ABSTRACT
Mechanist or vitalist, dualist or materialist, introspectionist, behaviourist, computationalist or cognitivist: succeeding generations have found themselves responding to Cartesianism in one way or another. Descartes represents the appeal to reason and self-responsibility over authority. The philosopher of psychology's concern with the mechanist/vitalist debates sparked off by Descartes’ attack on the Great Chain of Being is no mere exercise in the history of ideas and/or Weltanschauungen. The debate over the theory of heat established a paradigm for the scientistic outlook. The result of misconstruing the grammatical propositions or rules governing the use of psychological concept words as empirical propositions has been three centuries of conflict over whether intentions, desires, beliefs, etc in some way cause the actions they are thought to accompany or precede, and whether these mental phenomena correspond to or are caused by neural events.
