topic is that we all must naturally recognize we have a mind, and that this knowledge of ourselves as thinking beings with a mind is infallible (whether or not we believe our self-understanding is accurate or not). Right now, the only thing I can be sure of is that I exist because I am thinking and am aware of my mental states.

  22. I would agree with Descartes’ assertion that we have infallible knowledge of our own minds. If we suppose that we are either dreaming or being constantly deceived, Descartes still argues that we possess our own thoughts. We may be living in a false reality but we still act in that reality with our own will. The fact that we think means that we exist, for we are “thinking things.” We can know our own selves with full certainty because we possess the power to look within. I would agree with this, for I do not believe that we can deceive ourselves, at least not for an extended period of time. If we truly decide to introspect and be intellectually honest with ourselves, then we will truly know our selves and possess infallible knowledge of our own mind.
    Descartes then continues to explain that we cannot know with complete certainty the position of other people’s mental states. This, too, is true. We certainly have knowledge of our selves and our own emotions and desires, but any understanding of how other people are feeling is all based on supposition. We may infer how other people feel or what they want based on observation and our own experiences, but we can never know that with full certainty. Gopnik does pose an interesting case as to how observational learning and understanding other people’s behavior can help us understand our own minds, yet this is all still in the context of our own mind. We observe and interpret how other people act on our own accord, and then make sense of that on our own. It does not seem likely, as Gopnik suggests, that we can misinterpret our own mental states. We still must know more about ourselves than we do other people. We know with complete certainty who we are and what we desire, there is infallibility to that. There is fallibility, though, when we try to interpret the minds of other people. What Descartes argued is true.

  23. I believe that the fallibility of our knowledge of our own minds depends largely on one’s definition of thoughts. An argument not explicitly laid out in the assigned readings thus far is that thoughts may in fact be a product of sensory input, a sixth sense so to speak. Just as we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste based on cues in the environment, we also think based on cues in the environment. If we agree with Descartes philosophy that we cannot know infallibly the correspondence between the representational content of mental state and how the world actually is, how can we know the two separately? I think that we do have direct or immediate knowledge of our own mental state, but that state is a product of the environment. We are social beings and our perceptions of external cues likely inform our thoughts during introspection. For this reason, it seems that we cannot fully separate our own mental states from our perceived external cues and in turn from the “real” actual world.

    On the other hand, if one were to assume that the world as it actually is does not inform either our mental state or the representational content of our mental states, then one must disregard the “world as it actually is.” In other words, the only two components relevant when discussing knowledge would be type of mental state and representational content. In this case, it would only be possible to know of our mental state and its content. The next question that comes to mind is whether we can even know these two components infallibly.

    In his novel, Proof of Heaven, Alexander Eben discusses his near death experiences after contracting a rare E. coli strain of bacterial meningitis. The story is useful in that he survives the illness and lived to recount his experience while in a coma. One must also consider that he was and is still a neurosurgeon, and thus skeptical of the existence of a soul; he believed in materialism when it came to matters of the mind. He reports experiencing a new world despite that fact that his neocortex was inactive according to brain scans. In terms of whether or not the knowledge of our mind is fallible, this example seems to suggest it is fallible. Throughout the story he makes comments such as I can’t do the experience justice or I am unable to feel and explain the experience anymore. This is a case in which the representational content of the mental state can be fallible. Even in my own life, I sometimes find it hard to describe how I am feeling or the reason for my choices; furthermore, this inability seems to be related to our fallibility when comes to identifying mental state.

    Overall, I tend to believe that our knowledge of our own minds is fallible on the basis that our thoughts are based on constantly changing external cues and physiological symptoms. Considered along side the “Brain in a Vat” scenario, how can we know our mind infallibley if we cannot know our external world infallibly?

  24. I agree with Descartes that as entities we have infallible knowledge of our own minds. As I sit here writing this blog post, I can be completely certain with my mental states; the warmth being emitted from the heater, the bright orange tapestry on my wall, the sound of water running in the other room. However, I am not certain about my roommates mental states, as she sits, legs crossed on the bed across the room. She may be so focused on what she is reading that she does not notice the group of people outside yelling. That is why I find it so hard to agree with Gopnik’s article.
    Though Gopnik argues that she is not a behaviorist because she does not deny the existence of internal psychological states, she argues that in order to experience the intentionality of our mental states we must first understand the behaviors that result from those mental states. Firstly, I do not agree with this argument because it assumes that a certain behavior or reaction must be linked with every mental state. Secondly, we cannot be sure that the same behaviors that are linked with every mental state are universal. Certain behaviors in certain cultures, which may be the same in others, may infer completely different matters.
    I also disagree with her means, the “Theory of Mind.” This theory does not prove how we can understand our minds in the same way that we can understand, infer, others. We understand others by pure observation, while we understand ours by sense and feelings. Since, as I mentioned earlier, that every behavior is not necessarily linked with a mental state, how can we assume to know the mental states of others? Or more so, how can the percentage of misinterpreting others mental states be just as high as the percentage of misinterpreting one’s own mental state? This ‘Theory of Mind’ cannot be applicable from an internal perspective as well as an outside perspective. More so, we may misinterpret what we see, which was one of Descartes points in his first Mediation – doubting our senses. Even if we misinterpret our own senses, through introspection, we can still prove our existence.
    Finally, this shift seen in children at age 4, which allows them to understand their minds as well as others is an initial stage in child development. This stage allows children to understand that other people may be experiencing the same mental states as you. However, as children grow older and develop, they realize that the probability of their knowledge of others being fallible is much higher than the probability of the knowledge they have about themselves being fallible.

  25. I don’t know that I can say either way whether I believe Descartes’s assertion that “our knowledge of our own minds is infallible.” In his Second Meditation he says, “I am a thinking thing-that is a mind, soul, understanding, or reason,” sense (Descartes 37). I agree with this assertion based on his “I think, I am,” logic. That is a fairly basic observation, but it is a fact that we can unequivocally accept about our own minds. Knowing versus not knowing becomes more complicated when we look at more complex characteristics than whether the thinking mind or soul is or is not. I guess I think the question is what we mean by knowledge of our own minds. Yes, we know our minds exist, but if we’re defining knowledge as total understanding of our own mental processes I think the answer is less clear.

    As discussed in the reading and in class, Descartes previously decided to reject everything about his perception of reality based on the idea that there could be an evil deceiver making him see a false external world. But as Gopnik and a few other students have pointed out, everything about our minds, including internal thought processes not pertaining to any external stimulus, has been shaped by previous experience and perceptions. If we doubt our current perceptions, we have to doubt our memories of what we believed to be reality, so wouldn’t it cast doubt onto our entire mental paradigms?

    Because I was thinking along those lines when I started the Gopnik article, her description of phenomenological first-person knowledge and her assertion that it seems “incontrovertibly true” stuck out to me (1). The use of the term ‘experience’ seemed especially important to me because it functions as a qualifier. Perhaps we can’t trust the external stimulus causing our psychological states based on the evil deceiver or brain in a vat theories, or the previous externalities that shaped the way we are responding to the current “deception,” but we can know for certain that regardless of the truthfulness of the cause our minds are responding in a certain way because we are internally ‘experiencing’ it firsthand.

    To me, this tied in to the idea of “There is this experience now (Lecture 02/12/2014).” Especially when we take into account the three year olds who could not remember that there was a time when they believed the candy box contained candy and not pencils, it seems like we should treat memories of experience as fallible because as soon as it is not the psychological state we currently occupy, it is subject to externalities and therefore deception. Though experimentally, adults (or even children over the age of 4) could almost certainly remember that there was a time when they believed the box contained candy instead of pencils, who is to say whether or not that translates to psychological states based on knowledge that is more amorphous or complex and less declarative? In that sense I think our knowledge of our own minds is perhaps not as black and white as Descartes seems to assert.

  26. I do not think Descartes is correct that our knowledge of our minds is infallible. Recent research on consciousness finds that our mind makes decisions before we become consciously aware a choice has been made; sometimes decisions are encoded by unconscious brain activity up to ten seconds in advance of when the choice entered the subject’s awareness. Large amounts of brain activity may occur without the brain’s owner ever knowing, pointing to the fact that our own knowledge of our minds is deeply flawed.

    At the same time, Gopnik’s argument is not entirely convincing. While Gopnik presents extensive amounts of solid evidence, exactly what this evidence demonstrates is less indisputable. Gopnik uses her research on errors in young children’s perceptions of their psychological states to argue that our knowledge of our own psychological states is actually learned. Gopnik argues that we learn about our own minds at the same time, and in the same way, as was learn about others’ minds.

    One way to refute her views, according to Gopnik, would be “to deny that 3-year-olds have psychological states like ours,” a view which she dismisses. Gopnik refuses to accept that 3-year-olds might have fundamentally different psychological states because, “we are considering creatures that are made out of exactly the same stuff that we are… [they] are not just like us, they are us.” I have to disagree. They are not us in the sense that we are adults with (almost) fully matured and developed brains. At the age of 3, the brain is undergoing marked developmental changes, some of which will not be completed until their early 20s (infants cannot even distinguish between colors at birth, for example). To equate a 3-year-olds brain to an adult brain is simply erroneous. I argue that their brains are different enough to give reason to believe that they could be, in fact, experiencing fundamentally different psychological states.

    Furthermore, Gopnik contests that when children “do seem to have accurate beliefs about some aspects of their own psychological states, [they are] precisely the ones that are consistent with their accounts of the minds of others.” In my opinion, Gopnik has stumbled upon a contemporary chicken-and-the-egg problem. Gopnik believes that children learn about psychological states and then apply these lessons to their own psychological states. I would argue it is instead possible that that age, their brains cannot perceive certain states. At a certain point, their rapidly developing brains become capable of interpreting their own psychological states and soon after become able to detect similar signs in others. In effect, reversing the cause and effect direction Gopnik posits for understanding own-versus-other psychological states.

  27. Philip K. Dick (author of Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?, which was subsequently made into the film Blade Runner) wrote, “Sometimes an appropriate response to reality is to go insane.” After reading Descartes’ Meditations and Gopnik’s article, I feel poised to enter the realm of insanity. If we look at children’s beliefs and know them to be incongruent with reality, can we not draw that string of logic to our own? If we know, with certainty, that we have been wrong about our mind’s nature in the past, can’t we be just as wrong in adulthood?
    For the sake of argument, let us say that we do not understand the nature of reality. Through this haze of uncertainty, generations have experimented and concluded logical theories that work in concert with our universe. All the massive truths set forth in the scientific world are preceded by the words, “the theory of…”; the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, the theory of evolution. These theories simply indicate that science has yet to discover any piece of information to refute these claims. When we examine this line of reasoning on a microscopic, individual scale, we Descartes’s views are reinforced by the scientific method. How each one of us interprets the world is indeed infallible, because we are not creatures of a shared intelligence. Each of us possesses a brain sequestered away in a bony shell. Our individual universe resides exclusively within this tissue and any perceptions and thoughts that are created…exist. On this level, there is no dimension of right or wrong, but simply existence and non-existence. Our perceptions may indeed be incongruent with the collective reality we have learned. But even this shared reality is fraught with mistakes and enormous blank spaces. We still do not know what comprises 70% of the universe, let alone all the species that inhabit our tiny planet. It is only through hypotheses and experimentation that we can gain insight about universe, perhaps giving the keys for future generations to behold the infancy of their ancestors’ “truths.”
    In conclusion to this rambling, Descartes’ belief that the mind is infallible holds true, if we consider the entirety of the universe tucked away in each one of us. Furthermore, Gopnik makes an interesting argument, but one that wavers when we consider that a child’s brain simply needs more development to come into conjunction with the aforementioned theories.

  28. In Meditations, Descartes’s assertion about the infallibility of one’s own existence is impossible to deny. Alison Gopnik’s article “How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality” asserts that, as children, we do not fully comprehend our own minds and how they work. Because we are deceived about the nature of our minds at some point in our lives, it follows that all of our other beliefs about our minds may not be accurate. In other words, if I can be wrong about the nature of my own mind and beliefs just as I can be wrong about the nature of another’s, then there is no intrinsic reason why I should be said to directly know my beliefs as opposed to inferring them.
    I do not disagree with Gopnik’s conclusion that we may not have a completely direct route into our own beliefs and mental states, but these arguments do not adequately disprove Descartes’ theory of the infallibility of one’s own existence. It is perfectly plausible for a person’s beliefs about his beliefs to be completely wrong. Regardless, that person knows that he/she believes something, regardless of that thing’s truth value. As a result, that person can know that he/she exists, for that which does not exist cannot harbor any beliefs, be they true or false. The route into our own minds, while not as flawless as we may perceive it to be, provides us with enough information that we can determine our own existence without relying on the senses at all.
    By contrast, we cannot make such inferences about other people, because we do not have as much insight—or as Gopnik calls it, expertise—into their minds. In fact, we do not even know that they have minds, or that they believe at all in the way that we do. All we can really know is that we are experiencing images of bodies of mass that seem to exhibit similar behavioral patterns as we do. Because of the behavioral similarities, we tend to attribute minds to these bodies of mass and call them sentient beings. All of this, however, is done through inference.

  29. One thing that struck me during the readings was the issue of memory, and the consequences it would have on whether our knowledge of our own minds is infallible. Descartes’ central point of “I am, I exist” reasonably seems to prove existence, but I’m not sure if we can understand that existence completely (Meditation II, pg 36). He also says “if I completely stopped thinking, I would completely cease to exist” (37). This seems to imply that as thinking things we have a memory of our previous thoughts and states, so that we can exist as a somewhat continuous entity, rather than each thought existing as an individual being. In the Pollock essay, the scientists say that their input to the brain “provides a fictitious mental life that merges perfectly into his past life” (134). In order for previous memories to be accessed, they would have to be brought into the present as a current thought. If the scientists or the evil deceiver can feed false information to the thinker in the present, it seems reasonable that they could feed false memories as well, especially since most memories are essentially repetitions of previous sensory information or processed information based upon that. If previous memories could be altered or new ones added by the deceiver, and memories of thinking in the past are the only way for the thinker to know that they existed in the past, then it seems that the thinker can only know of their existence definitively in the present. Then, they would not be able to anything for certain about their past mental states or existence. Descartes describes a thinking thing as “something that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and also senses and has mental images” (38). If the thinker exists only in the present, it seems that they would have to have simultaneous thoughts: one actually performing the mental process (ie doubting or understanding) and another recognizing that the processing is occurring. Furthermore, if previous memories couldn’t necessarily be trusted, then they would not be able to definitively know that they could do processes that they had done in the past but weren’t doing presently. I also wonder what he would say about unconscious mental processes, considering most of them, especially sensation and perception, occur without us consciously realizing or without an explicit memory formed. I also wonder what he would say about the thinker forgetting something naturally, since that would also seem to indicate an imperfect knowledge of our own minds.

  30. We believe that we know of our own minds and its desired and states directly, and that the mental states of others must be interpreted, and therefore we have a different relationship with them. This belief relies on the concept that our knowledge of our own minds comes from a fundamentally different pathway of understanding than the knowledge we carry of other people’s minds. Gopnik presents an argument that suggests that we understand our own minds the same way that we understand other’s minds. This argument is based on empirical evidence of children who learn to understand their minds in the same way as they understand other’s minds. Children are not born with this belief of their own psychological states and in fact, require feedback from interpretation of others’ mental states to develop an understanding of their own. If this claim is true, then the foundation of Descartes’ argument of how our knowledge of own minds is infallible and knowledge of other’s minds can never be certain, falls apart. If this knowledge of our own minds and others minds is developed through the same pathway of understanding, then neither beliefs about our own psychological states nor beliefs about other people’s psychological states are infallible.

  31. Blog Response on Privileged First-Person Access To Intentional States

    After reading the Allison Gopnik article, I feel relatively convinced that Descartes overestimated, by at least a little bit, the immediacy and infallibility of our access to our own thoughts — if by thoughts we mean something like intentional states. If we’re working with a representational view of mental content, in which thoughts are models of the world, it seems possible to me that we are not always incontrovertible authorities on the subject of these models. The reason I say this is that I think the act of seeming to be requires a more complicated chain of inference than some other mental states we can observe in ourselves, such as the seemingly direct access we have to our own phenomenological states. Perhaps an intuitively-graspable example that helps to illustrate this, and which I’ve been keeping in mind as I work through these readings, is that of somatic markers of emotional states. It does seem to me that we obviously have privileged access to our own mental states in the sense that we have privileged access to the signals sent by our bodies and brains. For instance, if I walk into the dining hall at rush hour and my sympathetic nervous system immediately flutters into a state of ramped-up arousal, I have much better access to this fact than the person I bump into on my way to the silverware island does. What is not quite as immediate, however, is the interpretation of this state of arousal as anxiety. I’m thinking here of the Schachter-Singer experiment, which suggests that the same autonomic state can result in different emotions depending on the cognitive label applied to it. This may not be exactly the same as the type of mental content Gopnik is talking about — her experiments pertain to beliefs rather than emotions. But it doesn’t seem like a hugely implausible stretch, to me, to think that propositional models are abstracted and deduced from immediate qualitative experience in much the same way that the cognitive elements of emotion are. If I form a belief about my own believing-that-I-am-looking-at-a-beech-tree, I first have to associate the types of sensory content which would accompany such seeing into a coherent conceptual whole. I have to learn that a certain signal my nervous system lobs at me can be glommed onto the similarity cluster ‘greenness’, and another to ‘branchness’, and so on. I have to associate the activation of such concepts in my mind with other sensory experiences of that have to do with birch trees, and form the narrative that my having-this-experience is not just an arbitrary occurrence, but something which can be used to navigate the greater territory of my life. And if we admit this degree of constructedness in the very act of representation, it seems logical to imagine that the degree of constructedness involved in meta-representation must be even higher. If we admit a degree of arbitrariness and fallibility into our construction of representations from sensory data (we might misinterpret our sensory input due to biases, or fail to notice some crucial detail such as a pedestrian crossing the street in front of us) then it seems plausible that our meta-representations of our own cognitive states might be vulnerable to error in the same way. This would be the case merely because they are complicated processes mediated by many different acts of inference and observation. My belief that I believe I am sitting in a coffeeshop right now is founded on long chain of evidence-gathering and interpretation that moves from optical, auditory and olfactory signals all the way up the line through mental representations, to a further mental representation that umbrellas these earlier representations under the concept of belief. Such a chain of inference does seem to require a theory of mind to be interpreted, and it makes sense that this theory of mind would be learnable, fallible, and able to be updated.

  32. In Meditations II, Descartes posits that we [thinking, existing entities] have an infallible knowledge of our own minds. While this assertion may initially seem unlikely, especially considering his devotion to treating anything that may be falsifiable as equal to that which is completely untrue, I believe that it is fundamentally sound – or “right” – if we are to accept Descartes’ definition of a mind as one that is legitimate. In stating this, Descartes is not implying that anything perceived by the mind is infallible in its reality, as perception relies upon the senses that Descartes vehemently implicates as one the of deceivers in the world. Rather, he implies – I believe – that his thoughts, and his understanding that these thoughts originate from his existence, an existence that can only be assured due to these thoughts, cannot be denied.

    While my own personal views may disagree with Descartes’ assertions, this stems from a difference in our definitions of mind and one’s understanding of a mind rather than an error in Descartes’ rationale. The crux of this difference lays in Descartes’ stringent and minimalistic view of the mind, that it is something completely separate from the senses and the imagination, two entities which may strive to deceive our notion of reality, what is real, and what can be said to be true or “knowable” (according to him). Comparatively, Gopnik provides a view of the mind that relies not only on perception, but the very tasks that she relies on to assess if a child has gained a proper understanding of mind all rely on one of the senses. Similar to some of the ideas proposed by Gopnik, I believe that a mind cannot be separated from the senses, or potentially even from the imagination (whatever one may define that to be). Another key difference comes from Gopnik’s pronouncement that a proper – or at least, more complete – understanding of mind does not truly come about until a particular age (3-4 years old). Such an idea would question Descartes’ avowal of an infallible knowledge of our minds, since if we at one point in our lives have an improper idea of the mind, there can be no assured way of proving that we ever truly gained one, making the mind into as likely of a deceiver as the senses. Therefore, while it does not seem as if Descartes would agree with his own statement about our infallible knowledge of the mind using the parameters set forth for a mind by Gopnik or myself, this does not show a flaw in his overall argument, but rather a disparity in the definition of mind between he and Gopnik.

  33. Descartes makes a very compelling case for the infallibility of the mind’s self-knowledge, which especially applies to the stream of consciousness that we experience during our waking moments. Gopnik’s sequential breakdown of intentionality seems to deal mainly with the subconscious aspect of our minds; she explains that the sequence that leads to this “theory of mind” starts with psychological states, then involves observing the behaviors and experiences that follow, using these to create causal relationships that “postulate intentionality”, and then actually experiencing the intentionality of such states. Maybe I am alone in this, but I have never consciously considered these processes until reading about them, whereas I have often gotten lost in thoughts such as “What am I?” and “If teleportation were theoretically possible, would it work only for inanimate objects or also for things with a sense of self?”

    Even if our “theory of mind” is a construction based on observations of others, our minds are the architects of this toolkit. There is obvious adaptive purpose for such learning. At a certain point, the question of whether or not what we believe to be experiencing vs. what we are actually experiencing stops mattering in accordance with Descartes’ notion of “I exist, since I am deceived.” The cognitive reality, or theory, is what influences our actions, so if we think certain motivations exist doesn’ t the act of thinking make them true? Isn’t that enough? With an imperfect theory, perhaps the truth is distorted (like how an imperfect eye will deceive its owner), yet assuming the physical and metaphysical can be compared in this way is another imperfect theory. Perhaps the ever-changing nature of our “theory of mind” is an indication that the same theory can or should not be true indefinitely. I found it interesting that Descartes talks specifically about waiting to undertake his search for fundamental truths until his “mind was free of cares” and his body free of “passions”, suggesting a full mental and physical maturation that is somewhat at odds with Gopnik’s insistence that we should be looking at how young children understand their own minds. Their inclinations for specific periods of human development indicate a common belief that there is something distinct about each respective phase. From a biological point of view, those phases have lower concentrations of sex hormones than do others. Just a neurosciency thought.

  34. I do not agree with Descartes that our knowledge of the mind is infallible. I support the view of Gopnik. The development of our minds occurs during childhood and our minds develop through the influence of the people around us: our parents, siblings, and friends. Our mental states come to be through interactions with these people. They are the ones who shape how we come to see ourselves and how we see others. Our beliefs, intents, desires and other such mental states are shaped by the experiences we have with them. Our mind is then able to determine what another’s mental state is based on what we learned. We are not always correct in our assumption of another’s mental state. If we can be incorrect in judging another’s mental state, what is to say we are always correct about our own mental state. If the experiences and interactions we have had with others has caused incorrect predictions of the mental states of others, we can be wrong about our own mental states and we do not have infallible knowledge of our own mind.

  35. (Is this the right place to post these?)

    For me, this entire debate feels incredibly amorphous and frustratingly abstract. That said, I’m going to do my best to sort through my thoughts and present them in at least a quasi-intelligible way. First, I think that Descartes is right in saying that we have infallible knowledge of our own mental state at any given time. It seems to me that, regardless of the factors that lead to a certain mentality (e.g. past experiences, brain injuries, influence of drugs, etc…) we can always at least be sure of what we’re feeling. In other words, even if I’ve sustained a horrible brain injury and can no longer tell that my left leg actually belongs to me (to use an example that we talked about in physio psych), I can at least be sure that that is how the world seems to me. Or, to use another example, a person who is under the influence of some hallucinogenic drug might not be able to say what the world is actually doing, but they should always be able to know what it seems to be doing (“I may not know if what I’m seeing is real, but I know that I’m seeing it”) .

    Since I think I’ve now placed myself firmly in Descartes’ theoretical bandwagon, I feel like I should try to respond to Gopnik’s point of view. Admittedly, my first thought after finishing this particular article was “I have no idea what I just read”, but I’m going to push on nonetheless. Basically, I think that Gopnik’s postulate doesn’t actually come into conflict with Descartes’ ideas. To elaborate, it may be that most 3-year-olds don’t actually know what they were thinking when they opened a candy box to find pencils (when they were asked about it after the fact). Similarly, it may be that young children are frequently unsure of the source of their information even minutes after it is given to them. But wouldn’t Descartes say that such evidence is irrelevant? Wouldn’t he say that the conception of the event is the important part? For example, maybe I’m absolutely convinced that I was told about an object, when in reality (?) I saw it for myself. Although I may be ‘wrong’ about the way I learned of the object, can’t I be absolutely sure that my current belief (“I was told about the object”) is actually my current belief?

    I feel like I’m not making much sense, so I’m going to try and say it another way. Let’s assume that Gopnik is right, and that my conception of my mind is really just based on my interpretations of various behaviors (my own and those of other people). Let’s say that, when I become angry at something, I’m really just deciding that I must be angry because I’ve seen what ‘anger’ looks like in other people. Even once we’ve made this assumption, I’m not convinced that we can make the leap to saying that “I can’t be sure if I’m angry.” Does the fact that my conception of an emotion may be influenced by previous experience really throw that emotion into doubt? And, for that matter, how can a mental state possibly be “wrong” or “thrown into doubt”? Maybe I’m not labeling or identifying my feelings correctly, but to me (and, it seems, to Descartes), it seems pretty clear that what I’m thinking is what I’m thinking. It’s here, right now, and I’m thinking it. Maybe, a couple of minutes ago, something I thought was true ended up being false. Or maybe I can look back on something and be convinced that X happened when everyone else says that Y happened. But, as I write this, it seems fairly clear that my conception of the world around me is real and fairly unquestionable. I can’t say anything about any other people, or even about myself at any other point in time, but here and now I feel certain about the fact that I feel certain.

    P.S. I’m fairly sure this is a valid sentence… “Descartes and I are certain that I am certain that Descartes is certain about what we can be certain about.”

Leave a Reply