Doubt Doubted

Doubt Doubted

In this paper this author intends to examine and critique Rene Descartes' method for discovering truth and his concept of clear and distinct ideas. Broadly speaking, most modern philosophers explicitly reject both Descartes' specific method and his general approach. However, while there are problems with his philosophy of discovering truth, there is an underlying intuition that is correct. From this brief discussion we will be able to see that Descartes' theory of clear and distinct ideas and accompanying method are indicative of a significant truth but are ultimately flawed.

In order to have a proper, well-informed discussion of Rene Descartes we must first look at the man himself. Descartes was born in La Haye, France in the year 1596 and lived until 1650 when he died of pneumonia. He is most commonly known as the father of modern philosophy, but he was first and foremost a mathematician. He traveled extensively as a mercenary in three different armies, and while doing so he used the vast amounts of free time to think. This thinking led Descartes to author many now famous philosophical works between the years 1628-49. Descartes' most well know works are his Meditations and from these the famous, Ð''Cogito Ergo Sum.'

The famous Ð''Cogito' came into existence through Descartes' method for finding truth. In this method Descartes determined to doubt everything except that which was clear and distinct. By clear and distinct he simply meant: to doubt anything and everything unless it could be proven to be true without even the slightest doubt. So by systematically doubting everything one could obtain certain truths, and through these clear and distinct ideas true knowledge could be obtained. This led to his "Evil Demon" theory, which allowed him to doubt everything on the basis of a deceiving god that was constantly trying to trick him (this is also known as Cartesian Doubt). It became clear to Descartes that due to this "Evil Demon" everything could be doubted except for the fact that he was doubting and therefore that he was thinking. Hence, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). From here he built on this foundation and proved the existence of an undeceiving God, validated his senses, geometry, etc.

Here it is important to note that Descartes was a dualist. Dualism is the belief that there are two types of things. In Descartes' case, these two things were minds and bodies. More specifically, Descartes believed that there were two fundamentally different things, res cogitans (Thinking things) and res extensa (Extended things). However in his dualism we can already begin to see certain insufficiencies begin to arise. First of all, it is interesting to note that Descartes main "foundational truth", the cogito, only supports the res cogitans (Thinking things). This, however, is not dualism's main problem. The main problem lies in a topic that has confounded generations of philosophers and psychologist alike, mind and body interaction.

Since dualism takes the view of mind and body as being separate things we have two problems. First is the problem with extended things, which interact by colliding with each other. Second we have non-extended or thinking things which do not occupy space. So there is not only a problem with how extended and non-extended things interact but also how non-extended things interact with each other. If indeed it is the nature of things that causally determines how they act, and if each thing has its own individual nature, then how do they interact at all? This is a question that no one has ever been able to answer. Although Descartes is not the only one to have a problem with this, for the sake of this argument it had to be brought up.

Besides being a dualist, Descartes also believed in foundationalism. Foundationalism is the belief that knowledge must be regarded as a structure, where there are certain foundational truths and from those other truths can be obtained. However, this suffers from many different problems such as inadequacy and "theory ladenness". Under the category of inadequacy there are two subcategories, inadequacy of breadth and strength. There is an inadequacy of breadth in that no matter how you define foundational beliefs it is still going to be a very small group of truths. Due to this it would appear absurd that such a small number of truths would be able to support such a large group of other truths. To use the building example it would be equivalent to building an upside down pyramid, and through this analogy it is clear to see that the breadth is not strong enough to support