Friday, October 14, 2016
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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Descartes line of argument seems to fail when it comes to setting up a foundation for all knowledge, given how he fell into the Cartesian circle and his conclusion that he thinks is based on the premise that he thinks. It may be possible that there is another set of foundational beliefs that do work to build the knowledge base off of, but it may still be too early to totally throw out Descartes ideas. What Descartes actually has more closely resembles a coherentist model than a foundationalist model. Descartes views could be developed into a web of beliefs that work logically together and justify each other. When thought of like this the Cartesian circle expands to include that the existence of God is justified by the existence of things that could only be created by a perfect being and those things are justified by our experiences of the universe which are in turn validated by God’s existence. This new web now much more robust than the Cartesian circle but it must still deal with the challenges to the coherent model in general. While in this web if any one thing is true and that one thing is justifiably connected to everything else, then everything is justifiable. Inversely any falsity required to justify other things will demolish the whole web. The issue then becomes how can anything be verified or falsified without some foundational belief from which to do so and if that belief does exist then what was the point of a coherent model. Ultimately the survival of Descartes ideas relies on to things, the validity of coherentism as a viable model for justification and the coalescence of his ideas into a valid coherent model, the basic thinking I did above does not provide a full enough justification for all of its parts. Neither coherentism nor foundationalism has a full and valid justification knowledge, but both of them appear to have some potential and as such they should not be abandoned even as other strategies are pursued.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mr. Benjamin Weiss, in that there is some use in coherentism and foundationalism. The best way to find truth and defeat skepticism is to find one or more foundational beliefs- beliefs that do not need to be justified by other beliefs. If we can do that, then we can then develop a coherent model based off of those original foundational beliefs. This is what Descartes sets out to do in his meditations. However, Descartes fails on this first step. He concludes that there are two beliefs that do not need justification by other beliefs- the fact that I have a mind (I think, therefore I am) and the fact that there is a good God who is not deceiving us. However, while I agree with his first conclusion (that I have a mind), his second conclusion is based off of circular reasoning, which makes his entire argument a Pyrrhic victory. The fact that we are perceiving something is the reason that we know we exist. David Hume attempts to rebuke this argument, but just says our minds are little collections of perceptions and memories that we collect. But this is more proof that there is a mind- because there must be one to make those perceptions and hold on to those memories, and thus, Descartes first argument still holds water. Descartes goes on to say that since we are perceiving, we must always be perceiving truth because God cannot deceive us. God cannot deceive us because Descartes can only think/perceive a God who is good. This is circular reasoning. In order to defeat skepticism, Descartes still needs to prove that what we perceive is reality. There is still a possibility that we are dreaming right now, or an evil omnipotent being is deceiving us, or we are living in the matrix. Without proving that we are living in reality, any foundational belief or coherent beliefs will not matter, because they still won’t be true. In order for Descartes’ ideas to hold water, he do a better job of proving that what we perceive is reality- and that is the only way that coherantism or foundationalism will ever bring us closer to the truth and defeat skepticism.
ReplyDeleteIn the Cogito, Descartes relies heavily upon the existence of a God who is a non-deceiver. However, he also runs into a large problem, mainly in the form of the Cartesian Circle and his appeal to the existence of a God. However, what this seems to, in general, bring into question is the idea of having a set of foundational beliefs in the first place. What Descartes seems to have shown is the fact that in order for a set of foundational beliefs to exist, there will inevitably exist a place where your argumentation is circular because the existence and validity of these beliefs depend on themselves. What this would also imply is the idea that we should avoid, altogether, appeals to what we would perceive to be higher powers such as benevolent Gods or foundational beliefs. Instead, what seems to be more productive is the creation of a web, as coherentism would imply, so as to create a logical, self consistent system of beliefs. What this method of belief gets around, particularly in the circularity argument is the idea that each belief must appeal to a basic belief. Instead what the web seems to provide is not only a system in which we can find consistency within all beliefs, but also a malleable system. The benefit of such a malleable system or web seems to be that a massive change in certain values does not singlehandedly destroy the existence of the system, but rather only change its surroundings such that it fits in. Much like how Plato seems to find morality in The Republic, finding and defining values based on their surroundings to create a coherent web of values not only seems to be able to get around Descartes problem in his foundational project, but also in general seems to be much more resilient and sustainable.
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ReplyDeleteAs I argued in my last blog post, the only two premises that Descartes succeeds in justifying are his first two foundational beliefs: "I exist" and "I think". His next two attempts (the bit about clear and distinct perception as well as "proof" of the existence of a perfect God) take the reader down a logical rabbit hole that almost makes the papers I wrote for history class last year seem good in comparison, and which should be cautiously avoided by most sane people. While Descartes' project is seen to fail as a direct result of his circular reasoning, there appears to be a specific rationale behind his approach in this vein: he is overeager to justify his previously-held assumptions. He is not able to prove his most-cherished religious beliefs in a way that rationally stems from his foundational premises, and thus resorts to his desperate approach via the Cartesian Circle. His conclusion, already-known before he even begins his argument, justifies, in his view, the logical bridge between it and his foundational beliefs. The proper approach, however, would have been for Descartes to simply go about thinking logically, make arguments that support each other and see what conclusion his particular train of thought would have brought him to.
ReplyDeleteUsing the proper philosophical approach, we "should" look for more foundational beliefs simply for the sake of obtaining more knowledge, but it seems unlikely that anything aside from the simplest ideas can be known to be absolutely true. Since we have shown that Descartes' idea of a perfect God is unfounded, there is no reason, within the scope of this argument, to make appeals to him without first proving his perfection. Again, this seems to be a difficult thing to do. Finally, since is does not appear that foundationalism is sound, I must agree with my classmates in that the only viable way to have any useful knowledge is through the highly-adjustable framework of coherentism.
Though I do think that coherentism, in Descartes’ case, is probably the smartest way to go about solving his dilemmas. The idea of circular thinking and using the surrounding for a coherent web of values is useful to avoid the obstacles that Descartes encountered. On the other hand, coherentism is just as bad as foundationalism and could still be worse. Instead of having a basic belief or having something that can at least prove something else, we have a theory that justifies itself by grouping the argument with similar arguments that apparently prove each other because they do not disagree. I believe that this thinking is much more unrealistic than foundationalism. Coherentism’s justification isn’t based upon anything but is based upon agreement and coherence. This circular thinking does not prove anything nor does justify anything else because of the lack of evidence. I cannot get anywhere with this thinking because there is no end to justification and in the end an argument is basically proving itself through the idea of groups of coherent arguments. Through that, both coherentism and foundationalism have huge gaps in which they lack evidence to back up any argument that is based upon the theory. It’s hard to conclude or believe anything we prove, because in the end we cannot really prove anything beyond our most basic perceptions. We cannot exactly prove we aren’t dreaming or being deceived by some evil being. I would like to believe in one of the theories, but the gaps in argument prevents me from doing so.
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