Graukroger, Stephen - Home Alone: Cognitive Solipsism in the Early-Modern Era

03/16/2007

APA Proceedings and Addresses, Vol. 80, No. 2, 2006

Author makes a distinction between cognitive solipsism and epistemological or skeptical solipsism. Cognitive solipsism involves not realizing that there is an external world at all, where it is true of an animal that sensations are presented to it as though they are modification/changes in it's mind. Of course we are using 'mind' loosely here-- it could be just a place were perceptions come together, the 'sensus communis', a medieval hold-over into early modern philosophy where it was assumed the five senses came together to form a full representation.

Author discusses two neurological disorders that pull apart the cognitive and the affective: Capgras syndrome and Cotard syndrome.
Capgras: patient recognizes faces but feels no affective connection, often therefore thinking they are impostors
Cotard: patient doesn't think it lives in the external world, thinking instead it is dead (thinking there is no external world?)

Author's main point is that we might be looking for answers to the skeptical arguments in the wrong place: don't just start with the epistemological, also look at the affective. Author traces this dual approach back to the early moderns, who had a dialectic about the affective aspects of cognitive solipsism.

Once the science of perception developed, thinkers began to shrug off the old aristotelean claim that perception was just taking in resemblance and realized that perception was re-presentations, or representation. But now that we know it is a re-presentation, the threat of skepticism and solipsism arises.

Descartes, claimed that in order for us to be free of cognitive solipsism, we had to have both sensation and conscious judgment, which humans have, but he claimed that animals did not have the judgment part, so they were, for the most part, cognitive solipsists. They see, he thought, 'as we do when our mind is elsewhere'. [Blindsight?] The interesting thing here is that having the judgment capacity to overcome all forms of solipsism is also the feature that gives us our moral agency and personhood. It is that self-reflective capacity that Descartes identifies that unifies our cognitive life and gives us ability to reason morally (pg 70).

Locke claimed instead that perception is just successful sensation, not sensation+judgment. The difficulty here is that personal unification cannot be tied into the perceptual capacity like Descartes did. But Locke is an empiricist-- any moral agency from humans will likely come from experience one way or another.

Diderot enters the picture and realizes that if the empiricist picture is right, then someone with impaired sensation might have impaired moral agency. This was the gist of his Letter on the Blind. Diderot began to try to create a basis for morality based on the senses (pg 72). So here is an example of cognitive solipsism (or a leaning toward it) affecting our affections and moral sensibilities. [But we have two skepticisms!? One about the external world, one about other minds!]

So one of the issues is how we can have morality and ethics once we eliminate the rationalist picture and are empiricist. The other issue is whether skeptical/empirical solipsism represents a sort of bad moral fiber, or someone who is intellectually dishonest with himself.