Knowing How, Nativism and Naturalism in Descartes

In this paper I argue that Descartes’s theory of human cognition has more in common with the naturalistic models favored by contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists than is usually thought. My starting point is Gilbert Ryle’s well known (1949) contention that the Cartesian view supports the ‘Intellectualist Legend’ that ‘an action exhibits intelligence if and only if the agent is thinking what he is doing while he is doing it’. In other words, the Cartesian assimilates knowing how to knowing that. Ryle argues that this assimilation engenders a vicious regress since knowing that in the sense required by the intellectualist is itself an action which exhibits intelligence. I argue that Descartes was conscious of this particular peril of intellectualism and had various resources for avoiding it, including his nativist theory of ideas. Close examination of these resources will suggest a number of respects in which his concerns about the nature of cognition, and even his solutions, are the same as ours in spite of his dualistic ontology. I draw connections to other early modern philosophers such Spinoza and Locke, as well as contemporary theorists such as Cummins and Dennett.