Michael Glassman therefore makes a very important point: what
else is really at stake here besides the mind/body split? I think
it's pretty generally agreed these days that whatever it is
'minds' are supposed to do, the material system that is in play
when they do it includes a fair chunk of the body (beyond just
the brain) and extends at least to whatever bits of the local
ecology we are interacting with at the moment. In a paper I'm
writing now for an international semiotics conference next month
that will deal with how meaning-making emerges in material
systems (philosophers, linguists, biologists, physicists invited
-- and plenty of papers using concepts from non-linear dynamics),
the 'Cartesian' issue comes up a little differently.
Suppose we substitute for the 'mental' as a separate domain of
the real in addition to the material (which I take to be the
strong form of 'Cartesian' dualism), something more modern like
the 'semiotic' or the 'ideal-formal' (as in structuralism,
including mathematics). Then the issue becomes whether abstract
categorial relations have a separate kind of reality from
material interactions. Are sign processes different in nature
from material processes, or are they (as I argue) specialized
kinds of material processes? Is the contrast relation between two
phonemes (or two signs) additional information beyond the
acoustic relations that can be described for the phones/sounds
that realize them? In what sorts of systems are these kinds of
information definable? constructed?
There is another interesting twist on this issue. The arguments
of categorial or semiotic relations, the 'things' of the
semiotic-cognitive reality, are abstract classes, or 'types'. Our
sciences traditionally aim at making statements that are generic,
about and in terms of such types, even though they can ever only
be based on observations of (interactions with) individual
events, or 'tokens' of the types. For some kinds of systems this
works: their relevant behavior is wholly or mostly 'typical' for
their kind (e.g. atoms). For other kinds of systems, relevant
behavior is only very partially typical, and we need more
'hermeneutic' sciences which can say useful things about
individuals (e.g. particular texts, cultures, persons, events),
in some sort of dialectic with statements about types. So a
critical question to ask of an epistemology is whether and how it
will allow us to treat token-token interactions, token-type
constructions, and type-type relations all as features of a
single unified dynamical system. JAY.
PS. Niels Bohr made an interesting start on a 'post-Cartesian'
epistemology for atoms.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU