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1. The French philosopher René Descartes (1596~1650) is commonly known as the father of
modern philosophy. This is because Descartes set the agenda for much of modern
philosophy, that is, Western philosophy from the 17th to the 19th century. Ever since
Descartes, Western philosophers have been preoccupied with the problem of providing a
secure foundation for human knowledge, the mind-body problem (concerning the precise
nature of the relationship between mind and body), and the problem of our knowledge
concerning the external world (how do we know that the external world and material objects
exist, if we are only certain of our own subjective experience and can doubt the existence of
things beyond our own experience)?
2. Thus Descartes brought problems about the nature of human knowledge into the foreground.
Philosophical inquiry into the nature and the sources of knowledge is called epistemology
(more simply, theory of knowledge).
4. Descartes’s solution to the above problem is to provide a single chain of proofs establishing
(i) that I exist (as a thinking thing),
(ii) that God exists (as the cause of my idea of God), and
(iii) that the external world exists (as guaranteed by the non-deceiving nature of God).
5. To summarize—
Problem: Can we know anything with absolute certainty?
Method: Universal doubt.
Solution: A single chain of proofs, from self to God to world.
1
(If I am thinking, then I exist.)
I am thinking.
------------------------------------
I exist.
Note that the argument is a disjunctive syllogism. Premiss (3) and the conclusion are
supported by the following principle: “The cause must contain at least as much reality as the
effect”. Please see the notes on Meditation Three for further explanation.
The external world includes everything outside my mind except for God, whose existence is
established in the preceding proof. So the external world includes all material objects, all
other minds except God’s, and my own body. Note that this argument is also a disjunctive
syllogism. Premiss (2) is supported by the fact that what we perceive by our senses is
independent of my own will. Premiss (3) and the conclusion are supported by the non-
deceiving nature of God: since we are strongly inclined to believe that there is an external
world, and God is not a deceiver, our belief that there is an external world must be true.
Please see the notes on Meditation Six for further explanation.
9. Let me give you a brief background on the problem of characterizing the nature of
knowledge. Traditionally, philosophers have characterized knowledge as justified true belief.
That is, you know something just in case:
(a) you believe it,
(b) what you believe is true, and
(c) you are justified in believing it.
Now, the reason why a true belief must be justified in order to count as a piece of knowledge
is this: there can be accidentally true beliefs that we would not count as knowledge. Suppose
you mistake a 20 dollar bill for a 10 dollar bill, and you place the bill in your pocket, falsely
believing that you have 10 dollars in your pocket. Then while you are asleep your cheap
2
brother secretly replaces the 20 dollar bill in your pocket with a 10 dollar bill. The next day
you go on believing that you have 10 dollars in your pocket, and this now happens to be true
because of what your brother did while you were unawares. So now you have a true belief
that you have 10 dollars in your pocket, but it is not a case of knowledge, but of being lucky
in your beliefs (and unlucky in your finances).
10. So, knowledge requires justification.1 Descartes too insists that in order for true belief to
count as knowledge rather than a lucky guess, we must arrive at true belief via proper
justification.2 Also, according to Descartes, justification requires absolute certainty:
…knowledge is conviction based on a reason so strong that it can never
be shaken by any stronger reason [Descartes, in a letter written in 1640].
Or to put it in other words, we are justified in believing something only if we cannot doubt
that it’s true and it cannot possibly be false—only if it is indubitable and infallible. Thus,
according to Descartes, we have knowledge just in case:
(a) you believe it,
(b) what you believe is true, and
(c) [i] you have indubitable and infallible evidence for the belief, or
[ii] it can be justified by other beliefs for which you have indubitable and
infallible evidence.
11. Thus, according to Descartes, something counts as knowledge only if we are absolutely
certain of it, and there is no chance at all that we can be mistaken about it. We may object
that this requirement of indubitability and infallibility sets too high a standard for knowledge,
and we may wonder if anything would count as knowledge on this standard.
12. But there is a good argument that knowledge requires eliminating all possibility of error.
This is a reductio argument3 known as the Lottery Paradox. Our goal is to prove that:
Knowledge requires eliminating all chance of error
So we assume the opposite claim (the negation of the above claim):
1
20th century philosophers have discovered that there are cases where even justified true belief doesn’t give us
knowledge. Since it was Edmund Gettier who first pointed this out, this is known as the Gettier problem, and the
relevant cases (those which are meant to count as cases of justified true belief that are not cases of knowledge) are
known as Gettier cases. To find out more you can Google-search “the Gettier problem” or “Gettier cases”.
2
See Meditations, p.40, where Descartes says [emphasis mine]:
But if I hold off from making a judgment when I do not perceive what is true with sufficient
clarity and distinctness, it is clear that I am acting properly and am not committing an error. But if
instead I were to make an assertion or a denial, then I am not using my freedom properly. Were I
to select the alternative that is false, then obviously I will be in error. But were I to embrace the
other alternative, it will be by sheer luck that I happen upon the truth; but I will still not be without
fault, for it is manifest by the light of nature that a perception on the part of the intellect must
always precede a determination on the part of the will.
3
See Weston, Rule #29, for an explanation of reductio ad absurdum.
3
A chance of error can be allowed for a belief to count as knowledge.
13. To repeat what I mentioned in Note #2, inquiry into the nature and the sources of knowledge
is called epistemology. In the 17th and 18th centuries Western philosophers were divided into
two camps, the empiricists and the rationalists, who had different approaches to
epistemology.
14. The empiricists, on the one hand, included John Locke (1632~1704), George Berkeley
(1685~1753), and David Hume (1711~1776). They held that the human mind was like a
blank slate (tabula rasa) at birth, and that sense perception is the source of all our ideas.
They generally maintained that no true proposition about matters of fact can be known
independently of experience.
15. The rationalists, on the other hand, included Descartes, Baruch Spinoza (1632~1677) and
Gottfried Leibniz (1646~1716). They denied that the mind is a blank slate at birth.
According to these philosophers, there are innate ideas intuited by reason (rather than sense
perception), and there are some true propositions that can be known independently of
experience.
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16. Please note that we are using the term ‘rationalist’ here in a narrow and technical sense. In
the broad and ordinary sense of the term, both empiricist and rationalist schools are
‘rationalist’—they both insist upon rational inquiry as the method of attaining truth. What
they disagree about is the precise role of sense-perception and experience in rational inquiry.
A second point: it is difficult to find philosophers who were thoroughgoing rationalists or
thoroughgoing empiricists. For instance, a rationalist like Descartes does place some
(cautious) reliance upon the senses as a source of information about the external world and
material objects. And an empiricist like Locke was a rationalist about the existence of God,
just like Descartes: we have an innate idea of God, and from this we can deduce the existence
of God. More generally, empiricists have tended to side with rationalists on logical and
mathematical truths—the necessity and universality of these truths we know independently
of experience.
17. Rationalists usually point to logical or mathematical truths as examples of items that we
intuit by reason, and know independently of experience. Think for instance of ‘2 + 2 = 4’.
We know, without consulting further experience, that this arithmetic statement is always and
necessarily true: we know for sure that any pair of pairs—even ones we haven’t seen or
counted—will add up to four things. This cannot be verified by experience, but we do know
it! Rationalists believed that such truths intuited by reason, and known independently of
experience, reveal substantive truths about the world. Now, logical and mathematical truths
are uncontroversial. But Euclidean geometry (which rationalists took to reveal truths about
the nature of space) does not describe the nature of physical space according to modern
theoretical physicists. There are other controversial claims that rationalists made about the
world independently of experience, such as ‘Every event has a cause’, and, of course, ‘God
exists’.
18. Descartes, let me repeat, is a rationalist. According to Descartes, we have innate ideas, such
as the logical, mathematical and geometrical truths intuited by reason, independently of
experience. When we concentrate our attention on these ideas, we find that they are ‘clear
and distinct’, as opposed to ideas about particular features of material bodies which come
from the senses. These latter ideas deriving from senses are ‘obscure and confused’. You
can take clear and distinct to mean self-evidently true, and obscure and confused to mean
something like prone to error. The priority which Descartes places upon innate ideas that are
self-evidently true, as opposed to ideas arising from sense experience, even concerning
knowledge we have about material objects, can be seen in:
i. Meditation Two, the Wax Example (pp.21~2);
ii. Meditation Three, Descartes’s Criterion of Truth (p.24);
iii. Meditation Four, Descartes’s rule for avoiding error (p.41);
iv. Meditation Five, Descartes on the essence of material objects, in other words,
the truths of mathematics and geometry (esp. p.43).