The seriousness of doubt and our natural trust in the senses in the first meditation

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 159-181

  Macarthur, David ^a  

^a MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61449298913     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.2003.10716539     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. H. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen (New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1970), 16
2. D.M. Rosenthal, 'Will and the Theory of Judgment,' in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, A.O. Rorty, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press 1986), 430
3. L. Newman, 'Descartes' Epistemology,' in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, E. Zolta, ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1995), 2.2
4. M. Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge 1978), 26
5. J. Camera, 'The First Meditation,' Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987) 222-48, writes: 'Modern Descartes scholars see the importance of the doubts raised in the First Meditation as lying not so much in the skeptical challenges they present, but rather in the way they advance his scientific program' (222)
6. As Michael Williams, 'Descartes and the Metaphysics of Doubt,' in Rorty, ed., Essays, writes: 'There is no argument anywhere in Descartes' Meditations to show that common sense recognizes the conception of justification, embodied in the metaphor of foundations, on which Descartes' definitive doubt depends' (124-5). I would only add that the same goes for science. The existence of the meditator's strong foundationalist requirement on scientific knowledge was by no means the prevailing assumption in the seventeenth century. Descartes' correspondents, Gassendi and Mersenne, both advocated a fallibilist conception of science, which gave up the demand for certain foundations. This makes Descartes' lack of any argument for his assumption all the more surprising
7. and M. Burnyeat, 'Idealism & Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw & Berkeley Missed,' Philosophical Review 91 (1982) 3-40
8. For a detailed discussion of these three kinds of certainty in Descartes' work, see E.M. Curley, 'Certainty: Psychological, Moral, and Metaphysical,' in Essays on the Philosophy & Science of Rene Descartes, S. Voss, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993)
9. Cf. B. Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973), ch.9
10. Peter Markie, 'The Cogito and Its Importance,' in J. Cottingham, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambrdige: Cambridge University Press 1992) correctly notes that Descartes employs two levels of epistemic appraisal, corresponding to certainty and reasonableness, and that the First Meditation doubts are directed at claims to certainty. However, he does not go on to say that that leaves reasonable perceptually-based belief untouched by any reasonable doubt
11. William Alston, 'Levels Confusion in Epistemology,' in his Epistemic Justification: Essays in the Theory of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980) discusses a different type of 'levels confusion in epistemology' between P and S knows that P (where S is a subject and P is an empirical proposition) in relation to what he calls, with due caution, Cartesian skepticism. This is understood as an argument apparently capable of undermining any particular empirical knowledge claim. Alston's main concern is to criticize this argument on the grounds that it conflates knowing that P with knowing that one knows that P
12. When C.S. Peirce, Peirce on Signs, J. Hoopes, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1991), later called Descartes' strategy here 'mere self-deception' (55), he may have been questioning the intelligibility of this attitude of believing that P whilst pretending to oneself that P is false. Peirce's point seems to be that in so far as one is prepared to act as if one believed that P then it is hard to see what sense can be made of the claim that one is pretending that P is false
13. G. Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1990) writes: 'Descartes used skepticism in the context of a set of 'cognitive exercises' intended to better acquaint the reader with his or her intellectual faculties' (59)
14. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon 1975), for instance, claims that Descartes 'recommends a universal doubt not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of our very faculties' (12.1, 149). And he goes on to say that, given our nature, such doubt is quite impossible for human beings