Descartes Error, with Reference to the Third and Fourth Meditations

[Published in Philosophical Investigations, 33:4, 304-320]

Olli Lagerspetz, Philosophy, bo Academy

Introduction
The aim of this paper is not to criticise Descartes for some error he may have
committed but to look at what he says about the concept of error or mistake. The
overall effect is to raise some doubts about the customary association of Descartes
philosophy with Methodological Solipsism and Other-Minds scepticism.

Meditations on the First Philosophy1 belongs to the relatively few works of Western
philosophy where the occurrence of cognitive or intellectual error 2 is explicitly
presented as a feature of our thinking that needs explanation.3 In particular, that
discussion is included in the Third and Fourth Meditations. Given his general take on
the philosophy of mind and perception, Descartes is facing two problems:

(a) How is it possible that we commit errors, given the existence of a non-
deceiving God? Descartes presents his answer in the Fourth Meditation,
highlighting non-cognitive aspects of factual judgments (indeed, as we will
see, much in the same way as Antonio Damasio does, in a purported objection
against him, in his book Descartes Error).
(b) How is the concept of error possible in the first place given the fact that,
according to Descartes, the concept of falsity is not applicable to ideas, or
mental contents narrowly defined? How could the thought of being in error
possibly enter the mind of the subject of the Second and Third Meditations?

1
References will be made to the volume Ren Descartes, 1904. Meditationes de prima philosophia,
Oeuvres de Descartes Vol VII (ed. Charles Adam & Paul Tannery) [AT VII], Paris: Lopold Cerf.
Also the numbers of the relevant Meditations, Objections, and Replies will be indicated. The
translations are mine. For references to the Discourse on Method, I am using the volume Ren
Descartes, 1938. Discours de la mthode suivi des mditations Mtaphysiques, Paris: Ernest
Flammarion, which follows the French edition of 1668.
2
Descartes says he is writing about error with regard to distinguishing between true and false (de []
errore [] qui contingit in dijucatione veri & falsi, [Synopsis, AT VII, 15]), not about sin (peccatum)
or about what concerns the practical conduct of life.
3
Thanks to Marina Barabas for originally, several years ago, directing my attention to this.

1
 As we will see, Descartes answer, invoking the subjects idea of perfection
bursts the initially solipsistic frame of the Meditations.

A discussion of these issues, I suggest, will lead to the conclusion that Descartes
philosophy is less egocentric and more dialogical than is usually assumed. Here it
indeed compares favourably with some recent philosophy of mind. Descartes may
escape some criticisms applicable to later philosophers who have, consciously or
unwittingly, incorporated Cartesian elements into their work. A form of Cartesianism
has gained wide currency in twentieth-century debate because we see its perverse
appeal and ascribe it to Descartes, in order then to criticise it, while often
unconsciously retaining key elements of it. Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris
make this point forcefully in their book Descartes Dualism.4

To quote a critical view, Norman Malcolm writes, in a juxtaposition of Descartes

Meditations and Wittgensteins On Certainty:

Descartes believes that a single human being can, all by himself, arrive at
many certainties. Wittgensteins view is that anyones certainty about anything
presupposes a mass of knowledge and belief that is inherited from other
human beings and taken on trust. Descartes thinks that ones metaphysical
certainties have a Divine backing and, therefore, must be true. Wittgensteins
view is that when ones certainty of something is objective, one cannot
understand how it would be possible that one is making a mistake [] but
that it does not follow that one is right.5

I hope to indicate there are reasons for a more favourable comparison. Descartes
discussion of error in the Third Meditation may also be seen as a proto-private
language argument, or a private error argument,6 with at least the potential of
opening up questions quite similar to those raised by Wittgenstein in the relevant

4
Gordon Baker & Katherine J. Morris, 1996. Descartes Dualism. London: Routledge.
5
Norman Malcolm, 1989. Wittgenstein: Nothing Is Hidden. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 235.
6
This is not the place for a discussion of whether these should properly be called arguments. The
relevant passages in Wittgenstein and Descartes are certainly not arguments in the narrow sense of
showing that B necessarily follows from A. Rather they are invitations to consider things from certain
perspectives. But arguably most work in philosophy in general is accomplished by other means than
arguments in such technically restricted sense.

2
sections of Philosophical Investigations. This is generally missed, I submit, in part
because we tend to see Descartes contribution as more uniform and architecturally
structured than we perhaps should.

As far as I can see, the present paper is largely compatible with, but not dependent on,
the novel interpretation of Descartes philosophy of mind put forward by Baker and
Morris. They distinguish between Descartes dualism and the kind of Cartesian
dualism often ascribed to Descartes. They question the intelligibility of Cartesian
dualism within the framework of Descartes own (partly Aristotelian) view of the
mind.7 The present paper does not directly deal with dualism or on how to
demarcate the boundaries between the body and the mind but rather with
scepticism and solipsism, themes that do not lie at the centre of Baker and Morris
attention. Moreover, Baker and Morris consciously want to present an internally
consistent account of an overall position outlined in the corpus of his texts.8 My
suggestion is instead that Descartes, in the Second Meditation, presents and, in the
Third Meditation, abandons certain ideas that might be thought to support allegedly
Cartesian dualism and Methodological Solipsism.

1. Descartes Method
First a few words about Descartes method. Descartes often describes knowledge as
an architectural structure, hoping to base the necessary principles of scientific
knowledge on the foundation of propositions that cannot be doubted by any thinking
being.9 This certainly captures an important element of his contributions to science
and philosophy. But Descartes insists he had a reason not to construct his Meditations
more geometrico, or as a deductive system based on the Cogito. In his second set of
Replies he calls his mode of presentation analysis, by which he means that his
thoughts are presented in the order in which the meditating subject arrives at them.10

This is why I wrote Meditations and not Disputations as philosophers

would do, nor Theorems and problems, as geometricians would: namely, to

7
See also Lilli Alanen, 1982. Studies in Cartesian Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind. Helsinki:
Acta Philosophica Fennica vol. 33.
8
E.g., Baker & Morris 1996, 191-193.
9
See, e.g., Discours, pt II.
10
Resp. II, AT VII, 155-156.

3
 point out that I will have no truck with others than those who do not refuse to
consider and meditate the issue along with me.11

If we take him by his word we must not discuss the positions described in the
different phases of the Meditations in abstraction from the process by which he
arrives at his final views.12 The work tracks a meditative process where earlier
positions are successively abandoned.

I am directing this warning specifically to philosophers of mind, who would typically

present the predicament at which Descartes arrives at the end of the Second
Meditation as his more or less final bid on the nature of the mental life. On that view,
the Second Meditation presents us with a finished picture of that, while the existence
of an external world remains to be demonstrated later on, as a separate issue. Thus
the relevant philosophers of mind would assume that the question how I am related to
the world in experience can be compartmentalised into two questions: first, What are
the contents of my mind? And secondly, How accurately do those contents represent
goings-on in the external world? And they would take it that whatever answers
Descartes gives to the first question would survive regardless of his answers to the
second.13

That is what Baker and Morris describe as the two worlds view commonly ascribed
to Descartes. According to that view, the mind contains mental entities (thoughts and
sensations) understood as things, in analogy with things in an external, material
world.14 The mind has privileged, indubitable access to its contents, which supposedly
provide the basis for Descartes subsequent reconstruction of human knowledge on a
secure basis. The construction of thinking as an internal world gives rise to familiar
questions about how the internal and external worlds are related.

11
Resp. II, AT VII, 157.
12
John Cottingham, 1992. The Rationalists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 44 46.
13
Hence, as Alex Gillespie points out, subsequent, less pious scholars, [who rejected Descartes
appeal to God but] who developed Descartes method of radical doubt into early psychology in the
form of introspectionism, found themselves marooned on Descartes first principle (giving rise to
the Other Minds problem). Alex Gillespie, 2006. Descartes Demon: A Dialogical Analysis of
Meditations on First Philosophy. Theory & Psychology 16, 761-781, p. 762.
14
Baker & Morris 1996, e.g., 25, 69.

4
The view in the present paper is, in short, that Descartes sets out in the Second
Meditation to explore how far he can get if he starts out from a purely egocentric
conception of knowledge. However, he does not retain that conception. It seems to
me, on the contrary, that an important break with it occurs in the Third Meditation;
although there will be questions about how conscious Descartes was about the radical
nature of that break.

2. The Predicament of the Second Meditation

In the end of the Second Meditation and in the beginning of the Third, the thinking
subject (to which Descartes refers as I or ego) is conscious of the fact that, among
its thoughts, there are ideas (ideas), including those he calls feelings and images
(sensus & imaginationes15). Regardless of the status of ideas in other respects, I can
be sure that they are in me insofar as they are modes of thinking.16 The subject
knows that it thinks, and it has also knowledge of the specific qualities of its different
modes of thinking, such as sensation (visual, tactile, acoustic, and so on), volition,
doubt, and so forth.

In modern philosophy of mind, the initial position outlined here is known as

Methodological Solipsism. It is described by saying that mental contents can be
defined narrowly. The contents of my thoughts mental states, ideas or other
thoughts may be described independently of any judgments concerning their
relation to facts in the external world; facts that may or may not correspond to them.17
Here, inside, everything may be the same regardless of whether I am really perceiving
something out there.

Thus, according to Methodological Solipsism, a waking experience and a dream

experience are essentially the same because they are the same experience: they
present my mind with certain conscious states. The possibility of qualitative similarity

15
III, AT VII, 34.
16
III, AT VII, 35: quatenus cogitandi modi tantum sunt, in me esse sum certus. Italics by the
present author.
17
See D.W. Hamlyn, 1990. In and Out of the Black Box. Oxford: Blackwell, 59; J.A. Fodor, 1980.
Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, 3, 63-73; Hilary Putnam, 1975. The Meaning of Meaning. Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science 7, 131-193; Vincent Descombes, 2001. The Minds Provisions. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 202-203. Fodor accepts Putnams challenge and stands up for the defence
of Methodological Solipsism (see Descombes 2001, 202-223 for a detailed discussion).

5
of dreams with any waking experience is ensured by the fact that whatever the content
of my experience, it is always possible to assume a dream where I enjoy the same
experience.18 Let me just say briefly that any semblance of plausibility that this
view may have for us is largely a result of the thorough influence that Cartesian
philosophy has exercised in the intervening centuries (largely via the Empiricists, who
incorporated a certain reading of it into their concept of experience 19). We certainly
speak of seeing both in a dream and in a real situation. But countless things remain
that can only be said in the one case but not in the other. For instance, if there is
dispute about what really happened in a situation, the fact that I have seen something
happen can be used as evidence. (In other words, there is an internal relation between
my saying that I have or: that someone has seen an event and my claiming that the
event took place.20 My accounts of dream experiences do not have this role.)
Analogously, I swim both in my dreams and in real life, but this does not demonstrate
that the real essence of swimming consists in my mental states as I swim. Thus the
presumption of complete qualitative interchangeability between waking and dreaming
experiences is entirely due to the fact that experience has already been (re-)defined
as a process in the mind; which is simply a requirement of Cartesian-cum-Empiricist
theory. It is manifestly not what is meant by experience in a number of everyday life
situations.

In passing, let me point out anyway that many philosophers of mind today see
Methodological Solipsism (also known as Narrow Content and the principle of
Neurobiological Sufficiency) as a valuable research strategy. One reason for this is
that something like it must be assumed in any form of psychoneural identity theory. If
a neurophysiological state is to be described as being identical with a mental state, it
must be possible to individuate and describe that state independently of the external

18
Essentially the same argument is employed in the philosophy of perception in the form of the
Argument from Illusion. Each object of the external world may seem to have qualities that it actually
does not possess. If I am aware of such a quality then I am aware of some object that has it. But the
external object, ex hypothesi, does not have the quality in question. So I must be aware of some object
other than the external object; namely, of my representation of the external object. Howard Robinson,
1994. Perception. London: Routledge, 31-32, 151.
19
Marya Schechtman, 1997. The Brain/Body Problem. Philosophical Psychology 10, 149-164.
20
On this, see Olli Lagerspetz, 2002. Experience and Consciousness in the Shadow of Descartes.
Philosophical Psychology Vol. 15, 5-18.

6
situation. Hence one must be able to define mental states narrowly.21 At least in the
present philosophy of mind there are, then, powerful incentives for taking
Methodological Solipsism seriously despite its obvious problems.

The view just described is Cartesian in a received sense of the word, but Baker and
Morris raise the question whether anything like it might conceivably have been
Descartes considered view. Sensing, seeing, etc., were, for Descartes, modes of my
thinking, but Baker and Morris argue that he did not claim they were independently
existing entities that appeared before my mind. They were things that I do. Descartes
certainly claimed that if I seem to see, or if I think (or judge) that I see22 that there is a
torch in the room, then it always remains true that I think I have the experience of
light. This is something I am entitled to assert regardless of whether there really is a
torch in the room. Doubt is excluded.

This cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called sensing

[sentire]; and in this restricted sense [praecise sic sumptum] it is nothing else
but thinking.23

But, as Baker and Morris point out, Descartes is not saying here that sensing or seeing
is really thinking.24 He only says that in both sensing, seeing, and, for instance,
walking, one can discern a bodily component and a mental component (sensing in
this restricted sense) the latter being certain.25

In any case, in the Second Meditation Descartes wants to focus on that thinking
component of perception. For Descartes, this is a strategy for damage control in the
face of the Dream argument. The subject described in the Second Meditation does not
doubt, and cannot doubt, what he is thinking. However, the absence of doubt is
bought at the price of at least provisional scepticism about external reality. There is no

21
For an illuminating discussion, see Descombes 2001, 202-223. See also Sanford C. Goldberg, 2007.
Anti-Individualism. Mind and Language, Knowledge and Justification. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
22
Baker and Morris (1996, 66) point out that Descartes uses the deponent personal form videor [I
see] rather than the impersonal form mihi videtur [it seems to me], thus emphasising that this is not a
case of mental contents appearing before my minds eye but of me thinking.
23
II, AT VII, 29.
24
I have, alas, jumped to that conclusion in an earlier paper (Lagerspetz 2002, 10).
25
Baker & Morris 1996, 32, 35.

7
good reason, at this point of Descartes argument, to maintain that the thoughts that
the subject is having constitute cases of seeing and hearing in the wider sense in
which those words are usually understood: experiences of events and objects (out
there).

3. Memory in the Second Meditation

The subject of the Second Meditation has ideas or thoughts that are neither true nor
false in themselves. I may form mental images of many kinds, but as long as I have
not passed a judgment about the relation of my images to anything outside them, the
concepts of truth and falsity are not applicable to them.26 At the same time, according
to Descartes, I will be certain that I have these thoughts. This kind of certainty
pertains to my thoughts at the present moment. Now what about the subjects
knowledge of its past experiences?

Descartes discusses memory in two senses.27 On the one hand, he speaks of memories
as judgments about events (mental or external) in the past. Those judgments involve
truth claims and may be subject to doubt. For instance, extended chains of reasoning
are vulnerable because they need to be retained in the memory.28 But in the present
context of the Second Meditation, memory is simply the faculty that retrieves mental
contents from the past without implying truth claims. In the Fourth Meditation, he
includes memory, together with imagination, among the mental faculties whose
exercise does not imply truth claims, and which are contrasted with the will.29

Pointing to a close analogy: the I now is in the same predicament as Wittgensteins

keeper of a private journal, introduced in the Philosophical Investigations.30 Each
time I have a certain sensation I jot down S in my journal. S is my private sign for
the sensation, which I have named in an act of private ostensive definition by
concentrating my attention on the sensation and calling it S. Now I recognise my
present sensation as being sufficiently similar to the one I previously enjoyed; and I
call it S once again. Wittgenstein questions the assumption that the ostensive

26
III, AT VII, 37.
27
Bernard Williams, 1990. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. London: Penguin, 167.
28
V, AT VII, 69-70; Resp. II, AT VII, 140.
29
IV, AT VII, 57.
30
Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953. Philosophical Investigations [PI]. Oxford: Blackwell, I: 258.

8
definition makes me remember the connection right in the future between the sign
and the sensation.

One way to understand Wittgensteins point would be to say that memory cannot be
relied upon when applied to exclusively private states of mind. There is no way I can
make sure the sensation I previously called S is sufficiently similar to the one I am
enjoying now. This interpretation was put forward by A.J. Ayer and criticised by
Rush Rhees.31 However, the real point is stronger and really not dependent on any
limitation of my cognitive faculties. Should we try to imagine a being that always
remembers everything right, it would still be caught in the same problem. Or rather, it
would be unclear what the criteria are for remembering right or wrong in this case.

I have no criterion of correctness32 for the different designations that I give to my

sensations. Whether or not two sensations should be described as being sufficiently
similar will, in this case, be dependent on just what I am inclined to see as sufficient,
and only as long as I am so inclined. Anything or nothing may be enough. The subject
has something and that is all that can be said.33 And even that would be to say too
much (from the point of view of what the subject himself would be able to say34):
has and something also belong to our common language35. I, the subject, feel
perhaps that I have got hold of something peculiar, but all I can say about it boils
down to an inarticulate sound.

A word of caution. Wittgenstein is not presenting a knock-down argument turning on

the premiss that words can only be applied if definite criteria of correctness can be
applied in their use. Rather he says that the distinctions between meaning and not
meaning, remembering and not remembering, experiencing and not experiencing
disintegrate in the complete privacy that he is proposing to imagine. The situation
initially appears clear when we look at it: a person trying to keep track of his
sensations, sensations that we identify and imagine him as having. Thus the

31
A.J. Ayer and Rush Rhees, 1954. [Symposium:] Can There Be a Private Language? Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volume 28, 63-94.
32
Wittgenstein, PI, I: 258.
33
Wittgenstein, PI, I: 261.
34
This is my interpretation. Wittgenstein shifts a bit uneasily between me or you wanting to say
something and an observer describing the private journalist. Compare, e.g., PI, I: 260, 262, 263.
35
Wittgenstein, PI, I: 261.

9
perspective from which we first approach the situation is not that of the private diarist
but that of an omniscient narrator. But that initial frame of reference disappears when
we try to put ourselves into the shoes of the diarist. We no longer have two
descriptions: the situation of the private diarist as we know it to be, and the correlated
description that we suppose he will be able to give of that well-defined situation. The
scenario disintegrates when only the diarists perspective is available. Its presumed
intelligibility depended on the tacit assumption of an objective point of view from the
outside; thus, on the fact that we did not really imagine the subjects sensations as
private after all.

If this interpretation is valid, it also follows that the subject of the Second and the
beginning of the Third of Descartes Meditations cannot remember in the sense of
recalling past events, either mental or material, either inside or outside its own mind.
The subject has the experience of certain psychological stuff ideas being present,
but what that is is quite undecided at this stage. Nor can the subject really be said to
know anything about its states of mind. It has them; that is all. It cannot reliably
compare them with earlier or later material, nor do any other things normally
associated with knowing. It also follows that the meditating subjects radical
uncertainty at this stage is not simply the outcome of the suspicion that an evil demon
may be deceiving him also about his own states of mind; nor would it be remedied by
the mere removal of that particular suspicion.36 As long as the subject only has access
to his own states of mind he does not know anything about them.37

Perhaps surprisingly, Descartes indeed says so much. In the early part of the Third
Meditation he says he is certain of nothing not even of his own existence, nor that 2
+ 3 make 5. In his present state (i.e., as long as he is not assured of the existence of a
non-deceiving God), he cannot even exclude possibilities in which I see a palpable
contradiction.38

36
Cf Harry Frankfurt, 1967. Descartes Validation of Reason, 224-225. In Willis Doney (ed.),
Descartes. A Collection of Critical Essays. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 209-226.
37
This point is actually brought out in Kants proof of the external world in the first Critique. See
Immanuel Kant, 1787. Kritik der reinen Vernunft [KrV], Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, B274-275.
38
in quibus [] repugnantiam agnosco manifestam III, AT VII, 36. He calls his reason for
doubt extremely weak and, so to speak, metaphysical. But he stresses in several places that no one not
assured of the existence of God can properly speaking be said to know anything at all. See e.g., Resp.
II, AT VII, 141. See also Discours, IV, 26: que les choses que nous concevons trs clairement et trs

10
Norman Malcolm comments, I do not see how one can avoid the conclusion that
Descartes worked himself into a dreadful confusion in the Meditations. Echoing
Arnaulds famous accusation of circularity39, he adds, Descartes is in the impossible
predicament of trying to hoist himself by his own bootstraps.40 However, it seems
possible to respond that Descartes is, at least to an extent, conscious of his confusion
at this stage of the Meditations. It does not represent his last bid but rather a
transitional position that he hopes to overcome.

I said Descartes was conscious of his situation at least to an extent. There is some
debate on his exact position. In his second and fourth set of Replies, he seems again to
be understating the radical nature of the confusion he has reported.41 Now he seems to
be saying that the difficulties only arise because of the unreliability of memory and
hence do not affect my knowledge of such truths as I can intuit directly; for instance,
of my own existence.42 This, however, is in direct conflict with Descartes earlier
express words. Perhaps this shift in Descartes apparent avowed position is in analogy
with the difference between Ayer and Rhees on private language? On the other
hand, Timo Kajamies argues43 that, in the passage most frequently invoked in support
of the more conservative interpretation of the range of Descartes doubt,44 Descartes
is referring to a passage in the Fifth Meditation45 where (unlike the Third Meditation)
the truth of his first principles is already established. To read that argumentative
setting back to the Third Meditation is to disregard the dynamic character of the
Meditations.46

distinctement sont toutes vraies, nest assur qu cause que Dieu est ou existe, et quil est un tre
parfait, et que tout ce qui est en nous vient de lui.
39
Obj. IV, AT VII, 214.
40
Malcolm 1989, 206.
41
Resp. IV, AT VII, 246, also including a reference to Resp. II.
42
These are truths that the subject will know through a simple intuition of the mind: tanquam rem
per se notam simplici mentis intuitu agnoscit, Resp. II, AT VII, 140.
43
Timo Kajamies, 2001. Problems from Descartess Theory of Truth: Misrepresentation, Modality,
and the Cartesian Circle. Reports from the Department of Philosophy, University of Turku, Vol. 5,
175.
44
Resp. II, AT VII, 140.
45
V, AT VII, 69.
46
Kajamies 2001, 175. Kajamies also points out that the other crucial passage cited in support of the
conservative interpretation (Resp. II, AT VII, 145-146) only says Descartes is so persuaded of the truth
of the intuitions in question that he cannot help declaring that no one could deceive him about them
(Kajamies 2001, 179); which is not to say he knows that these simple intuitions are true. Thus while
there is no knock-down argument against the conservative interpretation, the relevant passages can
be read in a way which is compatible with the radical interpretation.

11
4. Descartes Private Error Argument
The overcoming of Methodological Solipsism in the Third Meditation is achieved by
mobilising an element from the outside. Alternatively Descartes demonstrates that
an element from the outside was present already at that earlier stage. The inclusion of
unacknowledged material is what Arnauld criticised as an illegitimate move.47 But it
can also be seen as Descartes recognition of the limitations of the position he has
previously outlined. In order for his earlier description of the subjects mental
capacities to make sense at all describing the subject as doubting, willing, and so on
one must avow the presence of some element not included in the original
description.

The concepts of error and doubt are central here. Descartes recognises it is
inconceivable that the subject, as presented in the Second Meditation, could ever be in
doubt about anything. The concept of (formal48) falsity cannot be applied to ideas
considered merely in themselves.49 However, the meditating subject does have
doubts. Descartes argues that in order for the subject to do so, it must possess the
idea of perfection. This gives conceptual space to the subjects idea of its own lack of
perfection.

Descartes establishes that, among his different ideas, there is one that cannot have its
origin within himself. This is the idea of God, the perfect being. That idea cannot
come from him because he is imperfect and since there must be at least as much in
the entire efficient cause as there is in the effect of that cause.50 Since he is finite, the
idea of an infinite substance cannot originate in him.

47
Cf. Frankfurt 1967. Frankfurt argues (224-225) that the accusation of circularity is not valid, as
Descartes does not need to demonstrate the truth of what is clearly and distinctly perceived, but only to
show that the sceptics reductio be discovered not to materialize (225). Descartes is, on this
interpretation, not concerned with establishing what is, absolutely speaking, true (226). Frankfurt is
basing his interpretation on the textual evidence of Descartes Reply to the Second set of objections,
where Descartes seems to downplay the radical character of his doubt.
48
Here I am disregarding Descartes views on material falsity, involving the claim that certain ideas,
e.g., of secondary qualities, are in a certain sense false as such (III, AT VII, 43-44). For a discussion,
see Anthony Kenny, 1967. Descartes on Ideas. Willis Doney (ed.), Descartes. A Collection of Critical
essays. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 227-249.
49
Jam quod ad ideas attinet, si solae in se spectentur, nec ad aliud quid illas referam, falsae proprie
esse non possunt III, AT VII, 37.
50
III, AT VII, 40.

12
The importance of an idea of absolute perfection lies in the fact that in its light I can
recognise my own shortcomings. My recognition of the possibility of a perfection
greater than my own is, in other words, internally related to my awareness of the fact
that I am prone to error. We may compare this with the use of geometrical figures in
reasoning. Geometrically speaking, a circle on paper is never entirely correct. But its
shortcomings can only be seen by someone who treats it as an approximation of a
perfect figure.

For what reason should I understand that I am in doubt, that I hope for
something, that is, that I am in want of something and not perfect in every
respect, unless there were an idea of perfection in me, in comparison with
which I saw my own shortcomings?51

This is a transcendental argument of a kind. A solipsist that doubts is impossible.52

Since it is a fact that I doubt, it follows that I am not a solipsist: I am already counting
on someone or something outside me, a source of truth independent of my own mind.
The possibilities of both knowledge and doubt are thus internally related to the idea
of someone being in a position to correct me.

Descartes calls God a substance, which is the term he also uses for the thinking and
extended substances. But, as Emmanuel Lvinas has emphasised, he is not simply
completing his metaphysics by adding one more substance to it. In Lvinas terms, his
reasoning breaks up the unity of the I think.53 Descartes says explicitly that he
cannot comprehend the infinite. There may be aspects of God, he says, that he
cannot understand in any way nor even touch with his thinking (attingere

51
[Q]ua enim ratione intelligerem me dubitare, me cupere, hoc est, aliquid mihi deesse, & me non esse
omnino perfectum, si nulla idea entis perfectioris in me esset, ex cujus comparatione defectus meos
agnoscerem? III, AT VII, 45-46. Cf also Discours, pt IV p. 23: A quoi jajoutai que, puisque je
connaissais quelques perfections que je navais point, je ntais pas le seul tre qui existt [], mais
quil fallait de ncessit quil y en eut quelque autre plus parfait, duquel je dpendisse.
52
This also implies that a solipsist is not someone who doubts the existence of an external world, but
someone for whom a distinction between external and internal makes no sense. Hence
Wittgensteins statement that solipsism, when consistent, coincides with Realism (Ludwig
Wittgenstein, 1973. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [TLP]. Berlin: Surkamp, 5.631 5.641, including
the famous balloon in 5.6331). The point seems to be a development of Kants critique of Idealism in
KrV B274-B279 and of his Paralogisms (see, e.g., A360-361).
53
Emmanuel Lvinas, 1989. God and Philosophy, 173. In Emmanuel Lvinas, The Lvinas Reader, ed.
Sen Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 166-189.

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cogitatione54). As Lvinas puts it, the idea of God signifies the non-contained par
excellence.55

It overflows every capacity; the objective reality of the cogitatum breaks up

the formal reality of the cogitatio. [] We will say that the idea of God
breaks up the thought which is an investment, a synopsis and a synthesis, and
[which] can only enclose in a presence, re-present, reduce to presence or let
be.56

The important thing for this argument is not the mere existence of a perfect being, nor
indeed the fact that this being is perfect. The point is that it is a being to which I stand
in a certain relation. It is not one more thing of which I am conscious (and which
could still be construed solipsistically, in terms of my ideas) but it is a being that,
somehow, has a claim on me. I stand in a relation to it, where that being is in a
position to correct me. The importance of the fact that the other is God and not a
human being lies, perhaps, in the fact that a solipsistic subject might still construe
other humans as bunches of ideas. God, by overflowing every capacity of the
subjects mind, obviously resists such construals. Descartes appeal to God thus
implies de-centralisation or de-subjectivation of thinking, a moving away from the
position of the Second Meditation. The presence of someone else introduces the
possibility of dissent. The subject acquires the concept of being right or wrong, or a
logical space for disagreement. Judgment is internally related to the idea of a
discussion where our interlocutor may teach us something new and unexpected.

Thus the meditating subjects progression in the Third Meditation may be described
as a private doubt argument or a private error argument. As Lvinas emphasises,
the idea of being in error, and hence also of objectivity, presupposes recognition of
the other, of someone else than the thinking subject, as a possible source of truth.

54
III, AT VII, 46.
55
Lvinas 1989, 173. Italics in the original.
56
Lvinas 1989, 173.

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Like Wittgensteins ladder57, the egocentric position of the Second Meditation is
overcome and thrown away in the Third Meditation.

5. Error According to the Fourth Meditation

The Third Meditation has established a non-deceiving God who then serves as a
quality control of the subjects clear and distinct intuition. But this faces Descartes
with the opposite horn of the dilemma: how is human error possible at all? Ideas, as
we saw, cannot be false in themselves. His famous answer in the Fourth Meditation is
that error is the result of two interplaying factors: my intellect (facultas cognoscendi,
intellectus) and my will (facultas eligendi, voluntas). Intellect in a narrow sense does
not involve judgment.

By means of the intellect I merely intuit such ideas concerning which I can
pass judgment, and no error properly speaking can be found in [the intellect]
considered in this restricted sense.58

To will consists in asserting or denying, pursuing or avoiding (affirmare vel negare,

prosequi vel fugere59). Error comes about when I use my will, pass judgments
(judicia60) and assert or deny the ideas with which my intellect provides me. 61 Error is
then not pure negation or ignorance. It involves actively pursuing the wrong
direction.

57
Wittgenstein, TLP 6.54.
58
IV, AT VII, 56: Nam per solum intellectum percipio tantm ideas de quibus judicium ferre possum,
nec ullus error proprie dictus in eo praecise sic spectato reperitur.
59
IV, AT VII, 57.
60
III, AT VII, 37.
61
Discussing the example of seeing light in the Second Meditation, Baker and Morris (1996) take
Descartes to be arguing that in every case, I can make the judgement that I have a particular thought
(117; also see 72-73). In Baker and Morris terms, seeing2 light means making the judgment that one
is seeing light. Even if in making a particular judgement I may be mistaken about the truth of what I
judge to be true, I can never be in error if I make the judgement that I am making (or have just made)
this judgement (116-117). This reading, in which Baker and Morris characterise Descartes general
position on perception, seems, prima facie at least, to create a problem if it is applied in the context of
the Second Meditation. It seems to be in tension with the fact that judgment, in the Fourth Meditation,
is considered to be something added to the ideas provided by the intellect, and not yet applied in the
Second Meditation. The ideas that Descartes contrasts with the will are apparently immune to doubt
precisely because they do not involve an aspect of volition (and hence judgment). On the other hand,
my discussion in section 3 above suggests it may be wrong in any case to say, of the meditating
subject, that he is certain of anything before he enters the Third Meditation, i.e., before he can trust in
Gods existence.

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Due to the fact that my will has a greater range than my intellect I am tempted to
extend my judgment to areas of which I have no knowledge. 62 Bodily sensations are,
in this sense, temptations: they may give me ideas e.g., of secondary qualities that
I incorrectly ascribe to objects. The central thesis is that error comes about when
existing cognitive material is confronted with an impulse to apply the material.
Descartes thus construes the thinking subject as active, in an anticipation of Kantian
approaches.

Incidentally, Descartes and Antonio Damasio seem to have a similarity of approach

here, although Damasio is obviously unaware of it. In Descartes Error63, Damasio
argues that all rational thinking in the normal sense includes judgments concerning
plausibility and importance. These are not simply derived from considerations of
logical coherence or factual correctness. A kind of emotional element must be
presupposed.64 Like Descartes, he assumes a dynamic faculty that sifts in the
cognitive material. Damasio supports his views with a neurophysiological argument.
However, in the unacknowledged background there is a conceptual point, which has
been independently spelled out by D.W. Hamlyn.

Hamlyn argues that belief cannot be merely described in terms of likenesses or

representations. To have a belief is to assert what is believed.65

And if this means anything, at least it means this: if someone realises that
things stand thus and not so, without caring for the fact that they do so stand,

62
IV, AT VII, 58. For a criticism of the idea that the will is unlimited, see Williams 1990, 171-177.
For a criticism of the idea that intellect and will can be separated, see Williams 1990, 183; Cottingham
1992, 159 (describing Spinozas critique of Descartes).
63
Antonio Damasio, 1995. Descartes Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. New York:
Avon Books.
64
Damasio identifies Descartes error according to him, the most fatal one of his errors for
subsequent research as the assumption that consciousness may be fruitfully studied without
considering neurobiology (Damasio 1995, 249-250). His critique no doubt applies to many
contemporary cognitive scientists, but it is historically unfounded in the case of Descartes. Descartes
describes the role of the brain at length in Passions of the Soul. In the second instance, the error
consists, according to Damasio, in not considering the brains interplay with the body and with the
external environment (250-251). This point may be interpreted as support for, in Gibsonian terms,
ecological approaches to mental life, and thus as being consistent with the critique of Methodological
Solipsism presented above. However, Damasio fails to follow up this point. In practice, he assumes a
representationalist view on perception (96-97), thus perpetuating this aspect of Descartes error.
65
D.W. Hamlyn, 1987. Kognitionen och behovet av knsla. Ajatus 44 (1987), 3-17, p. 10. Translations
by the present author.

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 i.e., if truths and untruths concerned him equally much in the sense that he was
concerned about neither, we could, on good grounds, claim that he has no
beliefs.66

[L]ack of interest in the truth would exclude the possibility of believing. This
means that a person who has no emotions cannot believe and cannot know
either. And a machine that in some sense can identify what is fed into it in the
form of information and carry out computations on the basis of it, does not
have beliefs for that.67

Hamlyn, however, takes the argument further than Damasio, emphasising the
importance of the concept of action and the social relations that in part are
grounded on emotion.68

6. The Demand of Coherence

What was previously said about the Third Meditation may in part be obscured by the
fact that Descartes, in the subsequent Meditations, proceeds in a way that seems to
indicate he can detect illusions all by himself by identifying incoherence.69 But it
should be kept in mind that Descartes, in the later parts of the Meditations, has
already passed the critical needles eye of the Third Meditation. The position from
which he is now speaking is that of a kind of rationally adjusted everyday
understanding. Life exhibits a certain normality or regularity that helps us recognise
plausible assumptions about our environment.

In the last Meditation Descartes returns to the problem that initiated his search for
certainty. He was sitting at the fire, as he thought, dressed, but suddenly woke up
realising he was lying naked in bed.70 Now he says he can tell dreams from daytime
experience because

66
Hamlyn 1987, 10.
67
Hamlyn 1987, 14.
68
Hamlyn 1987, 15.
69
For instance, he says he knows that the sense of sight is fallible because objects that seem small at a
distance appear big at close quarters (VI, AT VII, 76). This argument is dubious because it seems to
presuppose that objects somehow ought to appear to us in some other way than they in fact do for
normally sighted persons.
70
I, AT VII, 19.

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 dreams are never united by memory with all the other events that occur in life
[] for if someone actually showed up for me while I am awake and then
disappeared at once, as in a dream, [] then I would be right to judge him to
be a ghost or an illusion created by my brain rather than a real man.71

The suggestion is that I can discover illusions because of the lack of coherence
between my different senses, or between my senses and my memory and
understanding. Daytime experience exhibits a degree of regularity, which is absent in
dreams. But this presupposes that the subject is already conversant with the general
distinction between reality and dream. This is why the criterion could not be applied
right away in the First Meditation.

Our ability to form an understanding of reality as something opposed to fantasy is

part of our involvement in normal life; something that, it seems to me, comes
naturally as we are born and welcomed into a life with others. We pursue the truth
with others, naturally accepting the possibility also of being corrected by someone
else. In his Meditations, despite appearances, Descartes finally did not dispose of the
role of the Other in favour of an egocentric conception of knowledge. But by
substituting God for the human other, he hoped to re-create the foundations of
certainty in a way that would make them independent of any specific social milieu.

Cartesian approaches within subsequent philosophy of mind (acknowledged and

unacknowledged alike) have largely assumed that the egocentric position outlined in
the Second Meditation is Descartes last bid, not a position that he abandons in the
further course of his philosophical therapy. The present paper has argued for an
alternative reading. The Meditations include an implicit, and partly explicit, critique
of Methodological Solipsism at its very inception.72

71
VI, AT VII, 89-90.
72
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Wheres Your Argument? Conference at
Manchester Metropolitan University (Cheshire), 12-13 April, 2010 and (in Swedish) at bo Academy
philosophical research seminar on 1 February, 2010. Lars Hertzberg, Phil Hutchinson, Don Levi,
Rupert Read and other participants are acknowledged for comments and help. bo Academy
Foundation, Kone Foundation, and the Academy of Finland are acknowledged for financial help to the
larger project to which this paper belongs.

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Philosophy, bo Academy
Fabriksgatan 2, 20500 bo, FINLAND
e-mail: olagersp@abo.fi

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