Descartes's Method of Doubt

Janet Broughton

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780691117324
  9780691088181
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400825042
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Descartes thought that we could achieve absolute certainty by starting with radical doubt. He adopts this strategy in the Meditations on First Philosophy, where he raises sweeping doubts with the famous dream argument and the hypothesis of an evil demon. But why did Descartes think we should take these exaggerated doubts seriously? And if we do take them seriously, how did he think any of our beliefs could ever escape them? Janet Broughton undertakes a close study of Descartes's first three meditations to answer these questions and to present a fresh way of understanding precisely what Descartes was up to.


Broughton first contrasts Descartes's doubts with those of the ancient skeptics, arguing that Cartesian doubt has a novel structure and a distinctive relation to the commonsense outlook of everyday life. She then argues that Descartes pursues absolute certainty by uncovering the conditions that make his radical doubt possible. She gives a unified account of how Descartes uses this strategy, first to find certainty about his own existence and then to argue that God exists. Drawing on this analysis, Broughton provides a new way to understand Descartes's insistence that he hasn't argued in a circle, and she measures his ambitions against those of contemporary philosophers who use transcendental arguments in their efforts to defeat skepticism. The book is a powerful contribution both to the history of philosophy and to current debates in epistemology.

PART ONE

Raising Doubt

CHAPTER

1

Who Is Doubting?

THE First Meditation is short but devastating. After some preliminaries, Descartes raises a series of increasingly disturbing reasons for doubting increasingly large collections of our beliefs, until, it seems, there is “not one of [our] former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised” (2:14–15; AT 7:21). He ends the meditation by describing the way in which he will discipline himself into suspending judgment about everything for which he has found a reason for doubt.

His presentation of reasons for doubt begins with the beliefs he has acquired by using his senses: by looking at things, smelling them, tasting them, listening to them, and touching them. At the start he alludes to problems of ordinarys ense-deception, but he quickly zeroes in upon the beliefs for which no such problems arise: “for example, that I am here, sitting by the fire, wearing a winter dressing-gown, holding this piece of paper in my hands” (2:13; AT 7:18). He raises two reasons for doubting such beliefs: first, that he is like madmen, who “say they are dressed in purple when they are naked,” and second, that he can find “no sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep” and dreaming (2:13; AT 7:19). Further reflection suggests that these considerations also count as reasons for doubting many quite general beliefs, for example, the belief that eyes, heads, and hands exist (2:13–14; AT 7:20).

Still untouched, however, are “the simplest and most general things” that are dealt with by“arithmetic , geometry and other subjects of this kind” (2:14; AT 7:20). But Descartes finds reasons for doubting these beliefs too. How, he wonders, does he know that his omnipotent Creator has not made him so that he is deceived in these beliefs—even in his belief that two plus three equals five—as well as in all of his sense-based beliefs? Or if God does not exist, how does he know that his original cause—“fate or chance or a continuous chain of events”—has not botched his creation so that he is “deceived all the time” (2:14; AT 7:21)?

There are, then, four radical grounds for doubt: the lunacy argument, the dream argument, the deceiving God argument, and the “fate or chance” argument. The lunacy argument is sketchier than the dream argument, and for ease of exposition I will sometimes refer just to the dream argument when, in fact, what I am saying applies to the lunacy argument as well. Similarly, sometimes I will refer to the deceiving God argument when what I am saying applies equally to the “fate or chance” argument. When I speak of Descartes’s “radical” skepticism, or his “radical” grounds for doubt, I will be referring to the considerations he is raising in these four arguments.

In Part One of this book, I will be explaining how and why Descartes begins with these radical skeptical arguments. In chapter 2 I will be taking a detour into the ancient skepticism whose rediscovery was causing such a stir. By bringing out several features of Academic and Pyrrhonian skepticism, I hope to be able to identify some related features of Cartesian doubt, features that are easy for readers like us to miss. In subsequent chapters I will return to the First Meditation, looking for ways to answer these questions: What does Descartes count as a reason for suspending judgment? What does he count as a reason for doubt? And what does he cede to the authority of common sense? But first in this chapter I want to explore the question who is raising the doubts of the First Meditation.

THE MEDITATOR AS ANYONE

The First Meditation is seductive: we find it easy—all too easy—to project ourselves into the position the ‘I’ seems to occupy. It can seem to us that the meditator’s confrontation with the skeptical arguments must be ours as well, that what moves him should move any thoughtful person who examines his beliefs in a disciplined and thoroughgoing fashion.

It is true that we do not ordinarily consider the radical grounds for doubt when we assess our beliefs, or candidates for belief. There is also a sense in which we would be wrong to do so: any judge would declare a mistrial if a juror were to advance the dream argument as providing grounds for reasonable doubt about whether the defendant committed the crime with which he was charged. Some philosophers have concluded from this that the radical grounds for doubt are illegitimate. Thomas Reid, for one, argued that “what is absurd at the bar, is so in the philosopher’s chair. What would be ridiculous, if delivered to a jury of honest, sensible citizens, is no less so when delivered gravely in a philosophical dissertation” (1969, 623).

Still, it is easy to see the mediator as using nothing but a natural extension of the standards that are implicit in our ordinary ways of evaluating our beliefs, and then finding that by those standards, virtually nothing that we believe deserves our assent. Several distinguished philosophers in recent years have interpreted Descartes as intending for us to see the meditator’s reflections in this way, and they have explored the question why we find it so easy to see the First Meditation in the way they think Descartes wants us to.¹ (There are large questions here about how philosophical reflection is related to everyday belief; I will take some of them up in chapter 5.)

In the rest of this chapter I will be arguing that in important respects we are wrong to suppose that this is how Descartes thought matters should appear to the meditator in the First Meditation. Of course, we may nonetheless still wish to think about radical skeptical arguments in this way. But if I am right about Descartes, we will need to find the precursor of our wish somewhere outside the Meditations. So by raising the question who the ‘I’ is, who the meditator is supposed to be, I hope to be able more clearly to see how Descartes thought someone could raise and take seriously the radical skeptical arguments.

The Meditations is not an autobiographical work. Descartes’s own intellectual development did not pass through the phases the Meditations describes, as his correspondence and other philosophical writings make clear. So the ‘I’ of the Meditations is not Descartes himself. In at least some respects, Descartes suggests, the meditator’s position is one that any thoughtful person could occupy.² For example, in the Second Replies, he says that the “order” of the Meditations is this: “the items which are put forward first must be known entirely without the aid of what comes later; and the remaining items must be arranged in such a way that their demonstration depends solely on what has gone before” (2:110; AT 7:155). The “demonstration” of “the remaining items” proceeds by“analysis”:

Analysis shows the true way by means of which the thing in question was discovered methodicallyand as it were a priori, so that if the reader is willing to follow it and give sufficient attention to all points, he will make the thing his own and understand it just as perfectlyas if he had discovered it for himself. But this method contains nothing to compel belief in an argumentative or inattentive reader; for if he fails to attend even to the smallest point, he will not see the necessity of the conclusion. Moreover there are many truths which—although it is vital to be aware of them—this method often scarcely mentions, since they are transparently clear to anyone who gives them his attention. (2:110; AT 7:155–56)

Descartes intends the Meditations to instruct the attentive reader by putting ideas in the order in which the reader can come to know them, and by laying out demonstrations that show how the later things can be “discovered methodically” from consideration of the earlier things. “Earlier” and “later” here are not altogether metaphorical, as they might be, say, in reference to the steps of the proof of a theorem in Euclid. Descartes is trying to show how an ideal inquiry might go: a person who first had the thought that A, would then recognize that B, which in turn would show him that C. The order, A–B–C, is partlya matter of various relations among the propositions designated, but it is also partlya matter of the state of the person at the successive moments at which he entertains A, B, and C, and the ways in which the occurrence of the earlier states may help to bring about the later ones. (I will fill out this schematic description more fully in chapter 3.)

So by narrating a first-person-singular inquiry, Descartes is dramatizing a very general sort of “order” and (in one sense of the term) “method” that he is using to instruct the reader. These considerations do not by themselves rule out the use of, say, the second person plural. But once “you,” the readers, had done what Descartes urged you to do, and had suspended judgment about all your former beliefs, you would be suspending judgment about the existence of the person addressing you in the second person plural, and about the existence of the other people ostensibly being addressed. The first person singular is ideally suited to the lonely inquiry Descartes narrates.³

In the Second Replies, Descartes says that the order of the Meditations requires that he start with “items which are . . . known entirely without the aid of what comes later.” This suggests that as readers we should try to avoid interpretations that attribute to the meditator at one stage of his inquiry some idea or belief that he acquires at a later stage. When we think about the meditator, we should always ask, “What did he know, and when did he know it?” We may, however, find that there are places where we simply cannot make sense of what the mediator says without reading Descartes as putting words in the mediator’s mouth. I will argue presently that the very first sentence of the First Meditation is one such place, and that this complication is philosophically significant.

We can see how the idea of progressive discovery fits later sequences of the mediator’s thoughts: for example, the mediator achieves certainty that God exists without relying upon the knowledge of the material world that he acquires later. But we should not be surprised to find that it is harder to see how this idea fits the earliest stages of the Meditations. To be sure, once the mediator has suspended judgment about all of his “former beliefs” (2:14; AT 7:21), there is a sense in which he has a clean slate: he does not claim to know anything at all and thus cannot be claiming to know something by relying upon what comes later. But then on what basis does he first come to know something? And what about the very beginning, before the meditator has raised the grounds for doubt? What are the former beliefs of the ‘I’, and what exactly has persuaded him to seek out and take seriously such outré grounds for doubt?

Let me make this last question more specific by bringing it to bear upon the opening of the First Meditation. Descartes begins by having the meditator say,“Some years ago I was struck by the large number of false things that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of everything that I had subsequently built on top of them” (2:12; AT 7:17; trans. altered). What are these falsehoods? How did the mediator come to recognize that they are falsehoods? How had he built on top of them, and why do they make this superstructure of belief “highly doubtful”? Questions multiply as the meditator is made to continue by saying, “I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was sturdy and lasting” (2:12; AT 7:17; trans. altered).We can understand why lasting results in the sciences are unlikely to flow from beliefs that are “doubtful,” but again, why are those beliefs doubtful? And in any case, isn’t the meditator overreacting when he says he must “demolish everything”? To answer these questions, we need a better understanding of who this meditator is, and how he sees his situation.

THE MEDITATOR AS SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHER OR PERSON OF COMMON SENSE

John Carriero has argued that in the First Meditation Descartes is engaging someone who holds a specific set of philosophical tenets, those of the Thomistic metaphysics derived from Aristotle. This scholastic meditator would bring to his inquiry several assumptions that Descartes wants him to drop. One is that our knowledge begins in our senses, when...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART ONE Raising Doubt
• CHAPTER 1
• CHAPTER 2
• CHAPTER 3
• CHAPTER 4
• CHAPTER 5
• PART TWOUsing Doubt
• CHAPTER 6
• CHAPTER 7
• CHAPTER 8
• CHAPTER 9
• References