Questions for the First Meditation

2025-1 Descartes

Midterm Study Guide

 

1. What is the synthetic method? What is the analytic method? Descartes says in one passage that there is not a single claim that he asserts with confidence in the First meditation. Explain.

 

The synthetic or syllogistic method was commonly used in the 17th century by philosophers such as Spinoza and Leibniz. For instance, Spinoza famously begins his Ethics with definitions and axioms that we are able to recognize with certainty. Every axiom, as its name indicates, must be axiomatic. Geometry is one such synthetic science that requires definitions and axioms as premises, from which conclusions can be derived. The premises of the geometry can be grasped well in the form of a sensory picture or image. In this regard, their certainty is ultimately justified by our intuition—that is, our senses. Descartes believes that philosophy is not a proper science in which the synthetic method can be applied. For Descartes, human minds are not well-suited to philosophical thinking—a highly abstract idea. As embodied being, we are built to pay attention to sensible objects for survival and preservation. If we do not pay careful attention to such objects, we will die. As a result, we have no practice at thinking abstract ideas—essential part of philosophy. It is prevalent to have mental pictures of abstract ideas when we are trying to investigate them. Such pictures are often misguided, according to Descartes.

Here, Descartes concerns about the abstract premises of a philosophical argument, which are essential in philosophy, but, for readers, hard to understand. Descartes also recognizes that many conclusions he endorses seem quite far-fetched for ordinary readers who trust and are familiar with sensory objects: bodies have no color, sound, or smell; that there is no such thing as empty space; that God is an eternal and wholly immutable/unchanging entity.

To clarify abstract premises, he uses the analytic method, according to which several false heuristic claims are intentionally made for the purpose of investigation. For instance, an equator as an imaginary line, even though it does not exist, is useful for certain purposes. Likewise, Descartes deliberately makes several false claims through which readers finally recognize the opposite is true. It is not so much useful to just reiterate the truth to people who got confused.

It is thus a preliminary state for employing the synthetic method—its purpose is to make highly abstract premises clear. “He supposes that we will not register the evidence of the argumentation that comes after the First Meditation unless we engage the hyperbolic skeptical arguments, but as a matter of historical fact, it turns out that if we engage those arguments we are likely to conclude that nothing that comes after the First Meditation is credible.” (Cunning 2024: 126-127).

 

2. State the premises and conclusion of the First Mediation dream argument. How is the Painter Analogy supposed to help recover some confidence in the belief that there is an external world.

In the first Meditation, Descartes tries to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations, as he wants to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. In other words, he seeks beliefs that are so certain and obvious that they cannot be false. To do this, he considers several sorts of beliefs classfied according to their resources. One class of beliefs is beliefs that are “either from or through the senses.” He notes that there have been cases in which our senses have sometimes deceived us – for example we see a tower as circular when it is square, or we see an oar as bent in water. He then adds that if a source of belief has deceived us even once, we can never trust it.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

One might raise an objection that his requirement is too strict; our senses deceive us when we are in non-ideal viewing conditions – for example we are far away from an object, or our view of the object is distorted – but in ideal viewing conditions senses are trustworthy.

To reply this, Descartes suggests the dream arugment as follows:

A brilliant piece of reasoning! As if I were not a man who sleeps at night, and regularly has all the same experiences' while asleep as madmen do when awake — indeed sometimes even more improbable ones. How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events — that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire — when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my eyes are certainly wide awake when I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and it is not asleep; as I stretch out and feel my hand I do so deliberately, and I know what I am doing. All this would not happen with such distinctness to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did not remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while asleep! As I think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep.

The argument supposes the (very commonsensical) opinion that waking perceptions are veridical and that dream perceptions are not. The meditator thus notes the “familiar” experience of being convinced that he is sitting by the fire, “when in fact [he is] lying undressed in bed” (AT 7:19).

The dream argument also supposes that “there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep” (ibid.).

Descartes thinks that in the final analysis the distinction between waking and dreaming is not a distinction between perceptions that are veridical and perceptions that are not. When we are awake, we encounter objects as having color and sound and taste, and as clearly individuated from each other by empty space, but on Descartes’ view the external world is of course quite different. Bodies do not literally have color, and the world literally contains no light. Furthermore, Descartes does not think that waking perception is a reliable indicator of the qualities of bodies.

The function of waking perceptions is more pragmatic: [S]ensory perceptions are related exclusively to [the] combination of the human body and mind. They normally tell us of the benefit or harm that external bodies may do to this combination, and so not, except occasion ally and accidentally, show us what external bodies are like in themselves.

Descartes offers a Painter Analogy and says that just like an artist often paints an image of a thing that is not real, the basic colors that go into the image are real. In the same way, even if we cannot tell whether or not a given sensory perception is of a real thing, there are at least some real things that exist – the simple or basic elements. In the First Meditation he argues that even if we can never be certain whether or not we are dreaming, we can be certain that there is something external to us that is a precondition of our having any sensory perceptions at all – what he identifies as the simple elements that are a presupposition of waking and dream perception both (AT 7:20–21, CSM 2:13–14). An Aristotelian scholastic reader would suppose that those simples include entities like color and heat, and a mechanist reader (like Hobbes or Gassendi) would suppose that they only include extensive features like size, shape, and motion. Descartes accordingly leaves the list of simples open-ended in the First Meditation (AT 7:20, CSM 2:14)14 – as he should if he expects that a variety of minds are to reason from their own first-person perspective and continue into the Second Meditation, where a result of real epistemic stature is finally advanced. (Cunning 2024: 37-38)

He concludes that the simple elements that have to exist (if we are to have any sense perceptions at all) are “corporeal nature in general, and its extension; the shape of extended things; the quantity, or size and number of these things; the place in which they may exist, the time through which they may endure, and so on.” Some commentators have argued that because Descartes only includes features like size, shape, and motion in his description of the simple elements, he does not take the simples to include sensory qualities like color or sound (Bermudez 1998, 238). Other commentators have noted that because Descartes has not yet provided any reason to doubt the existence of features like color and sound (in the First Meditation), he would be reckless to conclude that color and sound are not among the simples (Rozemond 1996, 38–39), and so he doesn’t. For example, an Aristotelian reader who is working through the Meditation would hold that the simple elements that have to exist (if we are to have any sense perceptions at all) would possess size, motion, and color. What Descartes concludes in the First Meditation is that the simples include size, shape, “and so on” (AT 7:20, CSM 2:14); he leaves open the ontology of the simple elements in a way that reflects that he has written the Meditations with an eye to a variety of minds. (Cunning 2024: 38, 14)

 

3. In the First Meditation Descartes puts forward three arguments for the skeptical conclusion that it is not possible that our minds are deceived about results that are utterly evident to us. State each of these arguments. Why does Descartes porceed to offer the second and third, and not just stop at first?

 

Descartes puts forward one more skeptical argument to the effect that it is possible that our minds are deceived about results that are utterly evident to us. He provides three versions of the argument.

1. One rests on the assumption that God exists and that God is so powerful that perhaps God created us to be wholly certain about claims that are false. Perhaps two and three add to six, but we have been created in such a way that we see it as utterly obvious that two and three add to five. God is mysterious and difficult to comprehend, so perhaps there is a reason why God would have created us like that even though God is wholly good.

 

1. And yet firmly rooted in my mind is the long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am. How do I know that he has not brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, while at the same time ensuring that all these things appear to me to exist just as they do now? What is more, since I sometimes believe that others go astray in cases where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, may I not similarly go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable? But perhaps God would not have allowed me to be deceived in this way, since he is said to be supremely good. But if it were inconsistent with his goodness to have created me such that I am deceived all the time, it would seem equally foreign to his goodness to allow me to be deceived even occasionally; yet this last assertion cannot be made.

 

The second version rests on the assumption that God does not exist but instead we have arrived at our present by chance. On that assumption, why is it plausible to think that our minds might be defective?

 

2. Perhaps there may be some who would prefer to deny the existence of so powerful a God rather than believe that everything else is uncertain. Let us not argue with them, but grant them that everything said about God is a fiction. According to their supposition, then, I have arrived at my present state by fate or chance or a continuous chain of events, or by some other means; yet since deception and error seem to be imperfections, the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time. I have no answer to these arguments, but am finally compelled to admit that there is not one of my former beliefs about which a doubt may not properly be raised; and this is not a flippant or ill-considered conclusion, but is based on powerful and well thought-out reasons. So in future I must withhold my assent from these former beliefs just as carefully as I would from obvious falsehoods, if I want to discover any certainty.

 

The third version rests on the assumption that God exists and that God would not deceive us, and then posits instead it is possible that an evil demon is tricking us to see results as obvious (like that two and three add to five), even though two and three in fact add to something else.

3. I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things. I shall stubbornly and firmly persist in this meditation; and, even if it is not in my power to know any truth, I shall at least do what is in my power, that is, resolutely guard against assenting to any false hoods, so that the deceiver, however powerful and cunning he may be, will be unable to impose on me in the slightest degree. 

 

The First Meditation offers alternating versions of an argument for the conclusion that it is possible that our minds are deceived about matters that are utterly evident to us. One (for theists) is an argument from the possibility of radical divine deception (AT 7:21, CSM 2:14); one (for atheists and atheistic mechanists) is an argument from the possibility that human beings (and our cognitive faculties) evolved to their current state by a process of random chance (AT 7:21–22, CSM 2:14–15); and a third (for theists who are not prepared to allow that God might be a radical deceiver) is an argument from the possibility that an evil demon is tricking us every time we settle on a result that we find to be obvious (AT 7:22–23, CSM 2:15).