THEORY OF MIND

Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind

Dualism

The concept of “dualism” originated with Rene Descartes, a French philosopher, who theorized a dualistic existence of material bodies, on the one hand, and souls or minds defined by thought, on the other; he established the classic dualism of mind and matter. A dualism is an irreducible distinction between two categories in a classification scheme. Dualistic assumptions can be found in many areas of study. In psychology, there is the assumption that the mind and the body function completely independently, without any interchange. In theology, the world can be conceived of as a place where good and evil exist as mutually exclusive and antagonistic forces. With respect to sociology, duality exists in both the way sociology studied and what sociology studies (Anuruddha, 2000).

A simple way to classify is to set up a system in which two categories presented as diametrically oppose. An example of this can be found in the study of gender. Historically femininity and masculinity have treated as a duality. Femininity defines in contrast to masculinity and vice versa. Masculinity can be defined as what femininity is not. Research over the decades has transformed from this basic dualistic understanding of gender as two isolated extremes to a continuum, with the possibility for overlap and intersection (Lycan, 1999).

Duality also characterizes the nature of sociology itself. Pierre Bourdieu explored duality within sociology in his 1992 book An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. For instance, subjectivity and objectivity treated as a duality in sociology. Others include the split between the individual and sociology, theory and research, structure and agency, and micro-and macro-analysis. Bourdieu referred to these sets of concepts as “false antinomy” in that they are false distinctions that impair the sociological endeavor and need to be resolved to arrive at the truth of human practice.

Descartes's view faced immediate challenges. The most difficult problem for Cartesian dualism is this: How can a non-spatial, immaterial substance causally interact with a spatially extended, material substance? Given the fundamentally different natures of mind and body, it is difficult to see how the two-way psycho physical interactionism Descartes proposed supposed to occur. Descartes never offered a satisfactory resolution to this problem (Chalmers, 2002).

Several of his followers, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicolas Malebranche, proposed the doctrine of occasional-ism: the idea that an episode of mind-body interaction (e.g., willing to raise one's left arm and then doing so) is the occasion for God to coordinate sensations and volitions of the immaterial mind with overt actions of the physical body. Mind-body causal interaction is thus a species of divine action, and God the only true causal agent. Gottlieb Leibniz's parallelism denied that mind and body interact at all, asserting instead that God is responsible for the pre-established harmony coordinating mental and physical states.

According to Leibniz, all substances programmed at the moment of their creation such that their subsequent states run in perfect harmony with the states of every other substance in the universe. Genuine substance-to-substance causal interaction has no place in this ...