10 - Conclusion: Cartesian psychology and the science of the mind

Summary

We do not need an individualistic or Cartesian psychology in order to develop satisfactory psychological explanations for the workings of the physical mind. More pointedly, there are various ways in which a Cartesian psychology would be explanatorily impoverished relative to its wide rivals, and this makes individualism not only unnecessary but implausible. Part of my general argument has involved bringing out non-individualistic strands to existing psychological explanations, using these as a check on the normative claims that individualists have made about psychological explanation and mental causation; part has involved rethinking the more general claims on which individualists have based their views about psychology in particular. Since one of the central motivations for individualism is a commitment to some form of physicalism or materialism about the mind, many of these more general claims have been made about the nature of science and scientific explanation, these being paradigms of triumphs in our attempts to understand the physical world.

In arguing that a science of the mind does not require a Cartesian psychology, I have neither rejected materialism nor claimed that individualists suffer from so-called scientism about psychology, that is, a faith in science to provide all of the answers that it is reasonable to ask about the mind. This book expresses no scepticism about the cognitive sciences, only a reluctance to accept all that has been claimed on their behalf and a rejection of certain construals of what an interdisciplinary, scientific understanding of the mind must be like. It is not an external critique of individualism but a challenge to individualism on its own terms.