“...considering how many diverse opinions learned men may maintain on a single question—even though it is impossible for more than one to be true—I held as well-nigh false everything that was merely probable.”
This is so familiar to readers of D, but it remains absolutely stunning, in my opinion: why suppose everything that’s merely probable as false, until shown otherwise? Sure, if the goal of the theory of knowledge is to accumulate true things, then there ought to be a presumption against truth until some particular proposition has paid its way and been established. But D is such a method-based thinker—the book is called a discourse on method, after all—the focus should be on the soundness of the method. One could just be agnostic about truths (in the ordinary way we are agnostic about many things we don’t have definitive evidence for or against in our everyday lives) and then be strict about the application of the method (again, like the way in our ordinary lives we might insist on reading the paper or watching the news to get the story on some unbelievable event, rather than simply trusting hearsay). True, this is an appeal to authority rather than the application of a method, but the authority is established in virtue of the reporter having a method.
This is what bothered Peirce, for instance—it seems fake to suppose that everything is false, while it seems more genuine to suppose proof to consist of a gradual, methodical testing of claims to truth. Besides, D himself clearly advocates such a method-based approach in the book; why not carry it all the way through?
All I can think is that D is thinking about the problem like a geometer, whose proof might begin with the assumption of the falsehood of the premise. If a contradiction can be derived from that assumption, then the falsehood of the premise must itself be false, implying that the premise is true.
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4 comments:
I don't understand why Descartes would say to think of everything that is probable as false because of the four rules he creates later in the book in part 2. In part 2 he states that before he discards of the things that he has learned from other people that he will analyze the situations with his four rules so that he may decipher the difference for what is true and what is false. But here he says that he will recognize everything as false. These two passages definitely contradict themselves.
D spoke of his studies with mathematics and he related it to his theories. Im assuming that D always tried to influence his decisions the same way a mathematician might. By drawing up an x variable and a y variable he would slowly begin to create these equations in order to quantify the decisions so as to find the best solution. But any who, as i say "he who starts with certainties ends in doubts, and he who begins with doubts ends in certainties" which i believe we can closely relate to how D might be thinking, at least from what I see here on the blog. Consider all that you can false and begin to find the solution as opposed to accepting everything to be true only to end up questioning all of your beliefs.
I like the last paragraph you wrote. I can actually relate to it because I am currently taking logic and thats exactly what we are learning now. Start with making the statement false and if found to be false, must end with actually being true Contradictions! Gotta love them!
Suppose the probable is false. Everything is probable, so everything would be false, that would not make sense. In Meditations2 he constantly
talks about separating doubt from correct, but what is correct. Today we ave so many issues that we lost count.
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