The ghost of Descartes: Economics, purposes, perspectives and practical problem solving – Part One

Minds are not for thinking, traditionally conceived, but for doing, for getting things done in the world in real time

Wilson and Foglia, “Embodied Cognition“, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

I  Cartesian vices: Copernican moments

When Ludwig Wittgenstein asked his student and colleague Elizabeth Anscombe why people had once thought the sun went around the earth, she answered that this was what it looked like. Wittgenstein famously responded by asking what it would have looked like if instead, the earth turned on its axis. As Anscombe immediately realised, her initial answer had embodied a kind of thoughtlessness.

At least in hindsight, the thoughtlessness becomes obvious. Keynes had the same kind of thought regarding the insights he had forged in The General Theory. As he reflected, the ideas he had expressed so laboriously were “extremely simple and should be obvious.” The difficulty was “not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”.

At least when it comes to Copernicus’s Copernican moment providing the natural science is simple and at the ‘intuitive’ Newtonian scale – which is not too big or too small – the triumph of scientific demonstration feeds fairly simply into a new intuition and a new perspective. This is less true of deeper presuppositions.

We’re in the grip of the Ghost of Descartes or perhaps I should call it the Cartesian Zombie. There are lots of technical philosophical objections to Descartes’ assertion that mind and matter are of different substances. Pretty obviously minds are made of matter. (Well we think they are – they might just be a material sub-straight for a ghost in the machine – whatever the hell any of that means). Anyway, however many metaphysical discussions one has, Descartes Zombie just keeps walking. We can’t help but think in a Cartesian way.

In this regard, the purpose of this essay is captured in the words of Mary Midgley describing her own:

I concentrate, not so much on refuting particular arguments as on pointing out the wider imaginative landscapes that have made them look plausible, the visions that shape the thought behind them. I want to map the whole terrain in a way that can suggest a way out of various dead ends in which people easily get trapped.

There’s nothing wrong with the naïve Cartesian idea that our minds are ‘in here’ and objective reality exists ‘out there’, providing one understands its limitations. It helps us assert something important. We all know that our mind and all the other things in the world are different things. But the only questions that matter are the harder ones. How does the mind come to know something about the world and how can it, does it and should it act in the world?

In returning us to the comfort of the obvious, Naïve Cartesianism invites us to be thoughtless about what knowledge is and where it comes from. (One of its premier defense mechanisms is the peremptory assertion of the obvious. “Do you agree that there’s a world outside your head? Does Jupiter circle the sun or is this is ‘socially constructed knowledge’?” you might be asked peremptorily by Descartes’ Zombie (or Sam Harris) – someone who sees ‘post-modernists’ under every bed.

The first column of the table below sets out five general dispositions of the Cartesian temperament. It would be easy, but I think unfortunate, to propose that I’m arguing for some alternative paradigm. The alternative I want to propose is more modest. It takes exception to none of the inclinations of the Cartesian view. It simply insists that they’re starting points. Thinking has to start somewhere. Accordingly, my alternative does not present itself as a new set of foundations from which to proceed. How could it when the very first inclination it critiques is that thought is built from foundations? Rather it begins – in the second column – by noting some limitations of these starting points.

Table: Cartesian intellectual dispositions and their limitations

II  Escaping the Ghost of Descartes

One could describe much of modern philosophy and epistemology as various attempts to escape the pull of Naïve Cartesianism. There’s the mainstream Enlightenment route via Locke, Hume and Kant. You can treat Hegel as the apotheosis of this – as he did. Or you can think of him as the first of numerous attempts at the radical reconstruction of epistemology. I like the pragmatists’ escape from Descartes into what they called ‘radical empiricism’, but that gets one into debates about what ‘truth’ is.

So for now let’s go with another favourite of mine – R. G. Collingwood to give the flavour of a post-Cartesian epistemology – or the beginnings of one. I’m not after much more than that because I’m not engaged in trying to arrive at some conclusive philosophy or epistemology so much as clear away the cobwebs of naïve Cartesianism. Collingwood tells a story in his Autobiography which is widely quoted. He talks of becoming obsessed by how ugly he found the Albert Memorial each day as he encountered it on a daily walk. But he got to wondering: 

What relation was there, I began to ask myself, between what [the architect] had done and what he had tried to do? If I found the monument merely loathsome, was that perhaps my fault? Was I looking in it for qualities it did not possess, and either ignoring or despising those it did?”

For Collingwood, this slowly produced a revolution in his thinking. He came to believe that knowledge of the world – whether it was the social or the natural world – wasn’t captured in assertive propositions like “demand falls as price rises” or “increasing penalties for breach lowers tax evasion and dole cheating”. As he put it “knowledge comes only by answering questions”. And, in order to get anywhere, “these questions must be the right questions and asked in the right order”. In suggesting that knowledge consists of answers to specific questions, Collingwood preserves the idea of knowledge as something that is constructed from a very specific point of view. In that formulation, we never have access to the God’s eye view, and seeking it might lead us astray. For the best we can do is

1. more fully to understand our own perspective; and
2. build from there according to our purposes. 

III  Embodied cognition

A nineteenth-century walking toy

If you play the two videos above, you’ll discover two approaches to human cognition and action in the world. The first example – Honda’s Asimo 1.0 is built according to a Cartesian conception of the mind/body relation. There’s a big brain in the beast and lots of servo motors moving the limbs around at its behest. At about the same time Asimo 1.0 was being shown off in 2001, Steve Collins built the robot illustrated in the second video. Its “passive dynamic” design utilises properties that are distributed throughout the robot to effect its purposes. Indeed, passive dynamic designs go back at least to nineteenth century toys that would walk down an incline. Note how the second robot seems closer to the way we’re built. That’s how we walk.

Today, embodied cognition is an interdisciplinary field involving philosophy, cognitive psychology and robotics. The robotics makes it a much more exciting form of philosophy to me. For the philosophy of cognition takes us a long way out of the zone in which our intuitions are very helpful. To give you a flavour of what I’m talking about, here’s an extract from a justly famous paper by the Australian roboticist Rodney Brooks with a catchy post-Cartesian title: “Intelligence without representation”.

In this paper I … argue for a different approach to creating artificial intelligence:

• We must incrementally build up the capabilities of intelligent systems, having complete systems at each step of the way and thus automatically ensure that the pieces and their interfaces are valid.
• At each step we should build complete intelligent systems that we let loose in the real world with real sensing and real action. Anything less provides a candidate with which we can delude ourselves.

We have been following this approach and have built a series of autonomous mobile robots. We have reached an unexpected conclusion (C) and have a rather radical hypothesis (H).

(C) When we examine very simple level intelligence we find that explicit representations and models of the world simply get in the way. It turns out to be better to use the world as its own model.

(H) Representation is the wrong unit of abstraction in building the bulkiest parts of intelligent systems.

Representation has been the central issue in artificial intelligence work over the last 15 years only because it has provided an interface between otherwise isolated modules and conference papers.

So focusing on practical progress in robotics isn’t just helping us be useful. It’s helping mark our philosophical investigations to market – keeping our thinking consistent with an objective standard (does it work, or did it crash?). In the absence of this, academics can go off on all kinds of scholastic frolics defining, redefining, disputing concepts and splitting hairs in ways that can become highly self-referential.

If there can be said to be a ‘founding’ event in the establishment of embodied cognition, it was James. J. Gibson’s publication of his final book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. Significantly Gibson was strongly drawn to the philosophy of pragmatism as a young man. He struggled to escape the pull of Cartesian thinking in cognitive psychology his whole life. Cognitive psychology was constantly trying to understand how the mind created ‘representations’ of the physical world. Consistently with the ‘radical empiricism’ of the pragmatists he insisted on trying to make his intellectual way to an understanding of cognition as a capability that had evolved within organisms to meet their adaptive needs.

As he put it:

Ever since Descartes, psychology has been held back by the doctrine that what we have to perceive is the ‘physical’ world that is described by physics. I am suggesting that what we have to perceive and cope with is the world considered as the ‘environment’.

As Matthew Crawford puts it in a book of considerable terrificness, The world beyond your head, the “fundamental contribution” of the literature on ‘embodied cognition’ is that “it puts the mind back in the world, where it belongs, after several centuries of being locked within our heads”. Not only is our ability to walk the product of ‘causal spread’ between our mind, our body and their interaction with the environment, but there’s increasing evidence that the skills we need to perceive and interact with the world, are learned in the same way. We cannot train our brain to perceive and guide our action in the world except in interaction with the world.

From infancy our minds learn to perceive, but they are not passive points of consciousness like a camera is a passive recorder of visual information. Rather learning to perceive – and thereafter perceiving itself – is always an active process. One could say that physiologically, perception arises as an adaptation to our situation in the world but even this is too passive. As Alva Noë has put it, “When we perceive, we perceive in an idiom of possibilities for movement”.

To vivify this insight and build a language to operationalise it, Gibson coined the term ‘affordances’. A flat, firm surface could be defined physically, but Gibson’s point was that our own framing of the problem was keeping us from understanding how it was apprehended by an organism’s cognitive apparatus. It would be encountered by an animal in terms of the possibilities it afforded the animal. A heavy terrestrial animal would encounter a hard surface that was fairly flat and horizontal as something that was “walk-on-able and run-over-able” Such a place wasn’t “sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp”. Gibson continues, “support for water bugs is different”:

An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. … An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. … There is only one environment, although it contains many observers with limitless opportunities for them to live in it. The theory of affordances is a radical departure from existing theories of value and meaning. It begins with a new definition of what value and meaning are. The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object. … Physics may be value-free, but ecology is not.

IV  Positive and normative economics

One important legacy of economics’ Cartesian foundations is its bifurcation of the discipline into positive and normative aspects. In the effort to make it a science, economic theorists split economics into positive and normative sub-disciplines. ‘Positive economics’ sought to understand how the economy might respond to some economic development (say a natural disaster or a policy change like a tax increase). 

In aspiration, this is as value-free – and in that sense as scientific – as forecasting the weather. But, deciding how good or bad forecast developments are is no more objective than deciding whether rain is good or bad. It’s good for some and bad for others. So ‘normative economics’ has to start with some given set of values. And only based on them can it then evaluate how good or bad some change might be.

It seems commonsensical to say that one cannot improve something without understanding it. But we do so all the time. In medicine we took aspirin, safely and effectively, long before we understood how it worked. Engineers use materials where their unique qualities provide them with valuable engineering options without knowing more about the science of those materials. Cooks use their ingredients skillfully or otherwise without knowing their chemical makeup.

A better (positive) understanding of something may improve one’s capacity to improve it. Better understanding of the pathways through which aspirin works or the causes of metal fatigue might help improve medical or engineering practice. But this is mostly likely where (positive) investigations by medical researchers as to how the world is, will be guided by the (normative) purpose of improving health.

However, even this doesn’t capture the strangeness of this cleavage of the positive and normative. For it’s hard to think of any discipline divided into ‘positive’ and ‘normative’ with the intent of vouchsafing the ‘scientific’ status of one of those divisions. Pondering this point takes us to a vexed and complex tradition of scholarship about the difference between the natural and the human sciences. 

Yet a much simpler and more compelling point can be made here. The point of the natural sciences is to understand nature, and that might be driven by numerous motives from curiosity to the desire to discover knowledge that can be exploited for our gain. By contrast the aim of what I’ll call the professional sciences is not some abstract notion of knowing more about some domain, but rather to serve a diverse range of human purposes in the field.

What dominates the content of medicine and engineering is not some abstract notion of ‘normative’ medicine and engineering to be somehow juxtaposed with ‘positive’ medicine and engineering. What’s strange about this formulation is that in medicine and engineering, we don’t investigate the world and the options available to us (positive medicine or engineering) in order to ask ‘what ought we to do’ (normative medicine or engineering).

Overwhelmingly we come to these disciplines with readymade purposes, and the discipline is more or less entirely the product of being built to serve those purposes. This order of priority seems uniquely inverted in economics, positive economics dominating normative economics both in volume of publications and in priority.¹

Verily, there were more visually compelling images to present to you O reader. But I liked this for its ecumenism. We’re uniters here at Troppo, not divider. Anyway, I posted this image and comment at the top of the post, but then I came upon a truly cool and groovy image to put up top and couldn’t help myself but put it up instead.

To be continued in Part Two …