Scepticism - Lecture 6
6. Descartes
The protagonist of the First Meditation is frequently seen as a paradigmatic instance of someone who uses sceptical arguments to arrive at a sceptical conclusion about the extent of our knowledge of the world.
The broad outlines of the First Meditation are familiar to most people with any interest at all in philosophy. Descartes begins by drawing attention to the false opinions he believes he acquired in childhood and the ‘highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based upon them’. He infers from this a need to demolish everything and start again from the foundations. However it might be thought that this approach already incorporates a controversial rejection of coherentist thinking and an undefended commitment to the supposition that justification is always transmitted in a linear way. Descartes does not seem to give serious consideration to the suggestion that our success in building on our initial beliefs might count as adding to their credibility, and this leads him to think of our body of opinions in terms of the metaphor of an architectural edifice that relies on its foundations for its stability whereas it seems that it might be more appropriate to think of it in terms of a ship that can be rebuilt only in a piecemeal fashion.
The Meditations then take us through three successively deeper levels of doubt. The first is based on straightforward sensory errors, the second on the relationship between ordinary sensory input and the kind vouchsafed to us in dreams, and the third is based on considerations relating to the origins of our being. Unfortunately many commentators lazily conflate these considerations with Descartes’ invocation of the possibility that we are the dupes of a malicious demon. However it is important to note that Descartes actually reaches his most profound doubts by reflecting on the following dilemma. Either we have been brought into existence by an omnipotent creator, in which case he certainly possesses the power to deceive us even about matters as seemingly incontrovertible as the supposition that 2 + 3 = 5, or we owe our existence to some lesser cause, in which case we might well be so fundamentally flawed as epistemic agents that we go astray in even the simplest matters.
Suspension of Belief and the Will
Significantly Descartes supposes that we can suspend belief in response to these arguments only through an act of will. This forms a striking contrast with Sextus’ Pyrrhonism where suspension of belief is something that passively befalls the sceptic after he has directed his attention towards the relevant sceptical considerations rather than something that he needs to make an effort to achieve. Descartes’ meditator, though, is invariably portrayed as struggling to suspend belief. In the First Meditation Descartes talks of habitual opinions that keep coming back – ‘a result of long occupation and the law of custom’. This is supposedly such a problem that Descartes represents his meditator as resorting to the psychological device of imagining a malicious demon who is exerting all his power to deceive him. This piece of psychological play-acting is intended to strengthen the meditator’s resolve in guarding against giving his assent to any possible falsehoods. However even this device is scarcely equal to the task: ‘But this is an arduous undertaking, and a kind of laziness brings me back to normal life.’
Thus Descartes is adamant that even the meditator has rehearsed all the negative epistemological arguments of the First Meditation, he needs to exert his will to suspend belief. And when he does eventually achieve this suspension of belief, it can be maintained only through an unwavering act of will.
However if suspension of belief is a state we freely choose to embrace, then it seems that we can legitimately be required to explain our decision to make this particular choice. What can motivate us to behave in so unnatural a way? Also, if we have to strain to suspend belief, what becomes of epochç’s claim to be a source of peace of mind. And it seems relevant here that the picture Descartes gives of the meditator at the end of Meditation One is that of someone in considerable mental distress.
Thus in both cases (Pyrrhonism and Cartesian scepticism) an investigator begins his philosophical journey by examining his existing beliefs in order to weed out any beliefs that are not rationally justified. But subsequently their respective careers diverge considerably. The Pyrrhonean sceptic suspends belief effortlessly in response to the equipollence of reasons and thereby achieves peace of mind. The Cartesian sceptic, in contrast, struggles through an act of will to suspend belief in order to clear the way for the reconstruction of his beliefs on a foundation of certainty, and this temporary suspension of judgement brings with it not tranquillity but mental distress.
The Sceptic’s Target: Certainty versus Justified Belief
Descartes’ arguments are intended to call into question the supposition that we have certainty. In the First Meditation when Descartes is talking about our habitual opinions, he refers to them as ‘opinions which, despite the fact that they are in a sense doubtful, as has just been shown, it is still much more reasonable to believe than to deny.’ Descartes’ ground for treating them as uncertain is just that we can explain how we might hold those opinions even if they were to be false.
It seems, though, that even if we were to abandon the supposition that any of our beliefs are certainly true, we would still be able to assess them as falling into a wide range of epistemically favourable categories ranging from beyond reasonable double to marginally more probable than any equally detailed competitor belief. In fact the search for certainty is one that we often view as ill-advised or prudentially irrational. Descartes doesn’t even argue for a universal lack of certainty. In the Second Meditation he implies that beliefs about our own existence and the content of our thoughts and perceptions are immune to the arguments used in the First Meditation.
Descartes himself is at pains to reassure us that his project of inquiring into the certainty of our beliefs will have no impact on daily life.
‘This doubt, while it continues, should be kept in check and employed solely in connection with the contemplation of truth. As far as ordinary life is concerned, the chance for action would frequently pass us if we waited until we could free ourselves from our doubts, and so we are often compelled to accept what is merely probable’ Principles of Philosophy, Part One, Section 3.
‘I know that no danger of error will result from my plan and that I cannot possibly go too far in my distrustful attitude. This is because the task in hand does not involve action but merely the acquisition of knowledge’ – Meditation One, penultimate paragraph.
This lack of practical implications gives rise to the suspicion that Cartesian doubt is actually entirely bogus. In contrast real psychological changes are supposed to take place in the developing Pyrrhonist. Although the mature Pyrrhonist is not presented by Sextus as necessarily arriving at a psychological state that no non-sceptic could replicate, Sextus does hold that the Pyrrhonist will undergo genuine changes in his personality and attitudes as a result of embracing widespread suspension of belief. It might be better, then, to think of the Cartesian meditator not as embracing a radical set of doubts but as going through the exercise of bracketing off a range of beliefs for methodological purposes – ‘I won’t rely on this supposition to establish my conclusions’. Descartes’ ‘doubts’ are important only because of their alleged indirect payoff in terms of a new methodology and the recognition of new truths.
Descartes’ scepticism is insulated from the dangers of dialectical self-refutation and the charge that it cannot be lived. Hence some of the most interesting features of ancient scepticism are simply not needed.
Radicalising Cartesian Scepticism?
Although the line of reasoning deployed by the meditator in the First Mediation is far from being an argument in favour of any kind of radical scepticism, there does seem to be some possibility of reconfiguring Descartes’ arguments so that they generate something more genuinely sceptical.
Rethinking the deceiver hypothesis.
If the deceiver hypothesis is true, then most of what we now believe is false. We don’t know, for certain, that such a deceiver-ridden state of affairs doesn’t exist. Therefore we don’t know, for certain, that we don’t have mostly false beliefs. But do we even have good evidence that such a state of affairs doesn’t exist. What would evidence look like here? Do we have any access to how things are in the world independently of our sensory experiences? Anything that we might experience is logically compatible with the existence of such a state of affairs. Have we, then, good inductive grounds for supposing that certain forms of experience that are logically compatible with a deceiver world are actually negatively correlated with the existence of such worlds. After all, the striking of a match is not logically incompatible with the absence of a flame, but we would normally suppose that we have good grounds for supposing that a flame will appear. It seems, though, that we cannot legitimately maintain that we have such inductive grounds because we have never had access to what is out there independently of experience in order to give us a chance to establish these contingent correlations. And this point can also be put in the following way. Our view of how the world works and how experience relates to reality is based on the assumption that this is not a deceiver-affected world. Hence that view cannot be used in a non-question-begging way to argue that there is unlikely to be a deceiver out there.
Scepticism about the external world
Loosely based on Marie McGinn’s reconstruction of the sceptic’s general line of reasoning in Sense and Certainty (1989)
1) The inquirer takes up a reflective attitude towards our ordinary practice of making and accepting claims to have justified beliefs.
2) He notes past errors and undertakes the critical examination of his current claims to have true beliefs.
3) He discovers they are located in a framework of judgements that he accepts without doubt but can, in principle, be questioned.
4) The inquirer formulates a project of justification regarding the judgements of this framework.
5) This leads him to a purely subjective (in an effort to be non-question-begging) characterization of the evidence, and a recognition of an unproved and as yet undefended assumption that this kind of evidence can support his previous judgements.
6) He constructs sceptical hypotheses (to the effect that he is dreaming, a brain in a vat, or the plaything of some powerful deceiver), and these reveal that he cannot, without circularity, justify the foregoing assumption.
7) The inquirer concludes there should be complete suspension of judgement concerning the nature of the objective world.
McGinn claims that this line of argument is, prima facie, extremely powerful. She holds that the initial impression given by such reasoning is that it does not require us at any point to ‘accept anything that is either obviously false or even open to doubt’.
This example not only illustrates the way in which an argument modelled on the reasoning deployed by Descartes in the First Meditation can be structured so that it poses a serious challenge to the supposition that we have rationally justified beliefs, but it also reveals some of the pernicious side-effects of the grip exerted by the Cartesian paradigm.
According to McGinn, ‘the sceptical conclusion is completely incapable of bringing conviction’ despite the power of the epistemological reflections leading up to it. However if one has Pyrrhonean scepticism in mind, McGinn’s problematic proposition 7) seems to be a serious misrepresentation of the sceptic’s conclusion. The Pyrrhonean sceptic does not conclude that we ought to suspend judgement. Rather he comes to hold that not one of our beliefs is ever rationally justified, and this conclusion then has certain effects on his first-order beliefs. But an acceptance of the fact that we go on holding at least some beliefs even after we have come to the conclusion that they are not rationally justified is, in fact, one of the characteristic features of Pyrrhonean scepticism. When we see scepticism in terms of a Pyrrhonean rather than a Cartesian paradigm, we can appreciate that the phenomenon identified by McGinn is not an objection to scepticism: instead livable scepticism just is the view that we cannot refrain from belief and judgement despite the fact that onto one of our beliefs and judgements is ever rationally justified.
Cartesian inferential scepticism generates a whole family of problems that parallel the problem of the external world: other minds, the past, the future, distant, unobserved places. These all possess a common structure with only a few relatively minor variations. But they are also independent of each other and potentially additive.
Traditional responses from a foundationalist perspective to sceptical arguments of this kind are direct realism, logical reductionism, and inferences to best explanation. However the problems associated with these responses have also motivated some philosophers to attempt to replace foundationalism with a coherence theory of justification.
 Scepticism - Lecture 7a |
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