Descartes: Ttrue Belief and Knowledge
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Descartes: True belief and Knowledge
Descartes overall objective in the Meditations was to develop a system of true belief and knowledge. He starts with the assumption that the senses were false and anything interpreted by them was also false. This one statement disbands all the knowledge that we have ever learned. He traverses a process to set up a system by which knowledge could be gained, and this knowledge would be correct. The senses lie to us, reality could be our dreams, and material objects dont exist. . He rejects his senses, and replaces God with an Evil Genius. Once everything has been broken down, Descartes realizes he exists: “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes 66). With this affirmation comes the knowledge that God exists as a non-deceiver, the senses are not lying, and our world is not a dreamscape. With the senses true, material objects also now exist, and true belief with justification from the mind becomes knowledge.
Descartes first examined those beliefs that required the senses. He established that we must first “attack those principles which supported everything I once believed”(Descartes 60). He questioned whether the senses were true indicators of what was perceived. One night Descartes had a dream that he was sitting near a fire and could feel its warmth wash over him. When he awoke he realized that the fire had not really existed, and therefore there was no warmth. Yet his senses had felt the warmth, and his eyes had seen the flames. Thus he concluded that the senses could be deceived and could in fact be transmitting false knowledge. He went further to insinuate that the world that we are in may not be real; it could in fact be a figment of our dreams. We therefore could be truly sure whether we are in a dream state or not, thus is the treachery of the senses.
Descartes further made the hypothesis of “an evil genius, as clever and deceitful as he was powerful, who has directed his entire effort to misleading me”(Descartes 62). He believed that it could in fact be possible that there was no God, instead only this being that has control of him. He could in fact only be a brain that is being fed false information by this Evil Genius bent on deceiving him. By proposing this he was able to maintain that all his former beliefs were false and he was now ready to build his future evidence with confidence.
In Meditation two, Descartes attempted to prove the idea that God must exist as a fabricator for the ideas assembled his first theory: the notion that Descartes truly existed. He deduced that if he could both persuade himself of something, and likewise be deceived of something, then surely he must exist. This self validating statement is known as the ÐCogito Argument (Pitte 458). Simply put, it implies that whatever thinks also exists. Having established this, he asked himself: “What is this ÐI which necessarily exists?” (Descartes 65). He now began to explore his inner consciousness to find the core of his being. He argued that he was a “rational animal” for this idea is difficult to understand. He scrutinized whether perhaps he was a body infused with a soul, but this idea was rejected since he could not be certain the idea was of the material world. Eventually he focused on the act of thinking, and from this he concluded: “I am a thing that thinks, a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses” (Descartes 66).
To prove that perception of the mind is more real than that of the senses Descartes asked us to consider a piece of wax. When it is melted the qualities of the wax are changed and these can only be realized through the mind. Because the mind can see the dribble of wax melted, and also the fine candle that it once was. Descartes demonstrated how the information from the senses gives us only the observable; it is the mind that allows us to understand.
Descartes having proven that God exists must now make some conclusions concerning why God is not a deceiver. The main question that needs clarifying is “If God is no deceiver then why do we err?” (Descartes 81). He answered that humans were prone to make mistakes because our wills are unlimited but our intellect is not. The will gives us the abilities of declaration, denial and suspension of judgment. The intellect allows us to perceive things clearly and distinctly. Like God we have an infinite will, but we are imperfect because our understanding is finite. Descartes concluded that because we are free we are responsible for our errors. It is possible however, that if we use our minds properly we will not pass false judgments. Confident that God had created us such that if we understand things clearly and distinctly our reasoning would not be wrong; he was now free to explore the possibilities of material things and the mind-body relationship.
In the fifth meditation the essence of material things was considered. Before he begins with this however, Descartes feels it was necessary to offer another proof for the existence of God. Having just demonstrated that we gain understanding through ideas, he was able to continue with his argument proving that God necessarily exists. “The claim that is the glue to this argument is that a supremely perfect being must necessarily exist. If this is not the case, the being in question does not meet the criterion for perfection. God without existence is like a triangle without 3 sides or a mountain without a valley” (Descartes 89). First Descartes removed sensation as being separate from his imagination because he did not have any control over it. He again faced the same problem as he did in meditation one, the unreliability of the senses due to dreams or hallucinations. To counter this Descartes concluded that our knowledge of the material world was based on our knowledge of God. He believed that God had created man with such a strong belief in the existence of material things that they could not be false because God was not deceptive. By using God as his proof for the material world, Descartes left himself in a shaky situation. Were it to be found that God does not exist the rest of his claims would crumble. Nevertheless, Descartes was satisfied with the progress that he had made and was then ready to prove the existence of material things. To prove their existence he relied on his previous meditations to find the answer. He believed that material things can exist, if they are the object of mathematics. We can prove the existence of these objects because we can understand them with our minds.
There still remained the question regarding our imagination; Descartes reasoned that it was not necessary to explain how the imagination played a role in the perception of the world. The understanding