History of Psychology 2000, Vol. 3, No.

4, 299-325

Copyright 2000 by Ihc Educational Publishing Foundation 1093-451DrtJG/$5.00 DOI: 10.1037//1093-4510.3.4.299

DESCARTES'S REGULAR, MATHEMATICS, AND MODERN PSYCHOLOGY: "The Noblest Example of All" in Light of Turing's (1936) On Computable Numbers
Geir Kirkeb0en
University of Oslo There are surprisingly strong connections between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of mathematics. One particular important example can be seen in the Regulae (1628) of Descartes. In "the noblest example of all," he used his new abstract understanding of numbers to demonstrate how the brain can be considered as a symbol machine and how the intellect's algebraic reasoning can be mirrored as operations on this machine. Even though this attempt failed, it is illuminating to explore it because Descartes launched 2 traditionsmechanistic philosophy of mind and abstract mathematicsthat would diverge until A. Turing (1936) approached symbolic reasoning in a similar "symbol machine-existence proof" way. Descartes's and Turing's thought experiments, which mark the beginning of modern psychology and cognitive science, respectively, indicate how important the development of mathematics has been for the constitution of the science of mind. Cartesianism. . . created an unbridgeable gulf between the domain of natural science . . . and the domain of the soul.1

Descartes's reflex model of behavior was once considered the modest beginnings of modern psychology.2 Recently, however, several historians have criticized the view of Descartes as one of the field's founding fathers.3 Richards, for example, in his work on the origin of psychological ideas, claimed that "no single tap-root of Psychology is present in the seventeenth century."4 Danziger, in his fascinating investigation of the gradual replacement of Aristotelian-Scholastic categories with modern ones, agreed, and wrote, "there is no reason to begin these explorations much before the year 1700."5 Danziger and Richards did indeed discuss Descartes's writings, but they both overlooked his most important contributions to a non-Aristotelian psychology, which is not his reflex model of behavior but his attempts in the Optics (1637) and the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628, henceforth Regulae)6 to bridge, in Danziger's words, the "unbridgeable gulf between the domain of natural science . . . and the domain of the soul."7 These attempts, both of which were made possible by Descartes's new
Geir Kirkeb0en was educated as a psychologist and a computer scientist. He is a professor in the program Language, Logic, and Information, ILF, University of Oslo. He has published several articles on Descartes's psychology and on the influence of computer technology on psychology in a historical perspective. I thank Stephen Gaukroger, Lars Kristiansen, and Richard Watson, who made detailed critical comments on a draft of this article. A short version of this article was presented at the conference of Cheiron, the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, June 1997, Richmond, Virginia. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Geir Kirkeb0en, Language, Logic, and Information, ILF, Pb. 1102, University of Oslo, 0317 Oslo, Norway.

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algebraic geometry, which was developed in the early 1620s, are largely overlooked by other historians of psychology too. As a result, the close link between the early development of modern mathematics and modern psychology is not recognized. My general aim in this article is to throw light on the important role that the development of a formal mathematical language played in the break with Aristotelian-Scholastic psychology and the initial development of a non-Aristotelian or "modern" one. In the 1630s Descartes explained how a mechanically conceived world, including the human body and brain, can give rise to, respectively, color perception and perception of the external world's metric properties.8 Although Descartes, as Danziger emphasized, clearly adhered to several Aristotelian categories, these theories of perception constitute the first fundamental break with the Aristotelian-scholastic understanding of the relation between man's "intellect" and the world and can therefore, according to Danziger's own criteria, be considered as the very beginnings of the modern science of mind. Descartes's theory of metric perceptions in the Optics implicitly presupposes his new algebraic geometry. However, the close connection between his mathematics and psychology is far more explicit in his failed attempt to bridge "the gulf between the domain of natural science and the soul" in what, in Rule 8 of the early Regulae, he called "the noblest example of all." Descartes called it "the noblest example of all" because it is an application of the method (contained in Rules 3-7) relating to "the problem of investigating every truth for the knowledge of which human reason is adequate" (AT396).9 In Rules 12-21 this "example" is expanded into an investigation of how our cognitive facilities operate, in particular how they operate when we reason in accordance with the algebraic method Descartes put forward in the Regulae. In short, in the "noblest example of all" he tried to show how the immaterial intellect's algebraic symbols and symbol operations can be connected to what they are about, that is, the external material world. This attempt is the topic of the present article. The "noblest example of all" is a strange and isolated thought experiment to find out how the human mind might operate when engaged in symbolic reasoning. Descartes's main problem was to show how the intellect's algebraic reasoning can have a material process in the brain as a correlate. He did this in two steps. First, he showed that the corporeal imagination (a part of the brain) can be considered to be a symbol machine, and then he tried to demonstrate how algebraic operations in general can be regarded as operations on this machine. I argue that no one before Descartes, and none of his contemporaries in the 1620s, aspired to do anything similar; neither did Descartes himself in the works he wrote after he gave up the Regulae in 1628. No one in the following 300 years attempted to account for mental phenomena in a way similar to Descartes's Regulae until Alan Turing, in his 1936 article On Computable Numbers, answered "the real question at issue . . .'What are the possible processes which can be carried out [by a human computer] in computing a number?' "10 There are obviously several differences in Descartes's and Turing's motivations and in the contexts of their works. There are clearly also fundamental differences in the way they understand both human cognition and mathematics. Nevertheless, my claim is that there are some striking similarities in the way these two young mathematicians approached what today are called mental phenomena.

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In general, they both used their own results in mathematics to demonstrate precisely how symbolic reasoning can be considered a mechanical brain process. Although more than 300 years separate Descartes's and Turing's thought experiments, there is a kind of connection between their endeavors. Both are linked to the development of an algebraic mode of thought in modern mathematics, a mode of thought that has three main characteristics: (a) the use of an operative symbolism, (b) dealing with mathematical relations rather than objects, and (c) freedom from ontological commitment. To a large extent, Descartes's thought experiment and his mathematical contributions initiated this development, and Turing's thought experiment, in a sense, completed it. Their thought experiments were also pivotal in the development of the modern science of mind. In the Regulae Descartes attempted to show precisely how a mechanistically conceived world and brain can give rise to perception and perceptual cognition. His failed endeavor in "the noblest example of all" motivated and determined his modern naturalistic theories of perception in the 1630s. In On Computable Numbers Turing presented the first precise, abstract mechanical model of how a restricted kind of mental process might be generated and controlled. Turing's article is considered by several authors not only as an inspiration and indirect cause of the cognitive revolution but also as the seminal work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.11 In a recent book, Lakoff and Johnson expressed the popular view that
Descartes created a theory of mental representationessentially the view inherited by first generation cognitive science. In this theory you can separate the problem of how we think with ideas from the problem of what the ideas are supposed to designate.12

This is wrong. Precisely because Descartes did not "separate the problem of how we think with ideas from the problem of what the ideas are supposed to designate" he considered abstract symbols, like today's "second-generation" cognitive science, as being "represented in the same system as the perceptual states that produced them."13 In Turing's thought experiment and in first-generation cognitive science, on the other hand, the symbols are inherently nonperceptual or "amodal." I show that this important difference between Descartes's and Turing's thought experiments mirrors an important difference between the initial and the final stage in the development of an algebraic mode of thought in mathematics. Finally, I argue that it is not until today's second-generation cognitive science that one finds attempts to unify perception and symbolic cognition similar to Descartes's hypothetical thought experiment in the Regulae, that is, attempts to give "existence proof that one can develop a fully functional symbolic system that is inherently perceptual."14 Descartes's main concern in the Regulae was to explain how the intellect's scientific thinking can be visualized or simulated in a passive corporeal brain. In the first part of this article I clarify the nature of this problem and how it is connected with his new advanced algebra. In the second part, I consider in detail Descartes's approach to this problem in the light of Turing's On Computable Numbers. In the third part, I discuss some recent interpretations of "the noblest example of all" in comparison to my own Turing kind of cognitive science interpretation, and I argue that even these interpretations are influenced by today's

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cognitive science. In the last part of the article I consider Descartes's mathematical psychology in the Regulae in a wide historical context, and I defend my claim that "the noblest example of all" is unique with respect to Descartes's predecessors, his own psychology after 1630, and other attempts to materialistically account for symbolic cognition in the period between 1628 and 1936. I also elaborate on the difference between, on the one hand, the amodal (nonperceptual) understanding of symbolic cognition of Turing and the first generation of cognitive science, and, on the other hand, the attempts of Descartes and secondgeneration cognitive science to ground symbolic cognition in perception and imaginations.

Descartes's Problem: The Ingenium in Abstract Reasoning

"The noblest example of all" is Descartes's reflections in the Regulae on the four cognitive facilities: "the intellect, imagination, sense-perception and memory" (AT411). In Rule 12 Descartes gave a short outline of his understanding of the last three of these faculties together with reflex behavior. He simply outlined "as briefly as possible what, for my purposes, is the most useful way of conceiving everything" (AT412). Descartes's main purpose in "the noblest example of all," as it is in the Regulae ad directionem ingenii as a whole, is to explain the "direction of the ingenii." Ingenii, or ingenium, is often translated as "mind" or "natural intelligence." However, the ingenium does not refer to the mind or intellect as such, "But when [the intellect] forms new ideas in the corporeal imagination (phantasia), or concentrates on those already formed, it is properly called [ingenium]" (AT416).15 The ingenium, according to this definition, is the power of forming and manipulating ideas or images in the corporeal imagination.16 In the Regulae Descartes emphasized that the corporeal imagination has a role to play in all kinds of reasoning, stating that "we shall not be undertaking anything without the aid of the imagination" (AT443). In Rules 13-21 he attempted to explain precisely how the ingenium mirrors the immaterial intellect's algebraic reasoning in the passive, corporeal brain. I refer to this as Descartes's problem of mind in the Regulae. This psychological problem has its origin in Descartes's new mathematics. In the early 1620s he developed a new algebraic approach to geometry, as a result of which he is often considered the father of analytic geometry. However, the insight that grounds his mathematical thought is incompatible with the fundamental notion of analytic geometry, namely, that the equation is the essential datum.17 For Descartes, algebraic equations are simply a shorthand way of performing time-consuming geometrical operations. He viewed the equations purely as a useful symbolic language in which geometrical constructions can be stored, and he emphasized that each algebraic manipulation must correspond to definite geometrical operations. Unless they can be accompanied by geometrical operations, algebraic manipulations are regarded by Descartes as the result of meaningless play with empty symbols. This understanding of algebra conforms to the dominant view of the late Middle Age and the Renaissance. In this period it was common to make a distinction between practicalthat is, appliedmathematical disciplines and

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theoretical arithmetic and geometry. Algebra was practiced as an artful procedure in practical calculating and measuring.18 To legitimize an algebraic approach to theoretical geometry, Descartes had to demonstrate the relation between the artful algebraic manipulations and scientific geometric constructions. He had to show how his abstract algebra could be grounded in geometrical operations. This is the mathematical problem that Descartes confronted in the Regulae. Descartes's new understanding of scientific reasoning and mathematical activity, together with his understanding of the intellect, turned this mathematical problem into his problem of mind. Scientific reasoning, according to Descartes in the Regulae, is algebraic mathematical reasoning. His method is intended to be a universal problem-solving method; in it, he defined a problem in general terms as "something unknown" (AT430) in a subject matter. In short, Descartes explained how, in a "certain and evident" (AT362) way, we can abstract the quantitative aspects from all kinds of subject matters, symbolize the quantities, transform the relations between them into algebraic equations, and solve the equations, that is, express the unknown quantities in terms of the known ones. The Aristotelian paradigm of mathematical activity was the dialogue. The final criterion of mathematical truth was negotiations among the community of mathematical practitioners. In the Regulae Descartes prescribed not only a new science of nature but also a new "natural" science. The naturalness consists in his conviction that logic and scientific method must be rooted in how the cognitive faculties naturally operate. The difference between an Aristotelian discursive understanding of mathematical activity and a Cartesian facultative understanding is exemplified in the different ways that Aristotle and Descartes justified inferential principles. Aristotle justified the law of noncontradiction by showing that an opponent who denies it must, in denying it, actually assume its truth. For Descartes, only the "light of reason" or the "light of nature" could justify basic inferential principles.19 He internalized mathematical activity. The paradigmatic procedure of scientific or mathematical activity becomes calculation using algebraic symbols in an individual's intellect. In the Regulae the intellect is considered to be immaterial and active, and "it is of course only the intellect that is capable of perceiving the truth" (AT411). The corporeal brain, on the other hand, is conceived as being inert and passive. Nevertheless, Descartes strongly emphasized the intellect's limitations when it acts on its own. Consequently, it "has to be assisted by imagination, senseperception, and memory if we are not to omit anything that lies within our power" (AT411). However, the intellect is also sharply divided from the corporeal body; he wrote, "[it] is no less distinct from the whole body than blood is distinct from bone, or the hand from the eye" (AT415). In short, Descartes understood scientific reasoning as algebraic mathematical reasoning in a limited intellect sharply divided from the corporeal brain and world. Descartes, then, had at least two reasons to explain how the ingenium can visualize abstract scientific reasoning in the corporeal brain. First, to legitimate the new mathematical approach to natural phenomenathat is, his physicomatematicaDescartes had to show how the abstract objects and operations of his new mathematics can be identified with "the things which are outside us and quite foreign to us" (AT398).

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The second reason is the intellect's limitations when it is operating on its own. According to Descartes, "knowledge is certain and evident cognition" (AT362). His method requires certainty at each step in the reasoning process and is, ultimately, based on the intellect's truth-perceiving abilities, that is, what Descartes, in the Regulae, calls " 'intuition' . . . the conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding" (AT368). Intuition (or vis cognoscens) is the fundamental way of knowing. Problem solving, therefore, consists in reducing everything to a form in which we can grasp it in an intuition. The intellect must visualize abstract scientific reasoning in the corporeal brain so that the vis cognoscens or "the light of nature" (AT440) can verify that every step in the reasoning process is "certain and evident... and incapable of being doubted" (AT362).

"The Noblest Example of All" in Light of Turing's On Computable Numbers

Turing's On Computable Numbers is a classic article in mathematical logic. However, Turing's approach in this article is also motivated by his attempt to answer an old problem of mind,20 namely, how to reconcile an understanding of thinking and free will or mental control with the scientific description of matter. As late as 1933 Turing was something of a Cartesian dualist with regard to this problem; he wrote, "We have a will which is able to determine the action of the atoms probably in a small portion of the brain, or possibly all over it."21 Turing based this view on quantum mechanics. However, within a few years he changed his view completely. His own mathematical results then made it possible for him to account for apparent mental control in a mechanistic and deterministic way. Contrary to Descartes in the Regulae, Turing assumed that the mind can be identified with the activity of organized matter.22 Nevertheless, there is an important similarity in Descartes's and Turing's problems of mind: Each had to show how symbolic reasoning can be described as a mechanical "brain" process. There is also a resemblance in Turing's and Descartes's mathematical problems. In On Computable Numbers, Turing answered Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem. Hilbert's statement of the problem is as follows: "The Entscheidungsproblem is solved if one knows a[n] [effective] procedure which will permit one to decide, using a finite number of operations, on the validity, respectively the statisfiability of a given [first order] logical expression."23 What I consider to be Turing's mathematical problem is limited to the central difficulty of defining the vague intuitive notion of an effective procedure or definite method. Turing had to ground this abstract notion in mechanical (symbol) operations, whereas Descartes had to ground abstract algebra in geometrical operations. Hodges described Turing's problems as follows: "The lack of any simple connection between mathematical symbols and the world of actual objects fascinated Alan .. . the task was to relate the abstract and the physical, the symbolic and the real."24 This characterization also fits Descartes's problems of mind and mathematics in the Regulae.

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Descartes's and Turing \i Symbol Machines Turing and Descartes approached their problems of mind in a similar way. The key to their solutions is what I call their symbol machines. Turing invented his Turing machine to define the vague intuitive notion of a definite method. After describing his computing machine's simple operations, Turing claimed that "It is my contention that these operations include all those which are used in the computation of a number."25 He showed, then, how complex operations can be described precisely, as a table of behavior,26 with respect to the Turing machine. Turing identified the notion of a definite method with such a table of behavior. In a sense, he grounded the abstract notion of a definite method in the operations of the Turing machine. Descartes's mathematical problem was to justify the application of algebra to geometry. According to his understanding of mathematics, he had to ground abstract algebra in geometrical operations; that is, he had to show that the basic operations of algebra have a geometrical interpretation. Descartes's new symbolic understanding of numbers made this possible. In ancient mathematics, a number is always a number of something. Arithmetic is a form of metrical geometry. Numbers are considered as line lengths. Multiplication, for example, therefore involves a dimensional change. The multiplication of three numbers (or line lengths) is a cube, and the product of four numbers is considered to be meaningless.27 In the Regulae Descartes stressed "For though a magnitude may be termed a cube . . . it should never be represented . . . otherwise than as a line or a surface" (AT457). For Descartes, line lengths and rectangles are not what numbers are; they are just a way of representing themthey are symbols. In Rule 18 of the Regulae he showed how the basic algebraic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) can be understood as geometrical operations on such figure symbols. I consider Descartes's figure-symbolic representation of numbers and the basic algebraic operations on them to be his symbol machine. Turing's Abstract-Mechanical Model of Cognition In On Computable Numbers Turing had to justify that his definition of a definite method included everything that can possibly be counted as such a method. One way he did this (in paragraph 9) is by considering what people can possibly be doing when they thinkor, more precisely, when they compute a number by following a deterministic procedure. Turing argued that human cognition in that case can be modeled using the Turing machine.28 To show this, Turing first had to make several simplifying assumptions that adapt the human computer29 to his Turing machine:
Computation [cognition] is carried out on one-dimensional paper .. . the number of symbols which may be printed is finite . . . the number of states of mind which need to be taken into account is finite... Let us imagine the operations performed . . . are so elementary that it is not easy to imagine them further divided.30

The result of Turing's analysis is an abstract model of a human being doing calculations. Turing then claimed, "We may now construct a machine to do the work of this [human] computer."31 His idea was simply that each state of mind of the human

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computer can be represented by a configuration of the corresponding Turing machine. Cognition can then be described as computations on a Turing machine. Turing demonstrated that "The behaviour of the [human] computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing, and 'his state of mind' at that moment."32 He had turned his symbol machine into an appropriate deterministic model of symbolic reasoning. "Somehow," Hodges wrote, "[Turing] perceived a link between what to anyone else would have appeared the quite unrelated questions of the foundations of mathematics, and the physical description of Mind."33 My contention is that Descartes, in the Regulae, perceived a similar kind of link between his question of the foundation of mathematics and his question of how symbolic reasoning can be described as a process in the corporeal brain. Descartes's Simplifying Assumptions on Cognition Descartes, like Turing, first made assumptions that adapted his understanding of the cognitive faculties or cognition to his symbol machine. In Rule 12 of the Regulae Descartes stated that his method is based on considerations of "only two factors . . . the knowing subjects, and the things that are the objects of knowledge" (AT411). His considerations of these two factors are subordinated to his main aim in the Regulae, that is, to use his figure symbolism to answer the question of how the ingenium can visualize algebraic reasoning as a mechanical process in the corporeal brain. With regard to "the knowing subjects," Descartes first assumed that senseperception is purely passive and that it "occurs in the same way in which wax takes on an impression from the seal" (AT412). He considered everything, even colors, to be perceivable by the senses, as figures; he wrote that "we simply make an abstraction .. . and conceive of the differences of white, blue, and red, etc. as being like the differences between . . . figures" (AT413). He further assumed that the figure the sense organ receives "is conveyed at one and the same moment" to the phantasia or the corporeal imagination that is "a genuine part of the body.. . large enough to ... take on many different figures and . . . retain them for some time" (AT414). By making these assumptions Descartes achieved two things. First, he linked the corporeal brain or imagination to the external world, which is necessary to legitimize his new physico-matematica. Second, and more important, his assumptions make it possible to consider the corporeal imagination as an organ capable of representing abstract mathematical operations. "The objects of knowledge," according to Descartes, are not the "things that are outside us" (AT398). In the Regulae he was "concerned . . . with things only in so far as they are perceived by the intellect" (AT418). When Descartes stressed in his method that one has to "distinguish the simplest things" (AT381), he therefore did not speak of the things "in accordance with how they exist in reality" (AT418). He termed " 'simple' only those things that we know so clearly and distinctly that they cannot be divided by the Mind into others that are more distinctly known" (AT418). According to Descartes, "the whole of human knowledge consists uniquely in our achieving a distinct perception of how all these simple natures contribute to the composition of other things" (AT427). These simple natures are crucial in Descartes's attempt to legitimate his new

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physico-matematica in the Regulae. Descartes postulated three kinds of simple natures: intellectual, material, and common. "Those simple natures that the intellect recognizes by means of a sort of innate light, without the aid of any corporeal image, are purely intellectual" (AT419). The material simple natures "are recognised to be present only in bodiessuch as shape, extension, and motion, etc." (AT419). They are the simplest thing the intellect perceives clearly and distinctly in the corporeal organs. The material simple natures give the intellect access to the corporeal brain. I demonstrate above that the brain, by means of Descartes's understanding of sense-perception, is mechanically connected to the external world. Thus, the material simple natures link the intellect to the corporeal world. The common simple natures "are ascribed indifferently, now to corporeal things, now to spiritsfor example, existence, unity, duration, and the like" (AT420). Below I show that both the material and the common simple natures are necessary assumptions in Descartes's explanation of how the ingenium can visualize abstract reasoning in the corporeal imagination.

Descartes's Abstract-Mechanical Description of Cognition

In Rule 13, the first rule on problem solving in the Regulae, Descartes showed how "we can abstract a problem . . . and reduce it to ... certain magnitudes in general and the comparison between them" (AT431). According to Descartes, entities conceived in the intellect are indeterminate. To render them determinate, the intellect has to represent them in the corporeal imagination. The heading of Rule 14 summarizes what one has to do: "The problem should be re-expressed in terms of the real extension of bodies and should be pictured in our imagination entirely by means of bare figures. Thus it will be perceived much more distinctly by our intellect" (AT438). Descartes's new symbolic understanding of numbers makes it possible to conceive how this can take place. The analogy Descartes saw between geometry and arithmetic, between algebraic operations on continuous quantities (line lengths) and discrete quantities (number), legitimates his algebraic approach to geometry. This analogy also makes it possible for him to explain how the ingenium can visualize the intellect's "symbol-generating abstractions" as figure symbols in the corporeal brain. He obviously had his figure symbolism in mind when, in Rule 14, he claimed that "nothing can be ascribed to magnitudes in general that cannot also be ascribed to any species of magnitude [particular instance]" (AT440-1). Descartes's figure symbols can represent every quantity, and the basic algebraic operations can be performed on them. It is also possible, then, to imagine how magnitudes in general can be represented in the corporeal imagination. The ingenium does not merely re-express abstract problems in terms of figure symbols in the imagination. It also is able to turn its focus to "ideas" the corporeal imagination offers it and "completely .. . reduce continuous magnitudes to a set" (AT451). The ingenium then transforms the continuous magnitudes into corporeal figure symbols in the imagination. These figure symbols correspond to the letters in Descartes's new algebra. Precisely because Descartes considered the figures in the corporeal imagination to be symbols, and not simply geometrical figures, he stated that "We have as much reason to abstract propositions from geometrical

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figures, if the problem has to do with these, as we have from any other subject matter" (AT452). Descartes's assumptions about the simple natures are necessary to explain both how this figure symbolismhis symbol machinecan be implemented in the corporeal imagination and how the intellect has access to the figure symbols. The material simple natures are the basic constituents of these figure symbols, and the intellect, by definition, has clear and distinct access to them. The common simple natures are necessary to explain how the ingenium turns continuous magnitudes or figures received through sense-perception into figure symbols. To do this, the ingenium must apply a "unity . . . the common nature t h a t . . . all the things that we are comparing must participate in equally" (AT499) to the continuous magnitudes in the imagination. "If no determinate unit is specified in the problem, we may adopt as a unit either one of the magnitudes already given or any other magnitude, and this will be the common measure of all the others" (AT450).34 The ingenium, then, approaches the magnitudes in the corporeal imagination in the same way that Descartes turned geometrical problems into algebraic equations in his new algebra. Descartes presented for the first time the idea that abstract symbols can be represented in a corporeal brain, and he explained precisely how symbols are coded into brain states. His new mathematics made this possible. In Descartes's view people do not manipulate concepts according to formal laws; they link simple natures intuitively perceived by means of the common natures. They are, in a sense, Descartes's rules of inference, "those common notions that are, as it were, links that connect other simple natures together, and whose self-evidence is the basis for all the rational inferences we make" (AT420). Such an understanding stands in sharp contrast to how Turing comprehended rules of inference. For Turing, and modern logicians, rules of inference depend only on the physical forms of the expressions and not at all on their meaning or the logician's intuition. Turing considered each state of mind of the human computer as being represented by a configuration of the corresponding Turing machine. For Descartes, each perceptual state could be represented by a configuration of line patterns, a symbolic representation, in the corporeal imagination. His assumptions about the knowing subjects and the objects of knowledge turn the corporeal imagination into a symbol machine with the symbols built up by rectilinear figures and line lengths. Descartes attempted to show that scientific reasoning as prescribed by his method can be duplicated by the ingenium as a process in the corporeal imagination, which is considered to be such a symbol machine. Hodges claimed that Turing machines "offered a bridge, a connection between abstract symbols and the physical world."35 Descartes's symbol machine played a similar role in his attempt to anchor the intellect's abstract reasoning in the corporeal brain. The figures in the imagination are abstract symbols and, as part of the corporeal imagination, they are also corporeal entities connected to the external world. Descartes's figure symbolism together with his mechanistic model of sense-perception and his notion of the simple natures made it possible for him to show exactly how the corporeal imagination can act as a bridge between abstract thinking and the physical world.

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Turing's and Descartes's Existence Proofs Turing claimed that the most complex procedures can be built out of elementary states and positions, reading and writing. He showed that any definite method that can be performed by his abstract human computer can also be performed by his Turing machine, and vice versa.36 He also showed that one single machine, the universal Turing machine, can take over the work of any machine. By doing this, he implicitly gave an existence proof for the possibility that anything performed by a human computer can, in principle, also be performed by a Turing machine. Three hundred years before Turing's time Descartes attempted to prove that all operations in algebraic scientific reasoning can be simulated in a clear and evident way in his symbol machine, that is, that they can be described as concrete operations on figure symbols represented in the corporeal imagination. Descartes failed. He wrote out only the headings of Rules 19, 20, and 21. The solutions to the problems he posed in these headings demand complex algebraic calculations, and it is not possible to show that such complex scientific cognition can be simulated in a clear and distinct way in his concrete-logical framework. He abandoned the Regulae in 1628, possibly for this reason.37
"The Noblest Example of All" and/as Cognitive Science

Canguilhem maintained that "The discipline whose history one is studying actually changes with each epistemological break."38 With respect to "the noblest example of all," this claim makes sense. The so-called cognitive revolution in the 1950s was an epistemological break between behaviorism and cognitivism. Cognitive science, the main result of this "break," has indirectly influenced most recent interpretations of Descartes's work.39 In more than 200 years since the first publication of the Regulae in 1701, no one read into it what I emphasize above and what has been emphasized by several interpreters in recent years. Gibson, for example, in an extensive review of Descartes's Regulae in Mind in 1898, devoted no attention at all to the aspects of the Regulae that I stress.40 Before the rise of cognitive science, there was no basis for interpreting Descartes's understanding of the corporeal imagination in Rule 14 as, for example, Schuster did: "The imagination is an ontologically suitable 'screen' upon which extension-symbols can be manipulated."41 The Turing machine and its tape are fundamental to this interpretation. Such an interpretation presupposes the idea of coding in the nervous system that wasafter Descartesfirst developed by Turing, Shannon, McCulloch, Pitts, and later cognitive scientists.42 It is a curious fact that the first person to note that Descartes, in the Regulae, attempted to ground his abstract mathematics in a symbolism consisting of real, concrete line lengths depicted in the imaginationnamely, the mathematician and historian Jacob Klein, in his brilliant work on Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebradid so the same timeand from a similar stance43as Turing worked out his On Computable Numbers.

"The Noblest Example of All" as a Turing Kind of Cognitive Science

In most respects, my interpretation of Descartes's "noblest example of all" fits other recent interpretations. In one important respect, however, "the noblest

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example of all" looks quite different in my Turing kind of cognitive science interpretation. The essence of my interpretation is that Descartes's considerations of the cognitive faculties in Rule 12 are wholly determined by his main aim in the Regulae, namely, to explain how the ingenium may visualize the immaterial intellect's algebraic reasoning in the corporeal brain. From a diachronistic perspective, the relation between Rule 12 and Rules 14-18 looks quite different. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, theorists strongly psychologized logic; that is, they emphasized the basis of logic in the activities of the mind. For example, Sepper wrote that
Late Scholastic logicians took the established distinction between formal and material logic, the one culminating in syllogistic, the other in the analysis of the acts of the mind, and attributed primacy to the latter. Formal logic was no more than an abstraction from material logic.44

From such a perspective it is natural to consider Rule 12 as being an independent "inquiry into mental function and perception"45 and, further, to consider both Descartes's method and his explanation of the ingenium in Rules 14-18 as being based on his analysis of the acts of the mind in Rule 12. The way Descartes presented "the noblest example of all" was probably influenced by psychologized Scholastic logic.46 However, I cannot see that Rule 12 contains any inquiry into perception and mental functioning at all. Descartes wrote, "I should like to explain . . . what each particular faculty does; but I lack the space" (AT411). This is a rather direct way of saying that an inquiry into the cognitive faculties is not the issue. As I show above, Descartes assumed in Rule 12 exactly what is necessary, and hardly anything else, to explain in Rules 14-18 how the ingenium operates and how the intellect has access to the external world. Rule 12 is not therefore an independent analysis of the acts of the mind or our "material logic" from which Descartes then later abstracted his formal logic or method. The formal logic (presented in Rules 14-18) determined how Descartes considered cognitive faculties or material logic in Rule 12.47 Descartes worked out Rule 12 in 1628. The mathematical ideas he presented in Rules 14-18 date from several years earlier.48 This is also a reason for considering Descartes's investigations into the cognitive faculties or material logic as being shaped by his formal logic. Another reason is his introduction of the simple natures. After giving up the Regulae in 1628 he never explicitly used the notion of simple natures again. This indicates that he invented the simple natures in the Regulae explicitly in order to explain the operations of the ingenium and how the intellect can have access to the figure symbols in the corporeal imagination. Descartes's main purpose in Rule 12 was clearly not to explain how perception and mental functioning take place but only how they might take place. He stressed again and again the hypothetical character of his suggestions. He told readers, for example, "Of course you are not obliged to believe that things are as I suggest" (AT412). The following extract makes this even clearer:
To this end, as before, certain assumptions must be made in this context that perhaps not everyone will accept. But even if they are thought to be no more real than the imagery circles that the astronomers use to describe the phenomena they

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study, that matters little provided they help us to pick out the kind of apprehension of any given thing that may be true and to distinguish it from the kind that may be false. (AT417) Only his assumption on sense-perception must be thought of in the way Descartes suggested, namely, It should not be thought that I have a mere analogy in mind here: we must think of the external shape of the sentient body as being really changed by the objects in the same way as the shape of the surface of the wax is altered by the seal. (AT412)49 To summarize, "the noblest example of all" must be understood as a thought experiment to find out how a mechanically conceived world can give rise to perception and abstract reasoning. In Rule 12 Descartes seemed only to set up a new framework that made it possible for him later, in the Regulae, to imagine how a mathematical science of a mechanistic world is possible. Hodges's general characterization of Turing's thought experiment in On Computable Numbers also fits quite well with Descartes's "noblest example of all": But it was not only a matter of abstract mathematics, not only a play of symbols, for it involved thinking about what people did in the physical world. It was not exactly science, in the sense of making observations and predictions. All he had done was to set up a new model, a new framework. It was a play of imagination .. . What he had done was to combine . . . a naive mechanistic picture of the mind with the precise logic of pure mathematics.50

"The Noblest Example of All" in the History of Psychology

We have seen that, in "the noblest example of all," Descartes attempted to demonstrate in two steps how the immaterial intellect's algebraic reasoning can be considered as a material brain process. First, he considered the corporeal imagination as a figure symbol machine. Second, he attempted to demonstrate that the intellect's algebraic reasoning can, in general, be duplicated as a process on this machine. In the historical sketch below I substantiate my claims that one does not find a similar two-step "symbol machine-existence proof approach to explaining symbolic reasoning again until Turing's On Computable Numbers and that it is not until today's second-generation cognitive science that one finds attempts at a modal two-step symbol machine-existence proof approach to symbolic cognition, as one finds rudiments of in Descartes' s failed project in the Regulae. I first briefly consider "the noblest example of all" with respect to Aristotelian-inspired Scholastic cognitive psychology and abstraction theory. "The Noblest Example of All" and Descartes's Ancestors The way in which Descartes attempted to legitimate his new abstract physicomathematica in the Regulae is, to a large extent, in accordance with a theoretical understanding of abstraction and abstract reasoning that was widely accepted in Europe from the 13th to the 17th century. This understanding, based on Aristotle's cognitive psychology, assumes that we grasp external reality through a process of abstraction from physical sensation.51 Abstract concepts were taken to be images

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abstracted, or drawn out, from sensory impressions, and thinking was understood as being grounded in such images in accordance with the Aristotelian dictum "There is no thought without phantasms,"52 that is, there is no thought without corporeal images in view of which the power of understanding exercises its activity. Descartes's "noblest example of all," in which he stressed the immaterial intellect's dependency on the corporeal imagination, stands in this Aristotelian tradition.53 Descartes's "embodied" and "imagistic" psychology in the Regulae is, in many respects, traditional. For example, his comparison of external sensation with a stamp in wax is an analogy that was also used by the early Stoics (e.g., Zeno), and his division of the cognitive faculties into sense perception, imagination, memory, and the intellect is a simplification of a conceptualization that dates back to Avicenna (980-1037 AD). Avicenna distinguished between the intellect and the five external and internal senses. He also gave the internal senses precise bodily locations in the ventricles of the brain.54 With minor modifications, Avicenna's conceptualization, which can be considered an elaboration of the Aristotelian distinction between a sensitive and an intellectual soul, dominated the Middle Ages. The controversial question was how the immaterial intellect operates within the system of cognitive faculties.55 Avicenna himself assumed that the corporeally located internal senses serve the rational soul, but he argued that the intellect requires such help only for the preliminary stages of thought. In contrast to Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas insisted, in the Summa Theologiae (1273), that the intellect remains dependent on sense impression even while thinking, and he explicitly repeated Aristotle's dictum, which had been ignored by Avicenna, that is, non contingit intelligere sine phantasmate. Aquinas's theory places the intellect in close collaboration with the body. According to Aquinas, the human intellect
abstracts a universal from many particulars, but it does not then take leave of the sensible forms from which it has derived this knowledge, for in thinking of a universal, man always employs some phantasm, just as the geometer uses a diagram.57

Aquinas's emphasis on the intellect's dependency on the brain, as well as the analogy he drew between phantasmata and geometrical diagrams, anticipated central ideas in Descartes's "noblest example of all." Vesalius's anatomical findings, illustrated in detail in his De humani corporis fabrica (1543), were probably the main cause of the gradual decline of the neuropsychological theory of the inner senses. His anatomical discoveries undermined the physiological basis of the theory.58 Vesalius expressed the problem raised by his anatomical studies as follows: "I cannot understand to my satisfaction how the brain performs its office in imagination, reasoning, cogitation and memory."59 In the Renaissance it was still common to assume that the internal senses acted to bridge the gap between external sensation and the abstract operation of the intellect.60 The specific novelty of "the noblest example of all" is Descartes's attempt to answer Vesalius's "how" question in respect to algebraic reasoning,

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that is, his attempt to explain precisely how the corporeal imagination may act as a bridge between abstract algebraic reasoning and the physical world. Symbolic Reasoning and the Brain in Descartes's Modern Naturalistic Psychology In the Regulae Descartes assumed that the intellect does not have direct access to the external world. The intellect can only inspect material figures, built up from simple natures, in the brain. This assumption constitutes a fundamental break with the Aristotelian tradition.61 However, Descartes maintained another central Aristotelian-Scholastic assumption, namely that there is a perceptual relation between the intellect and what the intellect perceives, that is, the figures in the corporeal imagination. In his writings after abandoning "the noblest example of all," this assumption is also abandoned, and he replaced it with the assumption that the relation between brain activity and the intellect is a "causal" (or occasional) one. Probably motivated by his failure in "the noblest example of all," he now considered ideas or imaginations as consequences of mechanical brain movements.62 Descartes's naturalistic psychology as developed after 1629 is founded on this radical new epistemological hypothesis. In the Regulae he showed how it is possible to consider reflex behavior and sense-perception, memory and perceptual cognition as a result of mechanical processes in corporeal brain organs. However, his descriptions were abstract and purely functionalistic. He only sketched the structure of a causal path that could realize them. In his naturalistic psychology after 1629 he speculated on the particular realization of these causal paths. Historians of psychology have focused almost exclusively on Descartes's dualistic philosophy in the Meditations (1640) and his purely physiological theories in I'Homme (ca. 1633), in particular his theory of reflex behavior. However, Descartes also discussed what today one would consider to be psychological phenomena in ways clearly distinct from his concern with the status of sensory knowledge, on the one hand, and from his purely mechanistic physiology, on the other. An example of particular interest to my discussion is his theory of metric perceptions in the Optics. I have discussed this theory in another article,63 and here I mention only the crucial role of Descartes's new algebraic geometry and the lack of any attempt to specify the bodily correlate of the symbolic inferences (or "natural geometry") that he attributed to the intellect in his theory of metric perception. For Descartes, explaining perception was of decisive importance, partly because "the principle argument which induced philosophers to posit real accidents was that they thought that sense-perception could not be explained without them."64 In particular, it was important to explain metric perception, that is, the perception of objects' "primary qualities," and the distance to them, to "bridge the gulf between natural science and the domain of the soul" (i.e., of the scientist who makes the observations). Descartes clearly recognized that a new natural science demanded, in particular, a new psychology of metric perception. In the Optics Descartes assumed that when a person looks at an object, light beams reflected on its surface hit the eye and (mechanically) activate a set of nerve endings on the retina. Descartes then had to explain how a set of nerve endings

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set into motion can have sufficient representative content to represent the geometrical aspects of the perceived object. He answered this question in his analytic geometry.65 In Greek mathematics, shapes or figures cannot be reduced to magnitudes. Consequently, from the perspective of Euclidean geometry it is not possible to imagine how a set of activated points on the retina can represent geometrical figures. Seen from the standpoint of Descartes's algebraic geometry, a transformation from activated points on the retina to perceived figures is, however, conceivable. Tn his geometry he demonstrated how all geometrical figures can be understood as being generated from geometrical points. He considered a line to be the result of a point's movement, a plane to be the result of a line's movement, and so on.66 As a result, his new algebraic geometry served as an existence proof for the possibility of bridging "the gulf between the domain of natural science . . . and the domain of the soul" in his theory of metric perception in the Optics, as it did (in a quite different way) in the "noblest example of all" in the Regulae. In the Regulae Descartes maintained a "critique of pure reason." The ingenium, and the brain, have an important role to play in that work in all kinds of thinking, as well as when one is engaged in abstract scientific reasoning. For example, Descartes argued in the Regulae that "Those who attribute wonderful and mysterious properties to numbers" (AT445) do not understand the intellect's limitations when it operates independently of the corporeal imagination. In the 1620s he required that it must always be possible to imagine how certain kinds of brain processes may correlate with, or mirror, the intellect's abstract reasoning. After abandoning the Regulae, Descartes departed from this requirement.67 In his later writings he never speculated on the bodily correlate of the inferences he attributed to the intellect, for example, the algebraic inferences (or "natural geometry") in his theory of metric perception. In short, the radical change in Descartes's understanding of the relation between the intellect and the material brain in 1628-1629 meant that a project such as the "noblest example of all" was no longer of interest to him.

The Absence of a Two-Step "Symbol Machine-Existence Proof Approach to Cognition Until 1936 Descartes's contemporary, Hobbes, went a step further in explaining cognition materialistically. Hobbes reduced physics to matter in motion and equated mental activity with the latter. Contrary to both Aristotelian and Cartesian theories of cognition, Hobbes denied that human beings, unlike animals, have an immaterial intellect; he wrote: "The Imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature induced with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signes, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beast."68 Hobbes also formulated general principles of association in order to explain the regularity in people's thought or chains of imaginations. However, Hobbes did not approach symbolic cognition in the two-step "symbol machineexistence proof kind of way that Descartes used in the Regulae. Hobbes, like La Mettrie, Hartley, Pavlov, Hull, and others who put forward materialistic theories of symbolic cognition in the 300 years after Descartes's Regulae, assimilated

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symbolic reasoning directly to the brain mainly by simply postulating that particular physiological or mechanistic principles underlie such reasoning. Leibniz, in his logic, came far closer than Descartes to the modern notion of a formal system (or symbol system). In contrast to Descartes, Leibniz maintained both a mechanistic (syntactic) concept of inference and a related idea about mechanizing proofs.69 His "universal characteristic" (or "artificial language") is based on these ideas. However, Leibniz did not combine his understanding of a formal system with a mechanistic understanding of the human mind.70 In general, it was not common among 1 Sth-century thinkers working on machinery that could simulate thought processes to draw "the disparaging analogy between mind and machine."71 One reason for this was simply that "the actual calculating machines had proved such dismal practical failures."72 Neither did Babbage, early in the 19th century, try to explain cognition on the basis of his impressive Analytic Engine.73 It is common to attribute a disembodied understanding of cognition to the dualist Descartes. However, Descartes never explained (what is now called) cognition or cognitive processes without taking the brain and body into account. Whether cognition was beyond the powers of a corporeal machine was, for him, an empirical question.74 Not until the period after Descartes's death did a disembodied analysis of mental phenomena attain a prominent position, in particular within British empiricism.75 Locke, for example, explicitly delimited himself away from the corporeal correlate of mental processes.76 Even if Locke and (most of) his followers within British empiricism have as their aim to "mechanize the mind," they do not attempt to relate mental functioning to the material brain. The British empiricists' disembodied approach to mental phenomena was partly influenced by the Newtonian scientific ideals that characterized the 18th century. Particularly influential was Newton's explicit dissociation from the Cartesians' speculative mechanical hypotheses in science.77 In contrast to Descartes, Newton accepted the use of (mechanically) "unexplainable" concepts (gravitation, mass, etc.) in scientific explanations. The success of Newtonian physics discredited speculative mechanical models and legitimized the use of "unexplainable" concepts within epistemology, psychology, and physiology, too. For example, Hume, who obviously assumed that cognition is a result of material processes, did not speculate on the mechanisms that associate ideas (as Descartes, in fact, did). Hume legitimated the fundamental concept of association by drawing a parallel with the "unexplained" concept of gravitation or attraction in physics; he wrote, "here is a kind of ATTRACTION, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural, and to show itself in as many and as varied forms."78 One of Descartes's main motivations in the 1620s was to undermine vitalistic and animistic theories that flourished in the Renaissance.79 Mainly for that reason, he postulated that matter is "inert," a view that dominated mechanistic theories until Newton reintroduced "forces" into matter. Newton's success legitimated the introduction of vitalistic forces within physiology as well.80 It was partly for this reason that vitalism dominated science and philosophy in the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century.81 Major philosophers in this period, such as Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, also argued against the assumption that organisms and life processes can be considered to be processes in "inert matter." In general,

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Newtonianism did not encourage attempts at considering symbolic reasoning as represented (or realized) as processes in a brain considered to be a (hypothetical) symbol machine. In the middle of the 19th century there was a move from vitalism to mechanism in physiology, and the second part of the century was dominated by a strong mechanical conception of man. However, no one at that time seems to have any idea of how the material brain may perform symbolic reasoning or inferences. This is indicated by Pavlov's reaction to Helmholtz's concept of unconscious inference: "Evidently, what the genius of Helmholtz referred to as 'unconscious conclusion' corresponds to the mechanism of the conditioned reflex."82 As late as 1942 Boring characterized "the concept of unconscious inference . . . [as] a negative explanation . . . essentially a confession of ignorance."83 Boring's statement is representative of the attitude prevalent in the first half of this century toward the idea that unconscious inferences are taking place in the brain, an idea that most psychologists today consider to be unproblematic. Pavlov himself did not make any attempt to explain precisely how particular symbolic inferences can be performed by conditioned reflexes. Hull's attempts in the 1920s to demonstrate that machinery can do what mental processes do were probably the most ambitious ones within psychology until the 1940s. Hull constructed, for example, a mechanical machine to calculate correlation coefficients.84 However, Hull did not seem to have any idea as to how (symbolic) inferences can be realized in the nervous system, and he did not give any consideration at all to the brain as a (universal) symbol machine. Neither Descartes (1628) nor Turing (1936) took neuropsychology into consideration in their thought experiments, and neither of them provided realistic ideas as to how symbolic inferences are represented in the material brain. The first concrete hypothesis of how the brain may work as a symbol machine was put forward by McCulloch and Pitts in 1943.85 They established the logical principles of the brain as a computer by combining the insights of Turing and others in logic and automata theory with the view of the nervous system as a structurally and functionally coordinated network of neurons or nerve cells.86 The acknowledged fact that the brain was first considered as a symbol machine in 1943 is in itself a good reason for doubting that anyone in the period between Descartes and Turing gave the same kind of consideration to symbolic reasoning as they did in their thought experiments. Descartes's and Turing's Thought Experiments and the "Algebraic Mode of Thought" Descartes's mathematical contributions were a major factor in the initial stage of the development of the algebraic mode of thought in mathematics.87 In particular, his new abstract understanding of numbers was an important break with the intuitive geometrical mode of thought that characterized mathematics from antiquity until the early 17th century. Descartes's thought experiment in the Regulae was motivated by this geometrical mode of thinking in mathematics. However, it was his main contribution to an algebraic mode of thoughtthat is, his abstract understanding of numbersthat made it possible for him to consider the imagination as a figure (perceptual) symbol machine.

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With the gradual development of an algebraic mode of thought during the 200 years after Descartes, mathematicians moved further and further away from the intuitive physical world and entered an abstract world of structures. Hilbert, who considered mathematics to be a completely abstract enterprise, is the central figure in the final stage of this development. In the sense that Turing in On Computable Numbers gave a final answer to the last one of Hilbert's three general questions, he concluded the development of the algebraic mode of thought in mathematics. The fully developed algebraic mode of thought in mathematics contributed, by means of Turing (1936), the development of formal languages, the computer metaphor, and so on, to the cognitive revolution and a new kind of cognitive psychology in the late 1950s. This psychology considers the mind to be a symbol system and cognition to be symbol manipulations. Compared to earlier theories of cognition, the symbol system theories incorporate three important novelties. First, they have the ability to represent abstract concepts, to combine symbols productively, to represent propositions, and so onthat is, they are fully functional conceptual systems. Second, the theories themselves have the potential to duplicate or simulate the phenomena they are intended to explain. In a sense, they are themselves existence proof for the possibility of their own correctness. Third, the theories are amodal in the sense that the symbols' "internal structures bear no correspondence to the perceptual states that produced them."88 In particular, the distinction that this new symbol system psychology makes between conception and perception is an important novelty in the history of psychology. Throughout recorded history, from Aristotle's dictum "no thoughts without phantasms" until well into the present century, cognition had been considered and understood as being grounded in perception and imagination.89 It was the completion of a fully algebraic (and amodal) mode of thought in mathematics that both directly and indirectly made possible and legitimized abstract, amodal symbol system theories of cognition in psychology as well.

The "Noblest Example of All" and Second-Generation Cognitive Science

In the first decades after the cognitive revolution, cognitive science was dominated by amodal symbol system theories of cognition. I mention above the strengths of these theories. However, they also have obvious shortcomings. Two related problems are directly linked to their amodality: the symbol transduction problem and the symbol grounding problem. The first problem is that the symbol system theories do not provide a satisfactory account of the process that maps perceptual states into amodal symbols, and the second is that the theories do not explain how symbol meaning is grounded in something other than just more meaningless symbols. Contrary to first-generation cognitive science, Descartes attempted in the "noblest example of all" to provide a solution to both the symbol transduction problem and the symbol grounding problem. He attempted, in particular, to answer a question similar to the one raised by the symbol grounding problem, namely, "How can the semantic interpretation of a formal symbol system be made intrinsic to the system, rather than just parasitic on the meanings in our heads?"90 In fact, his main motivation in the Regulae was to demonstrate that it is possible

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to imagine how the immaterial intellect's algebraic reasoning or symbol operations are connected to what they are about, that is, the external material world. A central topic in today's second-generation cognitive science is how to reunite conception and perception. Among others, Barsalou and his colleagues have attempted in several articles to develop "modal" perceptual symbol system theories that have the same strengths as amodal theories but without their shortcomings. They attempt to do this by proceeding in a way which, on a general level, has similarities to the two-step symbol machine-existence proof approach that Descartes followed when he united algebraic conception and perception in the "noblest example of all." Compare how Descartes considered the corporeal imagination as a figure symbol machine above with the "first step" in Barsalou's most recent attempt to consider the brain as a "perceptual symbol machine":
A perceptual state can contain two components: an unconscious neural representation of physical input, and an optional conscious experience. Once a perceptual state arises, a subset of it is extracted via selective attention and stored permanently in long term memory. On later retrievals, this perceptual memory can function symbolically, standing for referents in the world, and entering into symbol manipulation. As collections of perceptual symbols develop, they constitute the representations that underlie cognition.91

Descartes's intended "second step" was to provide an existence proof for the possibility that the brain, considered as a figure (perceptual) symbol machine, can represent and visualize algebraic concepts and operations in general. The "second step" taken by Barsalou and his colleagues was "to establish an existence proof that a completely perceptual approach is sufficient for establishing a fully functional symbolic system."92 So far, no one has managed to demonstrate how a perceptual symbol system can be considered as a fully conceptual system. There is still a long way to go.
Clearly, theories of perceptual symbols and the evidence for them remain to be developed considerably in many regards. At this time, this approach primarily attempts to provide an existence proof that, in principle, perception and conception can be united in a way that does not require amodal symbols.93

Moreover, Descartes's failed attempt in the Regulae was limited to demonstrating the possibility that conception (of a certain kind) can be united or grounded in perception and imagination. The fact that it is still hard to see how a modal or perceptual symbol system can function as a conceptual system is probably the best argument for my claim that there is no evidence of a two-step symbol machineexistence proof approach to symbolic cognition in the period between 1628 and 1936, when cognition was understood imagistically or modally.

Conclusion
It was not, as Danziger claimed, Cartesian dualism that created "an unbridgeable gulf between the domain of natural science . . . and the domain of the soul." It was the new natural science (of Galileo, Descartes, and others) itself that created this gulf. In fact, Descartes' s problem of bridging the gulf between the immaterial

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intellect's algebraic reasoning and the material world in the Regulae was the problem of dualism as he first encountered it. Jacob Klein epitomized the importance to natural science of Descartes's attempt at solving this problem in the Regulae: Descartes' great idea now consists of identifying . . . the "general" object of this tnathesis universaliswhich can be represented and conceived only symbolically with the "substance" of the world, with corporeality as "extensio." Only by virtue of this identification did symbolic mathematics gain that fundamental position which it has never since lost.94 My main point is that Descartes's attempt at legitimizing a new mathematical physics also entailed a first fundamental break with Aristotelian-Scholastic psychology and that his failure in the "the noblest example of all" was (probably) the main reason why, in the late 1620s, he assumed that ideas must be understood as (mysterious) consequences of brain movements. On the basis of this radical new epistemological hypothesis, Descartes developed his "modern" naturalistic psychology in the 1630s.95 Descartes's two-step symbol machine-existence proof approach to bridging the gulf between abstract reasoning and the material brain in the Regulae is based on his most important contribution to the algebraic mode of thought in mathematics, namely, his new abstract understanding of numbers. No one, until Turing in 1936 completed the development of an algebraic mode of thought in mathematics, approached symbolic reasoning in a similar way. His thought experiment inspires, directly and indirectly, a new view of cognition as abstract manipulations of amodal symbols. Thus, the beginnings of both modern psychology and cognitive science were influenced by a young mathematician's new symbolic formalisms and calculation techniques. It is well known that the creation of a formal mathematical language was necessary for the constitution of modern mathematical physics. Descartes's and Turing's thought experiments indicate that the development of a formal mathematical language has also been important to the constitution of the modern science of mind. Notes 1. Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (London: Sage, 1997), 55. 2. See, for example, Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1950). 3. See, for example, Danziger, Naming the Mind; Roger Smith, "Does the History of Psychology Have a Subject?" History of the Human Sciences \ (1988): 147-177; Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas. Pan I. 1650-1850 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). 4. Richards, Mental Machinery, 92. 5. Danziger, Naming the Mind, 15. 6. Rene Descartes, "Rules for the Direction of the Mind" and "Optics," in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 9-78 and 152-175.

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7. Several of Descartes's contemporaries claimed that his reflex model of behavior was a plagiarism of a theory put forward by the Spanish doctor Gomez Pereira in 1554. See Javier Bandres and Rafael Llavona, "Minds and Machines in Renaissance Spain: Gomez Pereira's Theory of Animal Behavior," Journal of the History of the Behavioral sciences 28 (1992): 158-168. Dcscartes's psychology in the Regulae and the Optics, on the other hand, was based on his new algebraic geometry and, for that reason, clearly not anticipated by anyone; see below. 8. It is arguable that Descartes's theory of color perception (in the eighth discourse of the Meteorology, 1637) worked out in 1629 is the first theory in "modern" biological psychology and that his theory of metric perception in the Optics (1637) is the first mechanicalmathematical (cognitive science kind of) explanation of a mental phenomenon; see, for example, Geir Kirkeb0en, "Descartes' Psychology of Vision and Cognitive Science: The Optics (1637) in the Light of Marr's (1982) Vision," Philosophical Psychology I I (1998): 161-182. 9. The quotations from the Regulae are adapted from Descartes, "Rules for Direction of the Mind." However, I give only the Adam and Tannary (AT, volume X) numbers in Oeuvres de Descartes, eds. C. Adam and P. Tannery, (rev. ed., Paris: Vrin/C.N.R.S., 1964-1976). The AT numbers are also given in the translation of the Regulae by Cottingham et al. 10. Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungproblem," in The Undecidable, ed. Martin Davis (1936; reprint, New York: Raven Press, 1965), 135. 11. See, for example, Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma. (London: Burnett, 1983); Justin Leiber, An Invitation to Cognitive Science (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1991); Stuart Shanker, "Turing and the Origins of AI," Philosophia Mathematica 3 (1995): 52-85. See Diane Proudfoot and B. Jack Copeland, "Turing, Wittgenstein and the Science of the Mind," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 72 (1994): 497-519, for a critique of such an interpretation of Turing's article On Computable Numbers, 12. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 407. 13. Lawrence W. Barsalou, "Perceptual Symbol Systems," Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1999): 523. 14. Robert L. Goldstone and Lawrence W. Barsalou, "Reuniting Perception and Conception," Cognition 65 (1998): 236. 15. Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translate the last part of the quoted sentence as: "The proper term for it is 'native intelligence' " (AT416). See Dennis Sepper, Descartes' Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), for a thorough discussion of Descartes's use of the term ingenium in his early writings. 16. When Descartes referred to the imagination as a physical organ in the brain he commonly named it phantasia. Sometimes he also used the term corporeal imagination. The term imagination in the Regulae usually refers to the result of the knowing force or intellect applying itself to the phantasia. 17. See, for example, Timothy Lenoir, "Descartes and the Geometrization of Thought: The Methodological Background of Descartes' 'Geometric', Historia Mathematica 6 (1979): 355-379. 18. See, for example, Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans, by Eva Brann (1934; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). 19. See Steven Gaukroger, Cartesian Logic: An Essay on Descartes' Conception on Inference (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989), for a full treatment of what Gaukroger described as a shift from "a discursive to a facultative conception of inference" (p. 4).

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20. Hodges, Alan Turing, showed that Turing "was profoundly concerned to find a scientific description of Mind long before his encounter with mathematical logic" (p. 63). My interpretation of Turing's On Computable Numbers is inspired by Hodges's biography of Alan Turing. 21. Turing, quoted in Hodges, Alan Turing, 66. 22. In his later articles Turing explicitly made such an assumption about the human mind. See, for example, Alan Turing, "Intelligent Machinery," in Machine Intelligence 5, eds. B. Meltzer and D. Michie (1947; reprint, Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1969), 3-23; and Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59 (1950): 433-460. In his 1936 article, Turing only discussed a human being performing calculations. However, his approach in this article too was, as Hodges convincingly demonstrated in Alan Turing, inspired by his concern with finding a scientific description of mind as a whole. 23. Hilbert and Ackerman, translated and quoted in Robin Gandy, "The Confluence of Ideas in 1936," in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, ed. Rolf Herken (Vienna: Springer, 1994), 58. Related to his program for an investigation into the foundations of mathematics, Hilbert posed three questions at a congress in 1928. First, is mathematics complete; that is, can every statement either be proved or disproved in a formal calculus? Second, is mathematics consistent; that is, can untrue statements never be arrived at by a sequence of valid steps of proof in the formal calculus? Third is the question that Turing answered negatively in On Computable Numbers: Is Mathematics decidable ? 24. Hodges, Alan Turing, 86. 25. Turing, On Computable Numbers, 118. 26. A table of behavior is simply a set of quintuples (of the form: old state, symbol scanned, new state, symbol written, direction of motion) that describes the relation among the machine's states, inputs, and outputs. 27. See, for example, Steven Gaukroger, "Aristotle on Intelligible Matter," Phronesis 25 (1980): 187-197. 28. In fact, as Gandy pointed out in The Confluence of Ideas, Turing machines appear as a result, as a codification, of Turing's analysis of calculations by humans. 29. Hodges, in Alan Turing, observed that "the word 'computer' .. . meant only what that word meant in 1936: a person doing calculations" (p. 105). 30. Turing, On Computable Numbers, 135-137. 31. Ibid., 137. 32. Ibid., 136. 33. Andrew Hodges, "Alan Turing and the Turing Machine," in The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-Century Survey, ed. Rolf Herken (Vienna: Springer, 1994), 6. 34. In more detail; "We should realise that, with the aid of the unit we have adopted, it is sometimes possible completely to reduce continuous magnitudes to a set and that this can always be done partially at least. The set of units can then be arranged in such an order that the difficulty involved in discerning a measure becomes simply one of scrutinising the order. The greatest advantage of our method lies in this progressive ordering" (AT452). 35. Hodges, Alan Turing, 107. 36. Gandy, in The Confluence of Ideas, expressed what he named "Turing's theorem" thus: "Any function which is effectively calculable by an abstract human being following a fixed routine is effectively calculable by a Turing machine... and conversely" (p. 77). 37. Why Descartes abandoned the Regulae is controversial. Several commentators believe the reason was his inability to show how complex algebraic calculations can be simulated in a clear and distinct way in the corporeal brain, for example, John A. Schuster, "Descartes' Mathesis Universalis: 161928," in Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and

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Physics, ed. Steven Gaukroger (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1980): 41-96; Steven Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995). Sepper, in Descartes' Imagination, speculated that Descartes put the Regulae aside because of the results of his own anatomical studies, which he began in 1628-1629. Jean-Luc Marion, in Sur I'ontologie Grise de Descartes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 1981), argued that Descartes's main reason for giving up the Regulae was that he was not able to make clear in an absolute sense the crucial distinction in the Regulae between what is "simple" and what is "complex." Edwin M. Curley, Descartes Against the Sceptics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), suggested that Descartes abandoned the Regulae because he became convinced that he "did not go deeply enough into the problem of knowledge" (p. 38) and therefore did not give answers to skeptical (pyrrhonian) arguments which Descartes, according to Curley, began to consider as the main threat around 1628. 38. Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 16. In the Bachelardian history of science, an epistemological break is the transition between two scientific conceptualizations. 39. See, for example, John A. Schuster, "Descartes' Mathesis Universalis": Steven Gaukroger, Descartes; William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion (Canton, MA: Watson, 1991). 40. A. Boyce Gibson, "The Regulae of Descartes," Mind 1 (1898): 145-158, 332-363. 41. Schuster, "Descartes' Mathesis, Universalis," 67. 42. For example, Roy Lachman, Janet L. Lachman, and Earl C. Butterfield, Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing: An Introduction (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1979), 68, claimed that the concept of coding was not used in psychology before Shannon published his information theory in 1948. They overlooked the fact that Descartes, in the Regulae, showed how the ingenium codes and represents symbols in the corporeal brain. In his explanation of sense perception in the Optics, Part V, Descartes also assumed that a kind of (temporal) coding has to take place in the corporeal brain; see Kirkeb0en, "Descartes' Psychology of Vision." Warren S. McCulloch, "A Historical Introduction to the Postulational Foundations of Experimental Epistemology," in Embodiments of Mind, ed. W. S. McCulloch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 359-372, argued, wrongly, that this is the first theory of coding in the nervous system. McCulloch also ignored Rule 14 of the Regulae. 43. Klein, like Turing, took the symbolic mathematics (and mathematical physics) of the 1930s as his starting point; he wrote, "this study . . . will confine itself to the limited task of recovering to some degree the sources . . . of our modern symbolic mathematics . . . . However far afield it may run, its formulation will throughout be determined by this as its ultimate theme" (p. 4). 44. Sepper, Descartes' Imagination, 129. 45. Schuster, "Descartes' Mathesis Universalis," 59. 46. According to Gaukroger, Cartesian Logic, the strongest forms of this psychologized logic are in the texts that Descartes used at La Heche. 47. Descartes explicitly defended his mathematical or formal approach to the cognitive faculties: "But what is to prevent you from following these suppositions if it is obvious that they detract not a jot from things, but simply make everything much clearer. This is just what you do in geometry" (AT412). 48. According to Chikara Sasaki, "Descartes' Mathematical Thought" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1989), "the principal part of his mathematical thought had crystallised before about 1623" (pp. 4-5), and everybody seems to agree that Descartes worked out Rule 12 in 1626-1628. 49. It is likely that by 1628 Descartes had already worked out his mechanistic

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understanding of light (e.g., Schuster, "Descartes' Mathesis Universalis"). Thus, it makes sense that he stressed that his mechanical metaphor of sense-perception is not a mere analogy. 50. Hodges, Alan Turing, 107. 51. For a general account of this theory, see A. Mark Smith, "Getting the Big Picture in Perspectivist Optics," 7m 79 (1990): 69-89. 52. Aristotle in De anima, 3.7, 431a 16, translated in Sepper, Descartes' Imagination, 6. 53. See, for example, Sepper, Descartes' Imagination. 54. Avicenna's neuropsychological theory of the inner senses was based on the psychology of Aristotle and the anatomical discoveries of Galen. See, for example, Simon Kemp and Garth J. O. Fletcher, 'The Medieval Theory of the Inner Senses," American Journal of Psychology 106 (1993): 559-576. 55. See, for example, E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975). 56. Aquinas in Summa Theologiae la, 84, 6. 57. Harvey, The Inward Wits, Aquinas paraphrased on p. 58. 58. In particular, the theory of the inner senses assumed that there was a direct connection between the anterior ventricles and the sensory nerves. Vesalius did not find any such connections. See, for example, Kemp and Fletcher, The Medieval Theory. 59. Harvey, The Inward Wits, Vesalius quoted on p. 30. 60. See, for example, Katharine Park, "The Organic Soul," in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464-484. 61. According to Jean-Luc Marion, "Cartesian Metaphysics and the Role of the Simple Natures," in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992) 115-139: "[the simple nature] desposes traditional ousia or essence, and banishes it once and for all from modern metaphysics (despite Leibniz's attempts to bring them back)" (p. 115). Heidegger considered the introduction of the "simple natures" to be the very beginning of modern thinking; see Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing, trans, by W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1967). 62. Another probable motivation for this change is his increased interest and knowledge of anatomy around 1628-1629, and his ambition, after 1629, of developing a psychology that was in accordance with this understanding. See also note 37. 63. See Kirkeb0en, "Descartes' Psychology of Vision." 64. Ren6 Descartes, "Meditations, Sixth Replies," in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdock (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 293. 65. Consult P. J. Olscamp, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) for a translation of the Geometry in English. 66. Louis Liard, Descartes (Paris, Bailliere, 1882) was the first to point out that the possibility of replacing the image-copy notion of sensation by representations mathematically conceived depended on Descartes' specific mathematical achievements. See Kirkeb0en, "Descartes' Psychology of Vision." 67. Descartes explicitly stated that he has changed his critical view on the "pure intellect" when, in 1638, he commented on his theory of the creation of the universe thus: "Only 10 years ago if someone else had written it I would not have been willing to believe myself that the human mind could attain to such knowledge" (Letter to Vatier, 22.2 1638), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdock, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 86.

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68. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651, reprint, London: Dent, 1973), 8. 69. See, for example, Ian Hacking, "Proof and Eternal Truths: Descartes and Leibniz," in Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1980), 169-180. 70. See, for example, R. McDonough, "Leibniz' Opposition to Mechanistic Cognitive Science," Idealistic Studies 25 (1995): 175-194. 71. Lorraine Daston, "Enlightenment Calculations," Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 192. 72. Ibid. 73. However, Babbage often stressed the analogy between his Analytic Engine and new ways of social and work organization. See, for example, Simon Shaffer, "Babbage's Intelligence: Calculating Engines and the Factory System," Critical Inquiry 2 (1994): 203-227. 74. See, for example, Kirkeb0en, "Descartes' Psychology of Vision." 75. See, for example, Gary Hatfield, "Remaking the Science of Mind. Psychology as Natural Science," in Inventing Human Science. Eighteenth-Century Domains, eds. Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, & Robert Wokler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 184-231. 76. Locke wrote: "I shall not at the present meddle with the physical considerations of the mind . .. whether those ideas do in their formation, any or all of them, depend on matter or no. These are speculations which, however curious or entertaining, I shall decline, as lying out of my way in the design I am upon now." John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; reprint, New York: Meridian, 1964), 63. 77. Descartes's rationalism is often described as advocating an a priori and "certain" scientific methodology. However, the Cartesians in the 17th century were criticized for precisely the opposite, that is, the overhypothetical character of their speculative mechanistic theories. See, for example, Larry Laudan, Science and Hypothesis (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: KJuwer Academic Publishers: 1981) 78. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740; reprint, London: Penguin, 1984), 60. 79. To defend a sharp distinction between the natural, on the one hand, and the human soul/intellect and the supernatural, on the other hand, it was necessary for Descartes to demonstrate that all natural phenomena can be accounted for by mechanical theories. Thus, the demonstration in "the noblest example of all" that an inert and passive body and brain might give rise to perception and perceptual cognition probably also has a religious motivation; see, for example, Gaukroger, Descartes, 147-152. 80. Thomas S. Hall, "On Biological Analogs of Newton Paradigms," Philosophy of Science 35 (1968): 6-27. 81. See, for example, S. Moravia, "From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man's Image," Journal of the History of Ideas 39 (1978): 45-60. 82. Richard M. Warren and Roslyn P. Warren, Helmholtz on Perception: Its Physiology and Development (New York, Wiley, 1968), Pavlov quoted on p. 18. 83. Edwin G. Boring, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1942), 167-168. 84. Hull and his colleagues wrote several articles on this topic; for example, Clark L. Hull, "Knowledge and Purpose as Habit Mechanisms," Psychological Review 37 (1930): 511-525. 85. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115-133. 86. This is an understanding that goes back to Charles S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New York: Scribner's, 1906).

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87. See Michael S. Mahoney, "The Beginning of Algebraic Thought in the Seventeenth Century," in Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Steven Gaukroger (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1980), 141-155, for a stimulating account of Descartes's contribution to the change from a geometrical mode of thought to an algebraic mode of thought in mathematics. 88. Barsalou, Perceptual Symbol Systems, p. 524. 89. For example, Eva T.H. Brann, The world of the imagination (Savage, MD: Rowman, 1991); Goldstein and Barsalou, Reuniting Perception and Cognition. 90. Stevan Harnad, "The Symbol Grounding Problem," Physica D 42 (1990): p. 335. 91. Barsalou, "Perceptual Symbol Systems," 523. 92. Goldstone and Barsalou, "Reuniting Perception and Conception," 235. 93. Ibid., 236. 94. Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 197-198. 95. Edward S. Reed, "Descartes' Corporeal Ideas Hypothesis and the Origin of Scientific Psychology," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1982): 731-752, demonstrated the historical continuity between Descartes's epistemological hypothesisor "the corporeal ideas hypothesis," as he called itand the rise of a scientific psychology in the 19th century.

Received May 14, 1998 Revision received November 12, 1999 Accepted March 22, 2000