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René Descartes: Grandeur et Misère
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
Recent approaches to scepticism have followed a pattern which Descartes was the first modern to outline with anything approaching clarity. He is not often given credit for the best of his insights here largely because they are obscured by misleading theological assumptions, yet once these assumptions are removed we should be impressed by the subtle ring of the underlying account of rational belief. To demonstrate these claims the first section of this essay discusses the irrelevance of Descartes’ theology to his epistemology — the misère of the title — the second, devoted to the grandeur, expounds his operative theory of reasonable belief, and the remainder applies this theory to Descartes’ original sceptical problem and offers some comment both on its strength and its weakness.
Descartes is less careful than he might be in formulating the exact form of the most general sceptical doubt that he aims to rebut. On some occasions he appears to be asking the question (1) and, on others, the question (2).
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- Copyright © The Authors 1978
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1 All four assume Descartes to be operating with a realist conception of truth. This is disputed by Frankfurt in Demons, Dreamers and Madmen (New York, 1970),Google Scholar especially Chapters 15 and 16, but I shall here ignore that possibility.
2 Any dizziness this thought produces must be resisted; Descartes would say this shows the need for God, but that is merely asking argument A to perform one or other of the tasks (a), (b) or (c) above, and this we know it cannot do. We should not allow ourselves to be disconcerted by what is only a logical possibility. Scepticism wins nothing from that.
3 Similarly in Regulae XII he says about such hypotheses, “Whatever we compound in this manner (i.e. by conjecture) does not deceive us, if we only judge it to be probable and never affirm it to be true, but indeed it makes us better informed”.
4 Relying on this distinction Descartes can tell us why it is he is so much more certain of truths concerning the present contents of his own mind than of those that deal with the external world. Apart from recording this aspect of Descartes's epistemology here I propose to ignore it.
5 Some confirmation of this can perhaps be discerned in Descartes’ remarks about the nature of magnets (Regulae XII). We must “try to deduce from them [i.e. experiments] what mixture of simple natures is necessary to produce all those effects which have been experienced in the magnet; once this has been discovered one can dare to assert that one has perceived the true nature of the magnet so far as it could have been discovered by man from the given experiments” [my italics]. This ‘necessarily’ is the closest he ever comes to nomologicality.
6 cf. Frankfurt, op. cit., Chapter 3
7 cf. Quine, W.V. and Ullian, J.S.: The Web of Belief (New York, 1970);Google ScholarHarman, G.: Thought (Princeton, 1973),Google Scholar Chapter 10: Putnam, H.: Philosophy of Logic (london, 1972),Google Scholar Chapter 8.