Kenny:
"By introducing consciousness as the defining characteristic of mind, Descartes in effect substituted privacy for rationality as the mark of the mental. The intellectual capacities which distinguish language-using humans from dumb animals are not in themselves marked by any particular privacy. Whether Smith understands quantum physics, or is motivated by political ambition, is some- thing which a third party may be better able to judge than Smith himself. In matters such as the understanding of scientific theory and the pursuit of long-term goals the subject's own sincere state- ment is not the last possible word.
On the other hand, if I want to know what sensations someone is having, then I have to give his utterances a special status. If I ask him what he seems to see or hear, or what he is imagining or saying to himself, what he says in reply cannot be mistaken. Of course it need not be true -he may be insincere, or misunderstand the words he is using -but it cannot be erroneous. Experiences of this kind have a certain property of indubitability, and it was this property which Descartes took as the essential feature of thought. Such experiences are private to their owner in the sense that while others can doubt them, he cannot.
Privacy of this kind is quite different from the rationality which pre-Cartesians took as the defining characteristic of mind. It is thus that human sensation falls, for Descartes, within the boundaries of the mental, whereas for the pre-Cartesian it fell without.
When we come to look closely at Aquinas' [scholastic] account of the mind, we have … to realize that he not only describes it in a way different from Descartes, but has from the outset a different concept of the phenomenon to be described."
Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, London, 1993, Routledge, p.18.
| |