My first contact with logic (interrelation or sequence of facts or events when seen as inevitable or predictable) was in freshman Geometry class. My first understanding of how reasoned thought develops came with the introduction in that class of axioms (self-evident truths). There were more than one axiom introduced but I remember now only “a straight line is the shortest distance between two pointsâ€. I thought to myself that any dumbbell knows that. That, of course, represents the value in an axiom.
Axioms are the ‘bootstraps’ (you must pull yourself up by your own bootstraps) of reasoning. Cognitive science gives these bootstraps a different label; cognitive science calls them Folk Theories. Folk Theories are not exactly the same as axioms but they speak to the same aspect of the beginnings of any domain of knowledge or art. A Folk Theory my be understandable in comparing mountain music to classical music. Folk Theories represent the source of reasoning they represent the bootstraps of more formal rationalization.
Important Folk Theories explained by cognitive science are:
Intelligibility of the World—“The world makes systematic sense, and we can know of it.â€
General Kinds—“Every particular thing is a kind of thing.â€
Essence—“Every entity has an “essence†or “nature,†that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behavior.â€
The consequences of “General Kinds†and “Essence†result in the Foundational Assumption of Metaphysics—“Kinds exist and are defined by essence.â€
In the dialogue “Euthyphro†Socrates says, in response to his question what is piety, that every specific pious action must be an instance of the general kind of thing, piety. “Pious actions are pious through one form,†says Socrates. Here he introduces the metaphor ‘form is essence’. “Socrates argues that it is the philosopher alone who seeks knowledge, not by attending to the multiplicity of perceptible things, but rather by using reason to discern the ultimate Forms (the essences) that underlie this multiplicity of things.â€
Central to Plato’s metaphysics is that essences of things are ideas perceivable by the mind. We can know the essences of things because we know our ideas directly. The result of this theory is that since essences are ideas they cannot be material.
When speaking of mind it is common to use metaphors. Plato considered ‘idea is essence’ and Aristotle considered ‘essence is idea’. “For Plato, the essence of a physical object is the idea, and for Aristotle the idea is the essence of the object†and ‘essence is form’. The metaphors of Plato and Aristotle indicated that a person could know objects because the mind could know the objects through the forms (ideas).
We often use metaphors for the purpose of understanding the unknown by association with the known. Socrates and Aristotle made idea and essence associative with one another. In one case Socrates says you can understand essence by comparing it with idea about which you know something already. Aristotle says that you can understand idea by comparing it with essence about which you already know something. This association was lost when Descartes cooked up the mind/body dichotomy.
[b]For me the important consideration in all of this is that, before Descartes, philosophy considered it was possible to know objects with the mind because there was a direct connection between mind and the material world. Descartes severed this connection and thereafter mind and body were disconnected and body was material and mind was spirit. These disconnect resulted in many important aspects of modern culture.
Philosophy that accepts this split holds twin principles: nature or matter on one hand, and spirit, God, ego, etc. on the other. Humans are creatures harboring two distinctly different realities within one structure. We are bipartite beings. Thought, especially theoretical thought is a substance of the spirit thus intellectual, moral, artistic and such are activities of the spirit. Consciousness is the property of the spirit and because spirit transcends the world of matter then philosophers surmise consciousness is autonomous and independent, governed by non-material principles.[/b]
Much of this stuff, including quotes, comes from “Philosophy in the Fleshâ€. Cognitive science reunites body and mind in the theory described in this book.