Question

In understanding the marks of truth, why are clarity and distinctness so essential?

Answer 1

MARKS OF TRUTH

You judge truth/falsity by some natural light, some internal norm resident in feeling. You cannot ultimately ground your assent on an external standard, since in doing so you must have previously judged the external standard to be true. The standard of truth, if there is one, must be one present to your consciousness. Take the most trivial truth you can think of, perhaps the simplest addition problem, 1+1=2, and let me ask you if you doubt it at all. Do you? (Be honest — don’t play sophistical games.) Of course you don’t. Does your certainty have a feeling of its own, or is it just an absence of the the feeling of doubt? Stop and meditate on the question before moving on.

Now, what is different about *you* when you doubt something? Isn’t there a different quality of feeling? Contrast the repose of certainty with the obscurity and confusion of doubt. Certainty is phenomenologically “clear and distinct” and we all accept such a state as a marker of truth: what you cannot doubt must be true. Of course we can raise all kinds of philosophical objections (as Descartes does here courageously), but at least confess to yourself that your grasp of truth relies on some such interior quality. Descartes calls this quality of truth “clear and distinct.” Let that phrase be a token for whatever feeling within yourself constitutes your sense of certainty. Remove your faith in some version of qualitative truth-recognition, and all thinking becomes futile. I will give you a few moments to think this through…

Are you back? Good. One wants to know how any of us can trust this inner marker of truth. (Why do *you* trust it?) How can we be confident that it is not false? That it what is at issue in the Third Meditation. If we don’t frame the argument for God’s existence within this epistemological frame,