I spell, therefore I am

[koganbot]

I'm now reading Descartes in my philosophy class and am having trouble finding my feet, so I sent the following in an email to a few of the other students in the class, in the probably futile hope that I could get them to talk philosophy with me:

Let's say that Descartes is a friend of ours, and he has asked for our help. He says that crucial beliefs of his (e.g., that the earth is still and that the sun travels around it, that material objects just naturally fall downward) have turned out to be false, and he's decided therefore not to trust any of his beliefs, but rather to start over, to doubt everything he can possibly doubt, to challenge every one of his preconceptions, his hope being that what is left standing will provide a foundation for all of his succeeding inquiries. The help he is requesting is that each of us do the same: doubt everything we can, and bring him the results.

My own preconception (which is probably standard in the modern age) is that Descartes is asking the impossible - with enough ingenuity I could at least go through the motions of doubting anything and could give reasons for those doubts, but I don't think I can succeed in doubting everything at once. If I knock down one idea with my doubts, I discover that I've unwittingly raised another to support those doubts. But let's see if that's really the case. My own hope here is that in working out our ideas, we'll then have something to compare to Descartes'. If all goes well, this will give us a stronger sense of Descartes' ideas in their difference from ours.

Here's a start, with an actual doubt I have right now. Is the word "siege" spelled as I've just spelled it, with the e after the i? Or is it spelled with the e before i, as in "seize"? (Had to look that one up the other day.) Now, obviously I can go to the dictionary, but dictionaries themselves occasionally err. And my real question here is: given that I can doubt whether I've got the i and e right in "siege," can I also doubt whether I've got the s, the g, and the final e right? More generally, can I use this doubt about the i and the e as a basis for then asking myself if I've misspelled every letter of every word in this paragraph? Is it possible that I've always spelled every letter of every word wrong? Can I doubt that spelling even exists?

I'm asking the question about spelling because I think it can run parallel to another question: If I recall that, while dreaming in my bed, I once thought I was sitting here in my chair, can that be a basis for doubting that I'm ever awake and for doubting that anything my senses tell me can be correct?

Comments

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

If I remember correctly (two of my ex-boyfriends were doing philosophy when we were at college) then the fact that you're doubting the correct spelling proves that at least the *concept* of spelling exists, otherwise you wouldn't be worrying about it in the first place (ie because you have conceived it). Whether anyone actually *does* any spelling (correct or otherwise) is a different matter!

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

cetainly you'd be hard pressed to find correct spelling out there in the world. you always end up asking a delusional person.

however i am now going to design an experiment to detemine correct spelling. it involves a feather, a large stone weight, the hanging candelabra in Pisa cathedral and Lynn Truss's head

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

(ha ha, detemine)

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

Descartes failed anyway, probably due to using Latin, where the action and the actor are bound together in one word such as cogito. I don't think he actually had any fundamental justification for anything more than something like 'thought appears to exist,' which is too woolly to be of any use, I suspect.