Arc 1 : The conclusion that an all-perfect God exists is derived from premises that are clearly and distinctly perceived — i. Arc 2 : The general veracity of propositions that are clearly and distinctly perceived is derived from the conclusion that an all-perfect God exists. The italicized segment of Arc 1 marks an addition to the original statement of it, thereby clarifying the circularity reading.
Interpreted in this way, Descartes begins his Third Meditation proofs of God by presupposing the general veracity of clear and distinct perception. If there is one point of general agreement in the secondary literature, it is that the texts do not sustain this interpretation. How then should Arc 1 be understood? There are countless interpretations that avoid vicious circularity, along with numerous schemes for cataloguing them. Arc 1 : The conclusion that an all-perfect God exists is derived from premises that are clearly and distinctly perceived — indeed, premises belonging to a special class of truths that are fully immune to doubt prior to establishing the general veracity of propositions that are clearly and distinctly perceived.
Again, the italicized segment marks an addition to the original statement of Arc 1. More precisely, the Evil Genius Doubt is on this reading bounded in the sense that its sceptical potency does not extend to all judgments: a special class of truths is outside the bounds of doubt. Exemplary of this special class are the cogito and, importantly, the premises of the Third Meditation proofs of God.
Propositions in this special class can be perfectly known, even by atheists. Thus, the need on this interpretation for Arc 2 in the broader project. The other main kind of interpretation avoids circularity in a different manner.
More precisely, the Evil Genius Doubt is on this reading unbounded in the sense that it undermines all manner of judgments — even the cogito , even the premises of the Third Meditation proofs of God — when the mind is no longer attending to them clearly and distinctly.
Insofar as the meditator assents to the steps of these proofs, he does so not because of having an understanding of clear and distinct perceptions as being guaranteed true, but because the mind cannot but assent to them while attending clearly and distinctly. Importantly, if doubt is thus unbounded there is no circularity. The premises contributing to the conclusion of an all-perfect God remain vulnerable to hyperbolic doubt.
It is the unboundedness of hyperbolic doubt that underwrites the No Atheistic Perfect Knowledge Thesis. A central feature of this interpretation is worth repeating. It is natural for critics to ask why the arguments of Arc 1 are accepted by the meditator if, indeed, Evil Genius Doubt remains in play.
The answer lies in our earlier discussion of the indirect manner in which the doubt undermines clear and distinct perception Section 4.
However, the meditator does not yet have perfect knowledge of those premises, nor of their conclusions. How, then do those matters finally rise to the status of perfect knowledge? We return to this issue, below. At present, the focus is on the issue of circularity. Though bounded and unbounded doubt interpretations both avoid vicious circularity, each confronts further difficulties, both textual and philosophical.
Unbounded doubt interpreters must explain why, in the final analysis , the Evil Genius Doubt eventually loses it undermining potency. The first proposition is included in the list of examples that are undermined by the Evil Genius Doubt see the fourth paragraph of the Third Meditation. The second proposition is a premise in a Third Meditation argument for God — a proposition immune to doubt, according to bounded doubt interpretations.
What is supposed to be the relevant difference between these propositions? Given the indirect manner in which Evil Genius Doubt operates, there seems no clear explanation of why the doubt succeeds in undermining the first proposition but is somehow resisted by the second. Further awkward for this interpretation is that the cogito is included in the list of examples that that same fourth paragraph passage implies is vulnerable to doubt. Granting an unbounded doubt interpretation, why — in the final analysis — does the Evil Genius Doubt eventually lose its undermining potency?
But precisely such moments are when hyperbolic doubt does its undermining work. This means that upon diverting attention from the premises of Arcs 1 and 2, it is then possible to run the Evil Genius Doubt on their conclusions. It would thus seem that unbounded doubt interpretations leave us in a Sisyphus-like predicament. According to the myth, each time Sisyphus pushes his boulder near to the top of the hill, the boulder somehow slips away, rolling to the very bottom, and the whole process must start all over.
By carefully constructing the arguments of Arcs 1 and 2, the meditator gains anti-sceptical momentum, pushing his project near to the goal of perfect knowledge. Again, the hard question for unbounded doubt interpretations: Why, in the final analysis, does the Evil Genius Doubt eventually lose it undermining potency?
One recent unbounded doubt interpretation Newman and Nelson offers a solution, including an explanation of why Descartes waits until the end of the Fifth Meditation to claim final victory over the sceptical problem.
Here is a sketch of the account. It thus seems that a final solution to the problem would need, somehow, to make it no longer possible to make sense of the relevant sceptical scenarios. Indeed, the interpretation has it the sceptical scenarios become self-evidently incoherent. The needed apprehension of God would need to be self-evident. For suppose my apprehension is grounded in a demonstration.
Thus, the needed apprehension of God is a self-evident, clear and distinct conception that renders — as literally unthinkable — the very sceptical scenarios that underwrite indirect doubt.
A useful analogy lies in the doubt-resisting character of the cogito. If I attempt a direct doubt of own my existence, the effort is self-stultifying; I immediately apprehend that I must exist, in order to attempt the doubt. What Descartes needs is a similarly strong and immediate doubt-resisting outcome in connection with attempts at an indirect doubt. That is, on occasions of trying to undermine clearly and distinctly perceived matters — e. The Fifth Meditation introduces various themes about innate truths, including the positive epistemic effects of repeated meditation: truths initially noticed only by means of inference might eventually come to be apprehended self-evidently.
In the build-up to the passage claiming that the Evil Genius Doubt is finally and fully overcome, Descartes writes:. Given his newfound epistemic standing, the meditator would be unable to make coherent sense of the Evil Genius Doubt. His clear and distinct perceptions would be fully indubitable, thereby counting as perfect knowledge.
The interpretation helps explain two passages wherein Descartes purports to be detailing the final solution to the sceptical problem. In both passages, he can seem simply to be asserting that sceptical doubts are impossible, as if having forgotten the indirect manner in which his own hyperbolic doubt operates. But if we take Descartes to be assuming that the apprehension of God has become utterly self-evident, both passages make more sense.
The one passage arises in the Second Replies, in the context of rebutting an objection to the effect that, in the final analysis, it remains possible to doubt clear and distinct perception. The other passage arises in the Fifth Meditation, in the concluding summary explanation of how the sceptical problem is finally overcome.
Absent a self-evident apprehension of God, the two passages appear inexplicable, with Descartes seeming to misunderstand the sceptical implications of his own Evil Genius Doubt. But on the self-evident God interpretation, both passages read as a summary of the anti-sceptical effects of it being impossible to conceive of God as a deceiver. The interpretation also makes sense of why the final victory over scepticism is announced not at the end of the Fourth Meditation, but at the end the Fifth — after the further result concerning an enhanced, self-evident apprehension of God.
To help clarify this further circle, Della Rocca focuses on a twofold question:. As Della Rocca understands the broader Fourth Meditation argument, the claim that we should assent only to what we clearly and distinctly perceive is an essential step in the ongoing argument to establish the divine guarantee of clear and distinct perception. Since this step presupposes the eventual conclusion, that conclusion is based on circular reasoning:. Perhaps we can avoid this alleged circle. Though Descartes can be read in this way, the texts support the following alternative understanding of the broader argumentative narrative.
Early in the Third Meditation, having reflected on the epistemic impressiveness of the cogito , the meditator discovers that all , but only , clear and distinct perceptions are utterly assent-compelling. However, no step of that demonstration presupposes that clear and distinct perceptions have already been established as true; i. Summarizing the key steps:. Granted, the meditator needs each of the demonstrative steps to be clearly and distinctly perceived.
However, he needs this not because of presupposing the conclusion to be proved, but in order to be in compliance with his own initial resolve, stated in the First Meditation.
We noted in Section 1. Consider again the relevant Second Replies passage:. Indeed, the passage is plausibly read even more strongly: i.
Why does Descartes not add a truth condition, thereby ensuring that beliefs counting as perfect knowledge are true? In an influential book, Harry Frankfurt offers a provocative answer.
Writes Frankfurt:. The suggestion here is of some version of a correspondence theory. Also, on the most straightforward reading of the epistemic moves in the Meditations , Descartes is presupposing that at least some truths involve extramental metaphysical relations. Consider that Evil Genius Doubt is, fundamentally, a worry not about whether our various clear and distinct judgments cohere , but about whether they accurately represent an extramental reality — i.
Interestingly, Frankfurt himself came to renounce the interpretation:. How then should we interpret the Second Replies passage, and how should we understand the absence of a truth condition? I suggest that the lack of a truth condition need not reflect an indifference about truth, as opposed to a view about how a concern for truth is properly expressed in an account of knowledge. We can understand Descartes as wanting a fully internalist account whereby all conditions of knowledge are accessible to the would-be knower.
On a justified belief rendering, his account of perfect knowledge is fully internalist; yet, with the addition of a truth condition, it is not — at least, not given a correspondence theory of truth, in the context of metaphysical realism.
Importantly, then, in attributing to Descartes a justified belief account, we need not thereby attribute to him an indifference concerning truth. Again, from that same passage:.
Hatfield , , who expresses a related objection. Descartes himself makes a related point in connection with an atheist geometer who happens never to doubt his beliefs, simply because the Evil Genius Doubt never occurs to him:.
But note that the objection is telling only insofar as the requisite indubitability is understood as merely psychological. Yet clear texts indicate that Descartes regards clear and distinct perception as having epistemic import beyond mere doubt-resistance. His use of light metaphors, including the association of clarity and distinctness with the natural light , strongly convey a form of rational insight. Imagine that the magic pill is so magical as to instill in us a clear and distinct understanding of the matters we perceive — i.
But this objection misses a key point. As suggested in the Second Replies passage, Cartesian certainty — understood in terms of indubitability — does not, strictly speaking, rule out the broad possibility that we are in error. For texts concerning his final solution to hyperbolic doubt: see Fifth Meditation; Second Replies; letter to Regius 24 May For discussions of the role of the Fifth Meditation in the eventual, self-evident apprehension of God, see Newman and Nelson , Nolan , and Nolan and Nelson For examples of bounded doubt interpretations, see Broughton , Doney , Della Rocca , Kenny , Morris , Rickless , and Wilson For alternative schemes for cataloguing interpretations, see Hatfield and Newman and Nelson For an anthology devoted largely to the Cartesian Circle, see Doney For discussions of the role of truth in perfect knowledge, see Frankfurt and , Hatfield , Lennon , Loeb , and Newman and Nelson However, the existence of an external material world remains in doubt.
Descartes builds on a familiar line of argument in the history of philosophy, itself appealing to the involuntariness of sensations. The familiar argument is first articulated in the Third Meditation. Speaking of his apparently adventitious ideas sensations , the meditator remarks:. Though some such involuntariness argument has convinced many philosophers, the inference does not hold up to methodical doubt, as the meditator explains:.
We first examined this passage in regards to the Always Dreaming Doubt. That doubt raises the problem of the existence of external things.
This sceptical hypothesis explains why the familiar involuntariness argument fails: the inference presupposes exactly what is at issue — namely, whether involuntarily received sensory ideas are produced by external things, rather than by a subconscious faculty of my mind. Many philosophers have assumed that we lack the epistemic resources to solve this sceptical problem.
For example, Hume writes:. Interestingly, Descartes would agree that experiential resources cannot solve the problem. By the Sixth Meditation, however, Descartes purports to have the innate resources he needs to solve it — notably, innate ideas of mind and body.
Among the metaphysical theses he develops is that mind and body have wholly distinct essences: the essence of thinking substance is pure thought; the essence of body is pure extension.
This result allows Descartes to supplement the involuntariness argument, thereby strengthening the inference. As Descartes writes, this cause. It follows that my sensations are caused by external world objects — i. It remains to be shown that these external causes are material objects. That is, the cause is either infinite substance God , or finite substance; and if finite, then either corporeal, or something else. Descartes thinks he eliminates options a and c by appeal to God being no deceiver:.
This is a problematic passage. But unless each step of the argument is clearly and distinctly perceived, Descartes should not be making the argument.
On one kind of interpretation, Descartes relaxes his epistemic standards in the Sixth Meditation cf. Schmitt , f. He no longer insists on perfect knowledge, now settling for probabilistic arguments.
Though no decisive texts support the interpretation, it does find some support. For instance, in the Synopsis to the Meditations , Descartes writes of his Sixth Meditation arguments:. And other texts are unfavorable to this interpretation. For example, in the opening paragraphs of the Sixth Meditation, Descartes considers a probabilistic argument for the existence of external bodies.
This is a puzzling dismissal, assuming Descartes has relaxed his standards to probable inference. The relaxed standards interpretation falls short for another reason. It leaves unexplained why Descartes cites a divine guarantee for the conclusion that sensations are caused by material objects.
Instead, Descartes is extending the implications of his discussion of theodicy in the Fourth Meditation to encompass further cases of natural belief — such beliefs deriving from our God-given cognitive nature. It was noted above Section 5. Suppose Descartes holds that there are further cases in which an all-perfect God would not allow us to be in error, in part because the beliefs in question arise naturally from our God-given cognitive nature.
And suppose the further cases involve a natural propensity to believe which cannot be corrected by our cognitive faculties. Given these assumptions, the resulting rule for truth would look something like the following:. Indeed, a number of texts indicate that he holds some version of premise 2. As will emerge, Descartes looks again to call on this more expansive rule in his effort to prove that he is not dreaming. Earlier, we noted another apparent problem in the Sixth Meditation passage wherein Descartes concludes that the external cause of sensation is something corporeal.
One of his premises cites a great propensity to believe, yet the propensity is not itself the irresistible compulsion of clear and distinct perception. Does not the methodic procedure of the Meditations restrict Descartes to clear and distinct premises? By way of reply, distinguish a that my sensation has an external cause, and b that I have a great propensity to believe my sensation has an external cause.
In context, the meditator lacks clear and distinct perception of a. However, the relevant premise of the argument as opposed to its conclusion is not a , but b. And there is no principled reason that the meditator cannot clearly and distinctly perceive this premise. A final observation. Granting the success of the argument, my sensations are caused by an external material world.
But for all the argument shows — for all the broader argument of the Meditations shows, up to this point — my mind might be joined to a brain in a vat , rather than a full human body.
For even at this late stage of the project, the meditator has not yet established himself to be awake — a line of inquiry to which we now turn. See also Friedman , Garber , and Newman On the respects in which the Sixth Meditation inference draws on Fourth Meditation work, see Newman By design, the constructive arguments of the Meditations unfold even though the meditator remains in doubt about being awake.
This of course reinforces the ongoing theme that perfect knowledge does not properly encompass judgments of external sense. The judgment that an external corporeal world exists is not strictly a judgment of external sense — as if knowing its existence simply by sensing it. In the closing paragraph of the Sixth Meditation, Descartes revisits the issue of dreaming. He claims to show how, in principle — even if not easily in practice — it is possible to achieve perfect knowledge that one is presently awake.
A casual reading of that final paragraph might suggest that Descartes offers a naturalistic solution to the problem i. The following remarks can be read in this way:. Mirroring our discussion in Section 7.
Taken at face value, this reply rules out a relaxed standards interpretation; it indeed rules out any interpretation involving a naturalistic solution to the problem of dreaming. On closer inspection, the Sixth Meditation passage puts forward not a naturalistic solution, but a theistic one. How does his argument go? Recall, in the proof of the external material world Section 7. The dreaming passage looks to have Descartes again invoking this rule. The passage opens with the meditator observing the following:.
As the meditator says speaking of his apparently waking experience :. The cases like these to which Descartes refers look to be those where conditions i and ii are both satisfied. For everyone admits that a man may be deceived in his sleep. Whether in waking or dreaming, the Fourth Meditation theodicy has God allowing us to make judgment errors, provided that they are correctable.
Descartes is committed to holding that when our perception is confused, we can in principle come to discover the confusion — even if not easily. When we lack clear and distinct perception, we are at fault not God for any resulting judgments, in part because we can discover that our perception is confused. Descartes needs it that the same principle holds even while dreaming.
And again, nearly the entirety of the Meditations unfolds under the supposition that, for all we know, we may presently be dreaming. For the case at hand — i. Evidently, Descartes thinks so, as he tells Gassendi:. To the contrary, the Sixth Meditation treatment of the Now Dreaming Doubt closes with a concession that his solution is perhaps more theoretical than practical:.
Methodical doubt should not be applied to practical matters. Descartes holds that our judgments about our own minds are epistemically better-off than our judgments about bodies. The confusion is clearly expressed Descartes would say in G. In epistemological contexts, Descartes underwrites the mind-better-known-than-body doctrine with methodical doubt. For example, while reflecting on his epistemic position in regards both to himself, and to the wax, the Second Meditation meditator says:.
Other reasons may motivate Descartes as well. He may take the doctrine to be closely allied to a representational theory of sense perception. Accordingly, our sense organs and nerves serve as literal mediating links in the causal chain generating perception: they stand between both spatially and causally external things themselves, and the brain events occasioning our perceptual awareness cf.
In veridical sensation, the objects of immediate sensory awareness are not external bodies themselves, nor are we immediately aware of the states of our sense organs or nerves. Descartes indeed holds that the fact of physiological mediation helps explain delusional ideas, because roughly the same kinds of physiological processes that produce waking ideas are employed in producing delusional ideas:.
Various passages of the Meditations lay important groundwork for this theory of perception. For instance, one of the messages of the wax passage is that sensory awareness does not reach to external things themselves:.
This is an important basis of the mind-better-known-than-body doctrine. In the concluding paragraph of the Second Meditation, Descartes writes:. The understanding of ideas as the only immediate objects of awareness arises in a number of texts. Complicating an understanding of such passages is that Descartes scholarship is divided on whether to attribute to him some version of an indirect theory of perception, or instead some version of a direct theory. On both accounts, ideas mediate our perception of external objects.
On direct theory accounts, the mediating role is only a process role. More generally, Descartes seems to view all ideas as mental pictures, of a sort.
Indirect perception interpretations have figured prominently in the history of Descartes scholarship. A number of recent commentators, however, have challenged this traditional view. Suppose that the present contents of my mind include a confused array of ideas — say, a confused assemblage of auditory ideas, or color ideas, or perhaps I am presently flooded with a confused assortment of ideas of emotion.
In such cases, the proper use of my faculties requires me to withhold judgment about the present state of my mind. It is surprising, therefore, to learn that on the standard view among scholars, Descartes holds a strong view of privileged access guaranteeing the truth of all introspective judgments about the present contents of our own minds. On the standard view, Descartes holds an infallibility thesis whereby judgments about our own mental states cannot be mistaken, if based on introspective awareness: if I seem to be in mental state x , then I am in x.
There is some variation in the way these doctrines are formulated in the literature. At least two lines of argument are widely cited in support of this standard interpretation. One draws on the transparency doctrine. The other draws on texts claimed to provide support. Zeno Vendler explains:. Those who question the interpretation are apt to note that from the fact that I have awareness of whatever is occurring in my mind, it does not follow that I have distinct awareness.
But in that case, forming a judgment about the present state of my mind is a recipe for error — i. Because simpler ideas are generally easier to render clear and distinct, it can perhaps seem that I enjoy introspective infallibility concerning them. But suppose that while looking at multicolored sunset, I form an introspective judgment about precisely which color ideas are occurring in my mind.
Must Descartes say that such judgments are infallible? Were Descartes committed to introspective infallibility, then he should say that we could never be mistaken as to whether our occurring ideas are ideas of sensation , or instead ideas of imagination occurring in a dream. What about the textual line of argument regularly cited in support of the standard interpretation? Consider two Meditations passages that can seem to entail the infallibility thesis.
I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. Now as far as ideas are concerned, provided they are considered solely in themselves and I do not refer them to anything else, they cannot strictly speaking be false; for whether it is a goat or a chimera that I am imagining, it is just as true that I imagine the former as the latter.
As for the will and the emotions, here too one need not worry about falsity; for even if the things which I may desire are wicked or even non-existent, that does not make it any less true that I desire them. Prima facie, it is plausible to take such passages to entail that if if I seem to be having an idea of blue, or an idea of a noise, or of warmth, etc.
Read in this way, these passages anticipate the Fourth Meditation theory of judgment:. We have seen that, for Descartes, the only superlative perceptual state is that of clarity and distinctness.
The only guarantee of truth in our introspective judgments is, like all other judgments, when they are based on clear and distinct perception: if I clearly and distinctly perceive myself to be in mental state x , then I am in x.
All quoted texts are from CSM. Newman utah. Conception of Knowledge 1. The Methods: Foundationalism and Doubt 2. First Meditation Doubting Arguments 3. The Cogito and Doubt 4. Perfect Knowledge, Circularity, and Truth 6. Proving an External Material World 7. Perfect Knowledge of Being Awake 9. Self-Knowledge 9. While distinguishing lesser grades of conviction, and perfect knowledge,he writes: I distinguish the two as follows: there is conviction [ persuasio ] when there remains some reason which might lead us to doubt, but knowledge [ scientia ] is conviction based on a reason so strong that it can never be shaken by any stronger reason.
First of all, as soon as we think that we correctly perceive something, we are spontaneously convinced that it is true. Now if this conviction is so firm that it is impossible for us ever to have any reason for doubting what we are convinced of, then there are no further questions for us to ask: we have everything that we could reasonably want. AT f, CSM These passages and others suggest an account wherein doubt is the contrast of certainty.
Descartes adopted the strategy of writing his Meditations as meditations. Elsewhere Descartes adds, of innate truths: [W]e come to know them by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience. All geometrical truths are of this sort — not just the most obvious ones, but all the others, however abstruse they may appear. Hence, according to Plato, Socrates asks a slave boy about the elements of geometry and thereby makes the boy able to dig out certain truths from his own mind which he had not previously recognized were there, thus attempting to establish the doctrine of reminiscence.
Our knowledge of God is of this sort. The Methods: Foundationalism and Doubt Of his own methodology, Descartes writes: Throughout my writings I have made it clear that my method imitates that of the architect. When an architect wants to build a house which is stable on ground where there is a sandy topsoil over underlying rock, or clay, or some other firm base, he begins by digging out a set of trenches from which he removes the sand, and anything resting on or mixed in with the sand, so that he can lay his foundations on firm soil.
In the same way, I began by taking everything that was doubtful and throwing it out, like sand … Replies 7, AT f, CSM The theory whereby items of knowledge are best organized on an analogy to architecture traces back to ancient Greek thought — to Aristotle, and to work in geometry.
In contrast, metaphysical inquiry might have first principles that conflict with the senses: The difference is that the primary notions which are presupposed for the demonstration of geometrical truths are readily accepted by anyone, since they accord with the use of our senses.
Hence there is no difficulty there, except in the proper deduction of the consequences, which can be done even by the less attentive, provided they remember what has gone before. Admittedly, they are by their nature as evident as, or even more evident than, the primary notions which the geometers study; but they conflict with many preconceived opinions derived from the senses which we have got into the habit of holding from our earliest years, and so only those who really concentrate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things, so far as possible, will achieve perfect knowledge of them.
Descartes adds: All the mistakes made in the sciences happen, in my view, simply because at the beginning we make judgements too hastily, and accept as our first principles matters which are obscure and of which we do not have a clear and distinct notion. Search , AT , CSM Though foundationalism brilliantly allows for the expansion of knowledge from first principles, Descartes thinks that a complementary method is needed to help us discover genuine first principles. The passage adds: Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false.
So, for the purpose of rejecting all my opinions, it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt. AT , CSM In the architectural analogy, we can think of bulldozers as the ground clearing tools of demolition.
Writes Gassendi: There is just one point I am not clear about, namely why you did not make a simple and brief statement to the effect that you were regarding your previous knowledge as uncertain so that you could later single out what you found to be true. Why instead did you consider everything as false , which seems more like adopting a new prejudice than relinquishing an old one?
This strategy made it necessary for you to convince yourself by imagining a deceiving God or some evil demon who tricks us , whereas it would surely have been sufficient to cite the darkness of the human mind or the weakness of our nature. In reply, Descartes remarks: You say that you approve of my project for freeing my mind from preconceived opinions; and indeed no one can pretend that such a project should not be approved of.
Is it really so easy to free ourselves from all the errors which we have soaked up since our infancy? Can we really be too careful in carrying out a project which everyone agrees should be performed? Lastly, this process of radical doubt will hopefully rule out any doubts from the positive claims Descartes will build up in the next five meditations.
Read in the wider context of the Meditations, these skeptical doubts are a means to the end of preparing a resistant audience to the metaphysics Descartes plans to build. Read on its own, the First Meditation can be seen as presenting skeptical doubts as a subject of study in their own right.
Certainly, skepticism is a much discussed and hotly debated topic in philosophy, even today. Descartes was the first to raise the mystifying question of how we can claim to know with certainty anything about the world around us.
The idea is not that these doubts are probable, but that their possibility can never be entirely ruled out. And if we can never be certain, how can we claim to know anything? Skepticism cuts straight to the heart of the Western philosophical enterprise and its attempt to provide a certain foundation for our knowledge and understanding of the world. It can even be pushed so far as to be read as a challenge to our very notion of rationality. No one actually lives skepticism--no one actually doubts whether other people really exist--but it is very difficult to justify a dismissal of skepticism.
Western philosophy since Descartes has been largely marked and motivated by an effort to overcome this problem. Particularly interesting responses can be found in Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein.
SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. The most important qualities in an A level Philosophy answers are clarity, precision, integration and use of technical language. Structuring the argument is premise-conclusion format helps you be clear and precise. Explaining it in prose also allows you to use technical language and integrate the two sections of the question.
It can be tempting to write everything you know about Descartes — resist this temptation! Carefully plan your answer and ensure that each paragraph clearly addresses the question.
P2: If I am being deceived by an evil demon then all propositions I believe are false. C1: Therefore, in order to know a proposition I need to rule out the evil demon possibility. P3: I cannot rule out the evil deceiver possibility.
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