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Epistemology Day 3:
“Meditation Two”
Content:
1. The “Cogito” argument (10 mins)
2. The “Thinking Thing” argument (10 mins)
3. The “Piece of Wax” argument (15 mins)
4. Finishing Descartes (15 mins).
Method:
1-3. Lecture/discussion
4. Brief Lecture on “Meditation III”
Assignment for this class: “Meditation Two” and associated reading guide.
Instructor’s Introduction: In “Meditation Two,” Descartes refutes the skeptic. Hooray!
Unfortunately, his victory is almost hollow. All he is able to demonstrate is one single truth: he
exists. He can flesh that out a little—he is a thing that thinks. But that’s it.
In MII, we find three arguments. The first is the Cogito. This is his argument against the
skeptic. While he never actually says, “I think therefore I am” (or the one bit of Latin most
people can quote: Cogito ergo sum), that’s a nice summary of his argument here.
The second part of MII is his discussion of what kind of thing he is (we call this the “Thinking
Thing” argument). He used to think that he was a man, perhaps a rational animal, but these ideas
can’t get past the skeptical concerns from MI. All that he can say here is that he exists, and that
this thing that exists is fundamentally a thinking thing. This sets up something he’ll return to
later to argue for dualism. He is fundamentally a mind. If he in fact has a body (which he can’t
say now, but will admit to later), it’s something that isn’t as central to his identity.
The final section of the piece is his discussion of the “Piece of Wax.” Here is a supplementary
argument to reinforce his rationalism. He understands that what he’s argued for thus far is rather
counterintuitive and that, for most people, they are still hung up on the idea that we can really
doubt our senses. This argument is to reinforce the centrality of reason to knowledge over sense
experience.
Goals and Key Concepts:
1. Students will understand and be able to critique the three arguments in “Meditation
Two.”
2. Students should be considering their thoughts on knowledge from day one and
considering to what degree those thoughts are consistent with Descartes’ arguments.
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Again, since students should have completed the reading guide worksheet, it works best to have
them produce the interpretation of the reading here. The instructor can fill in gaps.
1. Cogito
The way to undermine these good reasons to doubt is to find something which you CAN’T
doubt.
As he sits and worries about whether he can know anything, he starts to wonder if he even exists.
After all, it seems that he can doubt his senses, and thus doubt that he has a body. We have to
worry about whether there is this deceiver, as well, that could be causing all of these thoughts.
BUT even as he has all of these worries–there has to be SOMETHING there that’s doing the
doubting or that’s being deceived. So he MUST exist.
You CANNOT doubt for good reason the statement, “I am, I exist”, because in trying to doubt it,
there is something that does that thinking, and it must exist.
This argument is often given as “I think, therefore I am”—he never says that phrase, but this
phrase gives the argument it’s name: The “Cogito”—Latin name for this argument. (In Latin,
the argument is Cogito ergo sum, which is just, “I think, therefore, I exist.”
So, you can’t doubt (for good reason):
1. I now think
2. Each case of thinking has an existent thinker
Therefore,
3. The thinker for the thinking in #1, call it “I”, exists. (i.e. I exist)
Even if he’s right about this, can this support all of the rest of his knowledge (which he’s gotten
rid of via skepticism, but which he hoped to bring back)?
The Evil Genius might still be a real worry; once you take him out of the bottle, he’s hard to get
back in. (But Descartes is sure that the EG can’t undermine the Cogito.)
2. Thinking Thing
So, now he knows THAT he is. The question becomes, WHAT is he?
He starts by listing all of his previous beliefs about what he was: He was a body w/ a soul.
What’s the point here? We want to know what things are NECESSARILY part of you.
Re: Man/ Rational animal: too many ideas involved here, start more basic
Re: body– “face, hands, arms”, etc. (and the soul was their cause – eating and walking, soul is
the “animation” of the body –what makes it work –not like our idea of soul)
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He admits that there never seemed any good reason to doubt his body before: “I believed that I
distinctly knew its nature” (p. 134a). BUT
Now we worry about the deceiver. All of these things could be fake, and I can doubt them. And,
more importantly, even if I ASSUME they’re false, there is still an “I” here, so I (in essence)
must be different from those things. (He wants the “necessary core” of the idea of what he must
be). The only thing that he can’t separate from himself is thinking (as soon as you doubt it–
you’re thinking!).
So, I’m a thinking thing—I’m something that essentially does thinking (my nature is to think).
E.g., what’s essential about a triangle is not its size, color, etc., but that it’s “three-sided closed
plane figure.”
3. Piece of Wax
He has a piece of wax that has a certain shape (figure), smell, color, sweet taste, is a little cold,
and if you hit it, it makes a sound (it’s kind of hard). In short, it has several particular physical
qualities that we seem to use to recognize it as a body.
BUT, as he gets nearer to the fire, all of these properties change. The smell changes, the taste
goes away, the color changes, it gets soft.
And yet, I have NO (additional) doubt that it’s the same wax. How do I know this?
–It can’t be through the senses–all of the sense information has changed
–It seems that there is just a “body” here, that I formerly recognized via one set of properties and
which I now recognize by others. How do I do this?
I abstract from the wax and try to get to what is necessary about it—that is, what remains when I
cut off everything I can and yet still have a piece of wax. This is just like we did when looking
for definitions before (e.g. when looking at a triangle).
All that remains of the wax is a certain extended thing (a body, a mass) which is flexible and
moveable. What do I mean by flexible and moveable?
Do I imagine all of the possible shapes it could be? No, because it could admit of an infinity of
shapes and I can’t possibly picture an infinity.
So, since I have an idea of the wax, which I can’t have through senses or imagination, I must
perceive it (the idea) through my mind alone (i.e. reason).
He’s forced then to conclude that even though he started out saying that it SEEMED to him that
he knew things better through the senses, that in fact this can’t be the case, and he must know
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things only through the mind. And in deliberating about these things, he’s also learning more
about the nature of his mind
4. Bringing Back Knowledge: A quick tour of Meditation Three
Instructor Note: One can get away with doing a quick summary of this material, stressing the
concept of innate ideas, and the relative strengths of rational beliefs over sensory-based ones. If
you skip this, you can stress that the nature of the knowledge proved in M2: it is a necessary
truth (can’t be doubted), and that for Descartes, as he builds back knowledge, the truths most
similar to that are going to be “firmer” (keeping with the foundationalist notion) than sensory
truths.
[A suggestion is to summarize the following based on how much time you think you’ll have. It’s
not necessary to go through the details of his Ontological argument here. You may want to come
back to it during the philosophy of religion section of the course, though. ]
Meditation Three:
The victory over the skeptic in M2 is a somewhat technical victory: yes, he proved that we can
have knowledge, but there is only ONE THING we can know (maybe two, depending on how
you cut it): I exist and am a thinking thing.
But, he wants a theory of knowledge. How is he going to build it back?
He notices that there is a feature about his new knowledge. It has a “clarity and distinctness”
about it—he hopes that this feature could be used to recognize other truths.
So, how is he going to build back knowledge? Well, “he analyzed the contents of his mind and
discovered it contained certain innate ideas, including “self,” “identity,” “substance,” and
“God.”1 These innate ideas share the same quality of being “clear and distinct” that his notion of
“I” has (in “I exist”). So, he has some innate ideas, but what about the Evil Genius, how does he
discard that notion?
What does it take to defeat a demon? God. So he tries to prove that an omnipotent,
omnibenevolent, perfect God exists who would not allow there to be an Evil Genius. Once he
does this, he can trust that ideas that are “clear and distinct” are true.
Here’s his argument. We will discuss arguments for God in the philosophy of religion part of the
course. Suffice it to say that he makes a good attempt, but his argument is ultimately circular.
For the instructor—argument overview:
1
Donald Palmer, Looking At Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter, 3rd ed. (McGrawHill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 2001), p. 163.
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1. I have the idea of God (standard Judeo-Christian/Muslim)
(even if you didn’t before, now you do!)
2. Everything has a cause
(The cause of the idea of God must explain not only why I have the idea at all, but
why I have the idea of God in particular.)
3. The cause of my idea of the infinite being (God) can’t be finite, and must itself
be infinite.
[Claim: The only way we can have an idea of infinite being is if there actually
exists an infinite cause of this idea. This is a problematic assumption. If you
weren’t already tempted to believe that God exists, you’re probably not going to
readily accept this premise.]
So, 4. The infinite being (=God) exists
but 5. I am not infinite.
So, 6. Therefore, God exists
Now, to show that God is no deceiver:
7. God is perfect.
8. Deception is an imperfection.
[Again, quite a problematic assumption]
So, 9. God is no deceiver.
If God exists, and is not a deceiver, then we can get a rule: all clear and distinct ideas are
true (and are innate—they are God’s trade mark). So then we can build back knowledge.
Descartes denies that we can get a notion of infinite through a finite means, but
it’s not clear that it works
He really begs the question in at least two places in his argument. (#3 & #8)
But, this (non-deceiving God) gets him what he needs to build back the world.
Once we have a God that exists and is not a deceiver, then we can count on
Question (from Meditation IV): So why are we ever wrong?
Answer: Because we don’t trust God, or don’t pay enough attention to what we’re doing. It’s
always our fault.
But, doesn’t that seem weird in the case of sense deception? (Where I can’t see well enough to
tell if it’s lint or a small spider? How is that my fault?)
We’ll return to Descartes when we talk about philosophy of mind.