No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Although Descartes presents himself as an adversary of skepticism, in contemporary epistemology he is celebrated much more for his presentation of the skeptical problem than for his efforts to solve it. The ‘Cartesian skepticism’ of the evil genius argument remains a Standard starting point for current discussions, a starting point that is seen (by contextualists, for example) to provide such a powerful challenge to knowledge that while one as much as contemplates such arguments one loses the right to ascribe knowledge to anyone. Even Descartes's less radical skeptical arguments are still widely credited as having tremendous force: Barry Stroud, for example, argues at length that no satisfactory response has yet been given to the dream argument of the First Meditation. The Cartesian response to skepticism, on the other hand, is not nearly so warmly received. In the current literature on skepticism one does not find much resistance to Stroud's assessment of the Cartesian response to skepticism as utterly unpromising, nor to his diagnosis of its central fault: the Cartesian response depends on a series of theological claims that Descartes does not (or perhaps cannot) show to be plausible, let alone true.
1 See Lewis, David ‘Elusive Knowledge,’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996) 549–67;CrossRefGoogle Scholar DeRose, Keith ‘Solving the Skeptical Problem,’ The Philosophical Review 104 (1995) 1–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In what follows, references to the works of Descartes will be to the translations of Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984)Google Scholar, and will be abbreviated by CSM followed by the volume and page number. References to the correspondence will be to the translations of Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991), abbreviated CSMK.
2 This is the main aim of Stroud's The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Clarendon 1984).
3 Indeed, the provisional negative results of the First Meditation so greatly overshadow the positive attempts of the Sixth for Stroud that he is ready to describe the claim that there are external things as ‘something Descartes thought that we could never know,’ and to maintain that ‘Descartes reflected on human knowledge and reached the conclusion that no one could ever know anything about the world around him’ (The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism, 175, 174). Where Stroud does discuss Descartes's own attempt to rebut skepticism he concludes that ‘I think most of us simply don't believe it.’ ‘Understanding Human Knowledge in General’ in Knowledge and Skepticism, Clay, Marjorie and Keith, Lehrer eds. (Boulder: Westview 1989), rpt. in Understanding Human Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000), 114.Google Scholar
4 Among other places: ‘Understanding Human Knowledge in General’, 114-15
5 Identified by Richard Popkin as the only skeptics of the Century leading up to Descartes who were widely known for their intellectual achievements — see The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press 1979), 36-7. Descartes had read Montaigne (CSMK 302, 303); it seems he likely read Sanches as well, although there is no decisive proof of this. Henri Gouhier speculates that Descartes read the 1581 Lyon edition of Quod Nihil Scitur during his time at La Flèche (Gouhier, Henri Les Premières Pensées de Descartes [Paris: Vrin 1958]Google Scholar, 116fn.); Elaine Limbrick agrees that Descartes may have read Sanches at La Flèche, and adds that he might also have picked up a copy of the 1618 Frankfurt edition when he was in Frankfurt in 1619, and that his recent reading of this work partly inspired his meditations on method and his choice of metaphors in the Discours. Francisco Sanches, That Nothing is Known, Thomson, D.F.S. trans.; introduction and notes, Elaine Limbrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 83.Google Scholar Henceforth cited as Sanches.
6 CSMIL374
7 Indeed, Sanches contends that we know not even that nothing is known; he Claims he can only ‘infer’ this, confessing that he does not know how it might be decisively established, a failure which he takes as additional (but of course inconclusive) confirmation of his skepticism (Sanches, 172-3).
8 Michel de Montaigne, ‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond,’ Screech, M.A. trans. (London: Penguin 1987), 81Google Scholar
9 ‘Apology,’ 111. The position Montaigne lays out is not in fact very far from the Position Harry Frankfurt ascribes to Descartes in his paper ‘Descartes and the External Truths,’ a position in which ‘we cannot presume that what we determine to be logically necessary coincides with the ultimate conditions of reality or truth. The necessities human reason discovers by analysis and demonstration are just necessities of its own contingent nature’ (Philosophical Review 86 [1977], 45). Frankfurt emphasizes those passages in which Descartes discusses the incomprehensibility of God as arising from his power over the eternal truths, perhaps at the expense of the passages in which Descartes insists that our idea of God is ‘the truest and most clear and distinct of all my ideas’ (CSM II, 32), and in which we are said to understand God ‘in his very truth and as he is’ (CSMK 378). Indeed, at one point (44) Frankfurt reads Descartes as holding that although we know that an infinitely powerful God exists we do not understand him, where our inability to ‘comprehend or conceive’ God is offered as evidence for an inability to understand him. If I am right to see Descartes as keeping comprehendere and inteiligere in contrast as far as God is concerned, we have grounds to distinguish a failure of comprehension from a failure of understanding here. On this point see also Jean-Marie, Beyssade's ‘On the Idea of God: Incomprehensibility or Incompatibilities?’ in Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes, Voss, Stephen ed. (New York: Oxford University Press 1993).Google Scholar
10 CSM II, 81. The claim that God is the only truly infinite being also appears in a number of other places, notably at 1.27 of the Principles and at CSM II 253-4 of the fifth replies. On the novelty of Descartes's treatment of the infinite, see Koyré's, Alexandre Essai sur l'idée de Dieu et les preuves de son existence chez Descartes (Paris: Leroux 1922; facsimile rpt. Garland, 1987), 126.Google Scholar
11 A point most famously argued in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, at A24/5-B39.
12 The following sections say more about this idea of unity and its textual support in Descartes, and while I hope to show it as plausible enough to be philosophically interesting, it is beyond the scope of the present paper to give a full-blown philosophical defense of the idea itself. There are some interesting and I think relevant arguments about determinacy in general, and the relationship between judgments of location and thoughts about physical objects in particular, both in Brewer's, Bill Perception and Reason (New York: Oxford University Press 1999)Google Scholar and in Campbell's, John Reference and Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Such an emphasis on unity is more commonly associated with Kant than with Descartes, although it should be noted that Kant himself saw such an idea in Descartes. In ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ Kant identified ‘the source of the Cartesian proof of God's existence’ as follows: ‘Since reason needs to assume reality as given before it can conceive the possibility of anything, and since it regards those differences between things which result from the negations inherent in them simply as limits, it finds itself compelled to take a Single possibility — namely that of an unlimited being — as basic and original, and conversely, to regard all other possibilities as derivative.’ Although Kant contends that such proofs ‘accomplish nothing in the way of demonstration.’ he maintains that ‘they are not for this reason by any means useless’ (Kant: Political Writings, Reiss, H. ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1970], 241Google Scholar). Thanks to Hans Lottenbach for this reference, and discussions on its relevance. The last section below endorses the reading of Descartes's argument as non-demonstrative, and takes up the question of what use it might nonetheless have.
14 Fraassen, Bas Van The Empirical Stance (New Haven: Yale University Press 2002), 1Google Scholar
15 In his ‘Understanding Human Knowledge in General,’ Stroud offers a forceful version of this criticism of Descartes. See especially 112-20.
16 Since Descartes considers God an infinite spiritual substance distinct from matter, there is of course still considerable distance between his view and the contemporary view of nature; in particular, his talk of all that is real being found in God cannot be understood to mean literal spatial Containment in any ordinary sense. But given that all finite things have necessary truths as their essences, and these truths are all ideas in the mind of God, it is fair to say that God contains the organization of all finite things.
17 Janet Broughton presents a forceful summary of the difficulties for Descartes on this point in chapter 8 of her Descartes's Method of Doubt, drawing attention not only to the apparent weakening of Descartes's position in this passage, but also to the comment in the Third Replies that the idea of God's understanding could be arrived at by extending one's idea of one's own understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002). I am strongly inclined to agree with Broughton that there is something incomplete or even misleading in the remark from the Third Replies; to be consistent with what Descartes says elsewhere about God's infinite attributes, extending one's idea of one's own understanding could at most be a device for conjuring up one's existing idea of God's understanding, and not a means by which we could initially form that idea. Broughton argues very plausibly that Descartes's considered position is better revealed in the Fifth Replies, where he rejects the notion that one could form the idea of God by amplification: ‘it is formed all at once and in its entirety as soon as our mind reaches an infinite being which is incapable of any amplification’ (CSMII, 256). My differences with Broughton on the apriority of the idea of God center on the nature of comprehension, although my position will still aim to be compatible with her Overall strategy of taking the idea of God to be one of the necessary conditions of the possibility of rational doubt. In fact, I want to argue for a stronger position in which the idea of God is a necessary condition of rational thought more broadly.
18 The parallel in the Second Meditation between the robust existence of the wax, as something capable of taking on various shapes, etc., and the robust existence of the self, capable of various modes of thought, is nicely examined by Amy Schmitter in her essay ‘The Wax and I: Perceptibility and Modality in the Second Meditation,’ in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 82 (2000) 178-201.
19 The more radical skeptic is nicely described by John Campbell: ‘The key skeptical possibility, he may say, is that the perceptions I have may not be caused at all. They may have no external cause. Perhaps there is only a sequence of images. Perhaps all there is, constituting the entire universe, are images and the void’ (‘Berkeley's Puzzle,’ in Conceivability and Possibility, Hawthorne and Gendler-Szabo, eds. [Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002], 132). One might think that the final skeptical argument of the First Meditation obliges Descartes to refute this more radical form of skepticism directly; the last section of this paper will argue that it does not.
20 By the same token, it is exactly the claim to have re-identified a Single united object in a succession of introspective judgments that generates the possibility of Humean challenges to Claims of knowledge here.
21 Objection: it is one thing to speak of a systematic series of judgments, and another to leap all the way to the presupposition of a complete unity or a Single, infinite reality. More will be said about the manner in which one aims to be systematic; the hope is to establish that merely making several judgments in the same manner, or several mutually compatible judgments, would be insufficient for knowledge. That this is Descartes's aim is suggested in the passages in which he places very strong constraints on knowledge, for example, in his remarks on the atheist geometer in the Second Replies: ‘The fact that an atheist can be “clearly aware that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles” is something I do not dispute. But I maintain that this awareness of his is not true knowledge, since no act of awareness that can be rendered doubtful seems fit to be called knowledge’ (CSM II, 101). The ideal Cartesian strategy would aim to establish that judgments that were only partly systematic could always be rendered doubtful. These issues are taken up in the last section below.
22 Cf. Carriero's, John characterization of the atheist geometer in his Descartes and the Autonomy of the Human Understanding (New York: Garland 1990):Google Scholar ‘the atheistic geometer lacks an ability to refute the evil genius hypothesis. But to lack this is to lack a lot. It is not just that the atheistic geometer is unable to handle a particular piece of sophistry that might come his or her way. Rather, I hold that to lack scientia is to lack a satisfactory argument for the connection of one's cognition to the world: it is to lack a defensible understanding of what one's geometrical activity comes to’ (99).
23 The division of skepticism into mild and acute forms is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive; other kinds of skeptical worry are possible, and it is also possible to combine some degree of mild and acute skepticism. In contemporary discussions, acute skepticism is a particularly important variety, however, especially given the influence of contextualists such as Lewis and DeRose, who hold that in giving thorough rational attention to the concept of knowledge we create a context in which most ascriptions of knowledge are false. For these contextualists, the ascriptions of knowledge we intuitively find plausible are only valid in contexts in which we are failing to exercise perfect rational insight into the concept of knowledge. Thus there is a sense in which contextualists hold that it is only by being less than thoroughly rational that we can avoid almost total Suspension of belief.
24 Pryor, James ‘The Skeptic and the Dogmatisf’, Nous 34 (2000) 517–49,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 547
25 Carnap, Rudolf ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ Revue Internationale de la Philosophie 4 (1950) 20–40,Google Scholar at 22. Note that Carnap will not make use of the active/ passive contrast in the way that the Cartesian does.
26 The ‘successfully’ matters: new experience could doubtless prompt one to revisit and overturn some past act of comprehension, some past judgment about how one's life had gone (I see only now that yesterday's ‘oasis’ was an illusion). The imperative is to connect perceptions to the rest of one's life, where this has factive force, not simply to what one has once judged one's life to be, or the rest of the judgments one happens to have made in the past, whether or not one is now prepared to endorse them. Complications involving coherent illusions will be discussed shortly.
27 It is important to note that this claim is strictly negative; given that the skeptical scenario is specified so that no amount of empirical evidence will indicate whether it obtains, empirical evidence on its own does not tell against the hypothesis that I am presented with a cup. This is not to say that empirical evidence on its own settles the question the other way; to know that I am presented with something real, something more than empirical evidence or the deliverances of active reason is required. More on this shortly.
28 Here there is another surface similarity with Carnap's approach, according to which ‘To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the System; hence, this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the System itself’ (Rudolf Carnap, ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology,’ 22). Note, however, that the broad Cartesian intends to use this move only against the skeptic who challenges the form of our empirical judgments; as will become clear shortly, Standard skeptics who worry about brains in vats are challenging content rather than form and will be dealt with somewhat differently.
29 These questions are not to be confused with a somewhat different sort of question concerning the details of the content of Claims about the intelligible unity, rather than the initial fact of this unity; for example, the question of what sort of geometry is applicable to objects in space, or what sort of order obtains among events. Questions of this sort are not skeptical, and I although I think they can be accommodated within the basic form of ‘the Cartesian strategy,’ constructing an argument to show how this would be possible is a task well beyond the scope of the present paper. For present purposes I will work with a grossly simplified view in which objects are organized geometrically and events are organized causally in a way we assume we (roughly) understand, without specifying exactly what the details of this order might be, or discussing how we know those details. It should become clear in what follows why this is still playing fair against the contemporary skeptic. Note for now that such assumptions are not uncommon among those who see skeptical arguments as threatening to ascriptions of knowledge: David Lewis, for example, contends that all possible worlds are organized spatio-temporally or in a manner functionally very similar to spatio-temporal organization. That an either strictly or analogically spatiotemporal System of organization is a feature of all possible worlds is something he considers basic to our modal thinking; he also seems to find that we have no real choice but to suppose something of this sort (On the Plurality of Worlds [Oxford: Blackwell 1986], 72-3). If these questions are admitted as reasonable, the skeptic forces us into either regress or dogmatism. But the Cartesian maintains that these skeptical questions appear to be reasonable only because they would be reasonable questions for any other object, and are not reasonable questions when applied to the overall form of reality. The strategy advocates that the proper attitude to basic notions of objective order, such as the notion that real physical objects are all spatially related, is a passive one; this kind of constraint is something to which we must simply surrender if we are to comprehend the various finite things we encounter.
30 This remark is not intended to raise doubts about those attributions; as noted at the outset of this section, the Cartesian strategy does not aim to carry out all the intentions of the historical Descartes.
31 This presentation of the skeptic's challenge as relying on a worry about symmetry between the bad and good cases is based on Williamson's, Timothy presentation of skepticism in chapter 8 of Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000).Google Scholar
32 Part of the modesty of the broadly Cartesian strategy is that its aim is not to show that the bad case is metaphysically impossible, but to argue that reason does not demand a demonstrative proof that one is not in the bad case.
33 McDowell, John ‘Knowledge and the Internal,’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995) 877–93,CrossRefGoogle Scholar at 877. Cf. Ralph Wedgwood's presentation of the motivation for internalism in ‘Internalism Explained,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2002) 349-69.
34 For comments on drafts of this paper I am greatly indebted to Annette Baier, Rachel Barney, Jane Friedman, Hans Lottenbach, John McDowell, Marleen Rozemond, and Sergio Tenenbaum. Parts of this paper were read at Kansas State University, Carleton University, and the University of Toronto; thanks to audiences at all three institutions for very useful criticism.