Two Other Melodramas. Commentary to Roca
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.rp.e350704Keywords:
Melodrama , Psychology, Subject Matter , Cartesian Dualism , Mental CausationAbstract
Roca’s target article clearly exemplifies the melodrama about the obsessive search for the psychology’s proper subject matter, criticized in my target paper, in close relation to two thers, namely: 1. Is psychology a science? 2. If it is, is it natural? In his article, Roca carries out such a search under the kantorian bastion, showing many of the excesses and vices I pointed out in my article, as well as others that I take the opportunity to discuss in this commentary. The melodrama about the scientific character of psychology arises from a scarce elementary philosophical culture that greatly underestimates the complexity of the problem of the demarcation between science and pseudoscience, ignoring that it has been widely abandoned in the philosophy of science as insoluble. Equally simplistic are his disquisitions on the naturalness of psychology as a science, which completely ignore important developments in naturalism. As part of his conceptual invocations, the author persists in falsely affirming that cognitive psychology is dualistic, when this is logically impossible since it conceives mental particulars as internal and causal, both characteristics absent from the mind according to any form of substance dualism, for totally lacking spatiality. In addition, the general agreement among mentalists is that the ontological category of mental particulars is occurrence, not substance, another strong reason to declare mentalism innocent of any form of substance dualism, a reason that allows, precisely, for more intelligible conceptions of mental causality.
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