Question

Phillosophy!!

What are the various reasons Descartes provides to show how he can doubt various categories of belief? (Meditation 1)

Answer 1

Descartes discusses three primary reasons to show how the various categories of belief can be doubted:

1. Perceptual Illusion: First and foremost, Descartes noted that any judgement made on the basis of our senses can not be trusted. This is because we often tend to make perceptual errors and things are not always just as they seem at first glance. This is sufficient reason to doubt any knowledge that we attain from our sensory and perceptual system.

2. The Dream Problem: Descartes extends his argument further by stating that because our most vivid dreams are almost indistinguishible from our waking experience, everything that we believe to be a part of the physical world around us (based on our perception) can be nothing more than a fabrication of our imagination.

3. A Deceiving God: Descartes’ final hypothesis was based on the existence of an omnipotent God who maybe intent on deceiving us. In other words, we might be forced by God to believe something which is in fact false. Furthermore, an omnipotent figure is also capable of changing the world at their whim, which would render all the knowledge we have accumulated thus far false.

On these suppositions, Descartes doubts that any physical thing really exists, and if there is an external world at all.