Yes, that’s a difference from Descartes, who didn’t see certainty (or doubt) as psychological, which I assume is what you mean by “an expression of confidence.” And yes, I think Quine would agree about the metaphysics part. But his web of belief is meant to be more than psychological – unless we insist on understanding pragmatism in psychological terms, which I don’t think Quine did.
A fair question. That’s why I urged that Descartes’ methodological doubt be understood in terms of a quest for certainty. If you don’t accept the end result of that search, the cogito, then you’d have to say – as indeed, Descartes does – that the whole project would have been in vain.
While I don’t think psychology is fully escapable, I was talking about intersubjective beliefs and goals, not personal ones. The “us” was supposed to do a lot of work there.
Good, that’s much closer to Quine and his followers. In English it’s often hard to tease out how a pronoun is being used. Another common example is “you”: If I write, “You can’t really know that X explains Y,” the person I’m writing to would reasonably ask, “By ‘you’ do you mean me personally, or are you using ‘you’ to mean ‘one’ as the British do?”
Well, this might not be answering the last question you posed, but I’d like to say something in a more general sense regarding the OP.
I’m wondering if there’s a difference between pretending to doubt something and choosing to doubt it for the sake of seeing where the argument leads. I don’t get the impression that Descartes genuinely woke up one morning thinking “maybe I don’t have hands” ; it seems more like he deliberately put his ordinary beliefs to one side to see what, if anything, would survive.
That’s partly why I’ve become a bit of a quasi-fan of the method. Even if doubt isn’t psychologically genuine, it can still be intellectually genuine. Sometimes deliberately entertaining a possibility you don’t actually believe is what exposes the assumptions you didn’t know you were making.
So I guess I’d be hesitant to lump that together with sham doubt. To me, there’s a difference between using doubt as a philosophical tool and using it as a performance.
Well, I partly agree with you. If by “doubt” we mean the psychological state of being uncertain, then I don’t think we can simply switch it on by choice either; it does seem to arise in response to something.
But what I had in mind is slightly different. I was thinking about deliberately adopting a doubtful attitude toward a belief, even if I don’t genuinely experience that uncertainty. That’s what I take Descartes to be doing: not literally becoming convinced he has no hands, but temporarily treating his ordinary beliefs as questionable to see what survives.
So I’d distinguish between feeling doubt and using doubt. The first may be well reactive, but the second seems more like a methodological exercise to me.
Descartes wanted something beyond doubt, to ground his system in. He eventually arrived at doubt itself. Dubito ergo cogito ergo sum. Or I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. See, you cannot doubt that you are doubting, because it would take doubt to do that.
Sure. I’m not actually against using methodological doubt as a tool. It acts as a way to prime our imagination when evaluating a differing position. We can say “Let’s take proposition X, that I happen to believe, and for a moment pretend I don’t, and see where that leads us”.
I just think it isn’t maybe as powerful and multi-purposed a tool as Descartes treated it, or as some of us treat it.
Well, that’s a fair clarification; I don’t think we’re very far apart now.
I’d also probably agree that methodological doubt isn’t a universal tool. I mean, there are certainly questions where pretending not to believe something doesn’t get you very far.
But I suppose what attracted me to Descartes wasn’t the conclusion that radical doubt could serve as the foundation for all philosophy, but the habit of deliberately suspending one’s ordinary assumptions from time to time, because even when it doesn’t produce certainty, it has a way of exposing assumptions that otherwise may remain invisible. But all said, perhaps I might’ve ended up admiring the exercise more than the ambition behind it.
That letter to Mersenne is a remarkable window into what Descartes was doing in the Meditations. The duality of mind and body suits a particular kind of Scholastic framing but actually is rendered mute by the “lessons of nature” at the end:
There is nothing that this nature teaches me more explicitly than that I have a body that is ill-disposed when I feel pain, that needs food and drink when I suffer hunger or thirst, and the like. Therefore, I should not doubt that there is some truth in this. By means of these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst and so on, [81] nature also teaches not merely that I am present to my body in the way a sailor is present in a ship, but that I am most tightly joined and, so to speak, commingled with it, so much so that I and the body constitute one single thing. For if this were not the case, then I, who am only a thinking thing, would not sense pain when the body is injured; rather, I would perceive the wound by means of the pure intellect, just as a sailor perceives by sight whether anything in his ship is broken. And when the body is in need of food or drink, I should understand this explicitly, instead of having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. For clearly these sensations of thirst, hunger, pain, and so on are nothing but certain confused modes of thinking arising from the union and, as it were, the commingling of the mind with the body.
–Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (Hackett Classics) (p. 53).
Another challenge to the Aristotle view is the following remark about causality:
For because the entire span of [49] one’s life can be divided into countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest, it does not follow from the fact that I existed a short time ago that I must exist now, unless some cause, as it were, creates me all over again at this moment, that is to say, which preserves me. For it is obvious to one who pays close attention to the nature of time that plainly the same force and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment that it lasts as would be required to create that same thing anew, were it not yet in existence. Thus conservation differs from creation solely by virtue of a distinction of reason; this too is one of those things that are manifest by the light of nature.
–Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy (Hackett Classics) (p. 33).
The remark certainly has the ex-nihilo camp at odds with the received doctrine on the nature of the natural.
Well, I’d say yes, but I suppose the assumptions most worth exposing are probably the most resistant to being exposed.
I still like the exercise, though, even if it doesn’t expose the assumption itself. Sometimes it at least shows you where you’re strangely unwilling to let go, and that alone can be quite revealing. Because sometimes you can think you’ve questioned everything, only to realize later that the thing doing the questioning was itself an assumption.
Well, that’s right, but let’s not confuse the mental event called “doubting” with the philosophical method of doubting. What Descartes discovered was that the mental event – the thing that I do, right now, in my brain and no other – requires that I exist. And this would be true of any mental event. It happens to be the event of doubting, in this case, because that’s what D is using as his tool. So I wouldn’t say he “eventually arrived at doubt itself.” He arrived at “If I can do something like doubting, then I must exist in order to do it.”
As Descartes explained in a margin note “we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt.” In the posthumously published “The Search for Truth by Natural Light”)*, he expanded it to dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum (“I doubt, therefore I am—or what is the same—I think, therefore I am.”).(“Antoine Léonard Thomas”), in a 1765 essay in honor of Descartes, wrote in summary: dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum (“I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.”)." From wiki.
So it is doubt specifically, as the foundation, and not any thought. While doubting that you are doubting is logically impossible, doubting that you are thinking is not. It cannot establish a certainty like doubt can, which is why it is the foundation.
Very good explication, thanks, I’m glad you questioned my over-certain interpretation. Perhaps the difference between your construal and mine comes down to how we understand “I doubt, therefore I am — or what is the same — I think, therefore I am.” (my emphasis). I was arguing that, in the manner necessary for the deduction, they are indeed the same – that it doesn’t matter if we talk about doubting or thinking.
Can you say more about this?:
I’m not seeing why “I doubt that I doubt” is any more of a contradiction than “I doubt that I think.” Do you agree that both “doubt” and “think,” in this context, refer to mental activities or events that occur for a certain person at a certain time? If so, that leads me to believe that it’s that fact, rather than the type of activity, that matters for the deduction.
I don’t think it is logically impossible to have the feeling, or sense that one is thinking induced, while not being thinking. Or to have thoughts that do not feel like you own, or the idea that one may believe themselves to be thinking, but actually being fed information from outside.
This raises skeptical suspicion regarding his separation of mind and body. Sensing is, according to the second meditation, part of what it means to be a thinking thing, part of what he means by the ‘I’ who is this thinking thing.
If [1] I and the body are one single thing then what does it mean to say that [2] I am only a thinking thing?
Good. But then those same considerations and possibilities would have to apply to the conclusion of the cogito – we can doubt that “I” really exists, in the same way. It is not logically impossible to think that “I” is an illusion, and many have argued this against Descartes – that at best he’s shown that “thinking is going on.”
So I’d ask, is there a way to keep the certainty of the cogito’s conclusion, but still maintain that “the feeling or sense that I am thinking could be induced while not actually being thinking”? Seems to me we don’t want to open that door.
There are some that suggest that he said “thinking” because he wanted to make the physical doubtable, but the mental indubitable, to bolster dualism. But that something has to exist that is being deceived for deception to occur doesn’t mean it has to be thinking. It could be entirely passive, only being induced to believe it is thinking, or feeling.
I think that it is grounded in the performative contradiction, that you cannot doubt doubting, without doubt. Then, from that, he classifies doubting as a subset of thinking. So to doubt is to think.
I think this is supported in how he justifies it, and relates it explicitly to doubting in particular.
OK. Descartes didn’t have our terminology of performative contradiction, but you’ve got me wondering if he would have preferred it to the language he does use, describing his deduction of the cogito. It’s an interesting point. And it relates once again to my question about whether “doubt” and “think,” in this context, are actions, performances. It sounds like you think they are?
"So to doubt is to think . . . " Yes, and in the end Descartes chose to frame the cogito that way, rather than in terms of the subset “doubting”. But you may be right in that only doubt would have provided D with the path he needed to establish the cogito. After all, he called his inquiry “methodological doubt.”
; it seems more like he deliberately put his ordinary beliefs to one side to see what, if anything, would survive.