Descartes and psychology

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From what I understand of Descartes, he wanted to make science like geometry, where you prove things. But how would that work in psychology? What would be an example of a statement like "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" for psychology? Did any psychologists actually try to do this? Did it work?

-- Jack Miller (schvester_1@hotmail.com), May 02, 2003

Answers

Descartes' ambition was premised on the then-widely-held belief that geometry gives one certain knowledge of facts about the world through the operation of pure reason (rather than observation). Kant would later call it the "synthetic a priori". The ideal was to model all sciences on geometry, which was renowned for its precision, certainty and "non-conatamination" by fallible sensation. Over the course of the 19th-century, however, with the discovery of various non-Euclidian geometries, philosophers gradually gave up the belief that it is possible to discover truths about the world through pure reason alone. Euclidian geometry came to be seen as a mere formal system which maps only imperfectly on to the real world (esp. after empirical evidence for Einstein's theory of relativity showed that space is not, in fact, Euclidian after all). Scientists gradually gave up the goal of certainty in favor of fallibilism (following Dewey).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), May 03, 2003.

Behaviorists would say that:

"Behavior is a function of it's consquences"

... is a proven, undeniable law similar to that.

-- Brian (lsdfg@hotmail.com), September 21, 2004.


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