understanding, and imagination, respectively. In general, “all [man’s] Honour and
Nobility, as Cicero observed, consists in his being favour’d with, and having an
Eloquent Tongue: As Wit is the Ornament of a Man, so Eloquence is the Light and
Beauty of Wit. In this alone he distinguishes himself from the Brutes, and
approaches near to God, as being the greatest Glory which is possible to be
obtained in Nature” (p. 22). The most severe “disability of wit,” under which
men “differ not at all from Brute Beasts,” is the disability, which “very much
resembles that of Eunuchs … unable for Generation,” that prevents the rational
faculty from arriving at “the first Principles of all Arts implanted in the Scholar’s
Mind, before he begin to learn, for which the Wit can give no other proofs of itself,
than to receive them as things already known; and if he be not able to form an Idea
of them in his Mind, we may strongly conclude him wholly incapable of the
Sciences.” In this case, “neither the Lash of the Rod, nor his Cries, nor Method,
nor Examples, nor Time, nor Experience, nor any thing in Nature can sufficiently
Excite him to bring forth any thing” (pp. 27 28).
See K. Gunderson, “Descartes, La Mettrie, Language and Machines,”
Philosophy 39 (1964), pp. 193 222, for an interesting discussion of Descartes’s
arguments as related to contemporary discussions of “intelligence” of automata.
For general background on the development and critique of Descartes’s theory of
the extent and limits of mechanical explanation, see Rosenfield, op. cit., and H.
Kirkinen, “Les origines de la conception moderne de l’homme machine,” Annales
Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, ser. B, vol. 22, Helsinki (1961).
10 Translated (in part) in H. A. R. Torrey, The Philosophy of Descartes (New York: Holt,
1892), pp. 281 284. [The translation that appears here, and in all subsequent
quotations from Descartes’s correspondence, is from The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, vol. III: The Correspondence, trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff,
D. Murdoch and A. Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991)
(abbre
viated CSMK).]
11 That is, by conditioning. When animals are taught “by art,” their actions are produced
with reference to a passion, in the sense that this behavior is associated with the “stir of
expectation of something to eat” or the “motions of their fear, their hope, or their joy”
that constitute the original contingency for the teaching. Descartes is therefore pointing
out that, just as in its normal use “verbal behavior” is free of identifiable external
stimuli or internal physiological states, so it is evidently not developed in the individual
by conditioning. He does not elaborate on this, regarding it perhaps as too obvious to
merit discussion. It is noteworthy that modern behaviorist speculation about human
learning denies these truisms. For some discussion, see Chomsky, “Review of Skinner,
‘Verbal Behavior,’” Language 35 (1935), pp. 26 58; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax,
chap. I, §8; J. Katz, Philosophy of Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1966);
J. Fodor, “Could Meaning be an ‘r
m’
’” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
4 (1965), pp. 73 81. [For useful contemporary discussion of organisms’ modular
learning and its explanation, see Gallistel 1990, 2002. Chomsky has in recent years
referred approvingly to Gallistel’s work. For a fascinating study of linguistic modu
larity in a polyglot savant, see Smith and Tsimpli 1995.]
12 The Descartes More correspondence, in so far as it relates to animal automatism, is
translated in full by L. C. Rosenfield (L. Cohen) in the Annals of Science 1(1936)
[and in CSMK].
122 Notes to pages 60 61