Wednesday, October 2, 2019
When the Walls Come Tumbling Down
Descartes realizes that some of the beliefs he thought were true turned out to be false. In the pursuit of knowledge he seeks to tear down his previous beliefs and build them up again upon a firm foundation. In other words, he is engaged in a foundational project, searching for a class of beliefs that themselves are not in need of justification in order to justify his other beliefs. But is this quest a misguided one? Do such beliefs exist? If not, does that mean that knowledge is impossible? Or is there some other way to justify our beliefs?
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When tearing down his own beliefs, Descartes searches for basic beliefs that do not need justification. The quest is a misguided one since the act of destroying all your own beliefs is hard, as they usually are ingrained in you. Descartes tries to do this several different ways, including saying how his senses can deceive him, so everything he sees may be false. He also uses dreams to do this, saying how you are unsure if you are dreaming or not, so you are not sure if anything around you is real. He is left with knowledge not related to senses, such as math, so he says that it is possible that an all-powerful evil genius it out there changings the rules of the universe, so we cannot be sure what is true. He uses this to say how he knows nothing, but he later proves that the all-powerful evil genius does not exist, so he did know things in the first place. Also, even if the evil genius did exist, and we ignored that he later proved it false, this would show that he didn't have knowledge or beliefs based in reason, but he could still hold beliefs. There are many people in the world obstinate about believing certain things with little to no justification. After someone leaves their child, many times the child will keep thinking that the parent will come back, even though there is no reason to believe it. Beliefs using no justification do exist and help build the foundations of arguments, but his quest was misguided in the fact that it is impossible to completely destroy your own beliefs. One belief is that I think and it requires no justification. It started the Cogito argument that leads on to the reasoning that I exist. Beliefs that require no justification are very important, but Descartes quest for them is misguided since it is impossible to destroy all your knowledge/beliefs.
ReplyDeleteDescartes searches for a set of foundational beliefs on which he can set the rest of his beliefs. He believes that he can find those beliefs for which he does not need to have a justification, theoretical or empirical. However, all of those foundational beliefs that he has, have some sort of justification behind them, meaning no beliefs are truly foundational.
ReplyDeleteDescartes’s most foundational belief is his Cogito argument. Descartes’s Cogito argument asserts, “I think, I am”, and he derives this idea from the fact that because he can doubt his other beliefs, that must mean he is thinking. Knowing that he is a thinking thing must assert that he exists. However, that belief is not foundational because it comes from his belief in doubt of other beliefs. That doubt has another root in the deception of his senses. According to Descartes, he cannot believe any of the information that his senses gives him because he knows that his senses have deceived him the past (hearing a sound that isn’t actually there, an optical illusion, something with white sugar-looking crystals on it tastes salty, etc.). From there, he bases all of the doubt from which his Cogito argument stems from based on this fact. However, that fact is itself a piece of empirical evidence. Thus, there must be some justification for Descartes’s Cogito argument, that justification being empirical evidence.
Descartes’s foundational belief cannot be foundational because it stems from empirical evidence. That empirical is itself a justification for that belief, but it itself it not a belief, and so it cannot be foundational. Thus, there are no foundational beliefs for Descartes.
I do believe that such beliefs exists. One reason for this is the fact that we really don’t know nothing. All we know is about ourselves and the inner machinations of our minds. Everything external would most certainly requires a most definite form of justification. The only way that said external beliefs could in fact be justified would be the appearance of physical evidence. Something that us ourselves can see and rule on based on what our eyes can see. Even though this is what we’ve been taught, we should always be prepared for deception. Because everything we see might not be in fact what it seems. For the God example, we cannot in fact prove his existence because there is definite physical proof of his existence. People might think that, “hey, this miracle is a case of the omnipotent power of God. Therefore, he exists”. This belief is unjustifiable because you don’t definitely and distinctly know that it’s the work of God. It’s the conclusion that you can most comprehend. On the other hand, one belief that doesn’t require personal justification is the rain. You feel and see the rain coming down from the sky, yet you don’t really know the science behind it. That’s the climate scientists job to figure that out on the gas level. You take their word for it that it’s coming from the clouds and you move on. You don’t know that but it’s what the qualified people tell you. So, after thinking this over, it is possible to have beliefs that have no justification. It’s really based on how you look at what you’re believing in.
ReplyDeleteThis is a misguided quest because Descartes builds upon previous beliefs to draw conclusions. He tries to disregard his senses, as they can be deceptive. For example, senses can deceive you when you think you heard something you did not or hallucinate when you are very exhausted. Based off of this, he says that nothing he senses can be trusted, therefore everything is false. He says that since you cannot tell the difference between being awake and dreaming, everything we experience may be a dream. All of these beliefs are based off of some sort of justification or evidence. He justifies his belief that we know nothing through distrusting what we thought we knew before. The foundation for his most famous argument, the Cogito argument, which is "I think, therefore I am" is based on the fact that he doubts his own beliefs, therefore he is thinking. This doubt is based off of the distrust of his senses. In conclusion, he uses his past claims about his lack of knowledge and distrust to justify this new belief. This proves that there are no foundational beliefs because Descartes justifies his claims with claims made before. He could not have reached the conclusion that we think, therefore we exist, without doubting the senses and reality first.
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