Saturday, October 11, 2014
A Noble Failure?
Many of us in class found Descartes' foundational project to fail. Let's assume that he cannot justify all his claims to knowledge by an appeal to the Cogito. What can we learn from this failure? Should we look for a wider class of foundational beliefs? Should we avoid appeals to a God who is not a deceiver? Should we find a different way to justify beliefs that does not require an appeal to foundational beliefs?
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ReplyDeleteWhile Descartes might have failed in proving that everything that you perceive clearly and distinctly is true, what he did succeed in is proving a point about the philosophical discussion as a whole in terms of foundational beliefs. Descartes is clearly a smart guy. He is a renowned philosopher, mathematician, and unarguably one of the great thinkers of the 17th century and the 2nd millennium as a whole. Just the fact that such a thinker like this spent so much time and energy and thought working on these meditations and still cannot come up with an answer for what any foundational beliefs are other than 2 is remarkable. One goal of philosophy is to explain the inexplicable and to answer questions that no one can ever prove. After reading Descartes’ Meditation on First Philosophy and our arguments all of his arguments, it is easy to say that at a basic level, you don’t really know all that much more about what you know and what you don’t. While this seems like it is disregarding the work that Descartes did and wondering why anyone would ever publish such a work that is not the case. One way to interpret this failure is to say that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we truly understand about the world that we perceive because we will live in this world then die and move on to whatever is next and figure out that world when we get there. This “situational” knowledge allows us to validate our perceptions based on the world we experience right now. By that logic, we never have to answer the unanswerable question of is this the real world or are we dreaming or anything of that sort. Overall, understanding that it is impossible to try and understand what is true if we can never know if this is the only true existence or not is crucial in realizing that we need to qualify our perceptions of one to this world, and therefore knowing a great deal more than before.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, we determined Descartes’ foundational project to ultimately fail to be able to justify all of our beliefs. However, we can still learn from this failure. For one, the project did not completely fail; for example, the Cogito was never disproved and thus skepticism is proved to be false. Next, Descartes’ failure to succinctly prove the existence of a God also suggests the impossibility to prove this claim; however, this is not to say that a God doesn’t exist! Finally, we can learn from his failure the sheer difficulty of his project; although it is disappointing to lack definitive, refutable proof that what we outwardly sense is true, it is important to realize the difficulty of the project that would prove it based on a single foundational belief. Hence, this is why I believe that philosophers should continue searching for more foundational beliefs; the importance of multiple beliefs can be conveyed in an analogy. Foundational beliefs are akin to the base blocks used to build the bottom of a tower. While it isn’t impossible to build a tower with a single block serving as the base of hundreds of other blocks, it is harder to knock down a tower that is constructed with three or four base blocks. Hence, it would be easier to support and acknowledge as absolutely true our beliefs if they were based on multiple foundational beliefs. While I cannot at this time ascertain what these beliefs are, I believe that they exist and it is vital to find them so that we can prove that are beliefs are true.
ReplyDeleteLike I mentioned in my other Descartes blog, I think that it is important to steer clear of proving all knowledge via a God argument because it is too susceptible to being influenced by personal convictions. While Descartes’ efforts to prove that a benevolent God exists are commendable, his argument in his third meditation is either circular or disproves his general rule. Further, the assumptions that Descartes makes about God, such that he is perfect and that he can’t deceive because he is perfect, seem to be influenced by what he had been taught previously. It is important to realize that no one has proof that God is perfect—we assume him to be because we have no proof otherwise and because we, as humans, have assigned perfection to the definition of God. Thus, in order to ascertain the veracity of our beliefs, we must utilize an argument which doesn’t depend upon the existence of a non-deceiving God.
The first thing that we can learn is that it is extremely hard to prove the existence of God. Descartes clearly has difficulty with this, creating a circular argument that says that the distinct and clear perception of things relies on the existence of God and the existence of God relies on the clear and distinct perception of things. There are an infinite amount of objections that could be brought to this circular argument. The argument itself goes against the principles of philosophy that Descartes himself established.
ReplyDeleteIt also shows that foundationalism as a theory is very hard to prove. In this case, Descartes had a false belief he thought to be foundational, but it turned out that it was able to be doubted and thus should have been thrown out. It is very hard to think of any beliefs that are certain and cannot be doubted, which makes skepticism more appealing as a theory. Descartes’ own method of methodic doubt proves to be a downfall, and actually made his job harder in searching for foundational beliefs.
Concerning the question of God, I believe that we should try to avoid proving His existence. We fall into too many loopholes and traps that are hard to get out of, as evidenced by Descartes attempt to do so. If someone does try to, they must be very sure that they can provide a thorough, infallibly logical argument that can’t be denied.
In order to find these beliefs, we must cast as wide a net as we can. It won’t be easy, but having a wide range of beliefs to hunt for provides a better chance of finding success. However, I do not believe that foundationalism is not the best way to go about answering philosophical questions. It only makes skepticism more appealing, and is too hard to be able to adequately find out the truths about the universe.
Descartes' foundationlism placed too much emphasis on establishing that our perceptions are true. If there is a possibility that we are in a false universe such as the Matrix, it is difficult to justify the truth of our perceptions, especially since there is no apparent distinction between the false world and the real one. A stronger basis for foundationalism would be based on a theoretical concept that would be consistent across both the real world and a false one that we inhabit. One example would be math or logic, since the two are conceptual ideas that humans have developed. Since 1+1=2 is true regardless of whether or not we live in the Matrix, it could be used to justify our beliefs.
ReplyDeleteIt also seems that foundationalism should avoid justification through the existence of a god. It is impossible to prove or disprove a god, as a god isn't something that we can directly perceive, and since a conceptual proof of a god doesn't lead to the existence of a god because the qualities of a god are constructed by humans themselves. Additionally, if we try to prove the existence of a god, we would have no way to test the validity of the proof. Therefore it would be more in our interest to test whether or not the world we live in is a real one. Both seem impossible to prove, but if we are able to prove that the world we live in is a real one, then we would be able to better justify our perceptions whereas proof of some god doesn’t necessarily justify our perceptions, such as in the case of the evil genius.
I think the reason that Descartes fails to come to a successful foundation is because he fundamentally approaches the problem incorrectly. He tries to prove that our perceptions are true, or if he fails, false, but perceptions are just that, they are how you perceive the world, in a sense they are how you prove and define things. For example, if you had a child raised by animals, in that they had no cultural influences he would have a very different understanding of nearly every concept, whether it be time or beauty, then ourselves; neither of us would be necessarily incorrect, we just perceive the same concepts differently despite us both using our eyes and ears and hands to detect them. The other side of this would be to consider a computer with a camera. If you show this computer an object and the software is able to correctly identify it, then a human and a computer both have correct information based upon correct assumptions despite using different fundamental senses to detect the object. What is true and what is untrue are completely determined by our perceptions. The obvious opposing argument would say that people are very bluntly wrong all the time, for example a creationist. Over time, because cultures are all related and people have very similar senses, a sense of truth has evolved, but it has evolved as the general agreement of perceptions. For hundreds of years during the Dark Ages, god was the truth because the culture as a whole defined it as a truth; now we have replaced religion with science because we as a culture have defined it as the truth; nevertheless, there exists subcultures that still accept god as the truth.
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