Did you just believe that Descartes was modeling “cognitive-process flow” because some psychologist told you so? Or is possible that Descartes was, y’know, prescribing how rationalists should approach belief, rather than how we generally do?
No, it’s not possible, as one would know if one had ‘just’, ‘y’know’, looked up the citations in the papers and read what Descartes himself said in his Fourth Meditation:
Whereupon, regarding myself more closely, and considering what my errors are (which alone testify to the existence of imperfection in me), I observe that these depend on the concurrence of two causes, viz, the faculty of cognition, which I possess, and that of election or the power of free choice,—in other words, the understanding and the will. For by the understanding alone, I [neither affirm nor deny anything but] merely apprehend (percipio) the ideas regarding which I may form a judgment; nor is any error, properly so called, found in it thus accurately taken.
...the power of will consists only in this, that we are able to do or not to do the same thing (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or shun it), or rather in this alone, that in affirming or denying, pursuing or shunning, what is proposed to us by the understanding, we so act that we are not conscious of being determined to a particular action by any external force.
Seems pretty clearly descriptive and not normative… no ‘should’ about it.
Did you just believe that Descartes was modeling “cognitive-process flow” because some psychologist told you so? Or is possible that Descartes was, y’know, prescribing how rationalists should approach belief, rather than how we generally do?
No, it’s not possible, as one would know if one had ‘just’, ‘y’know’, looked up the citations in the papers and read what Descartes himself said in his Fourth Meditation:
Seems pretty clearly descriptive and not normative… no ‘should’ about it.