I spell therefore I am, part 2

[koganbot]

In a previous episode I asked:

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?

To try to answer:

I can't question whether I've got the i and the e right in the word "siege" unless I think that there's at least some sort of "correct spelling." My ideas about correct spelling don't have to be absolute - spelling is a social convention, as are what alphabet to use, and there are often variants and controversies surrounding this word or that. But I'd think that unless you're a foreigner learning the language who only knows fifty or so words, or a kid just learning to spell, you're going to get the vast majority of most letters of most words right. I would say it's probable that there are some words that I am certain I spell correctly that in fact I don't (for decades I thought that "breath" was both a noun and a verb, didn't realize that the verb form took an e at the end as in "breathe," even though I must have read the latter many times), and of course I won't know which words those are in advance of my discovering something is wrong with them. So I can say that potentially and unpredictably my spelling of some words can be wrong. But what I have trouble saying is that potentially my spelling of every and all words can be wrong all the time. Or at least I can't use the fact of my sometimes not knowing the spelling of some words to decide that my spelling of all words could always be wrong. Because if I'm not right about most words I have no basis to say that I'm wrong about some words. What would my concept of "wrong spelling" be, if I didn't generally know how to get spelling right? The doubt about spelling a word right or wrong is dependent on one's pretty well mastering the practice of spelling. So there might not be one specific word that is indubitable for everyone, but doubting the spelling of all words, wholesale, and doubting that there is such a thing as spelling, is a kind of doubt that's different from doubting whether I've got the i and the e right in "siege."

So by analogy, I don't see how Descartes can do what he says he's doing when he doubts the senses. That is, when he recalls that a room that appeared empty turned out, on further examination, to have something in it, he's implying that his latter examination was valid. Ditto for his saying that a tower in the distance that appeared round turned out to be square. And the same holds for his noting that, while dreaming, one can think one is sitting in a chair and writing, when it turns out upon waking that one is lying in one's bed and had been asleep. To recognize that the dream was wrong you have to presuppose that there's a difference between dreaming and being awake, and that what the senses tell you when awake trumps what they tell you when you're asleep. So deciding that the dream was wrong depends on our not doubting that there's a difference between dreaming and being awake etc. But Descartes wants us to doubt everything we can, right, so shouldn't that include doubting that there's a difference between dreaming and being awake and doubting that the latter is more trustworthy than the former? But if we doubt those things, we lose our judgment that the dream was wrong in telling us that we were sitting in our chair writing. And it was that particular judgment that supposedly originated our questioning in the first place. Maybe there's a way to doubt all of our senses, wholesale, just as maybe there's a way to doubt all spelling, wholesale, but it doesn't work to say that we're deriving that wholesale doubt from the fact that we can sometimes be wrong about what our senses tell us and that we can sometimes be wrong in our spelling. This is because doubting some of our senses some of the time, and some of our spelling some of the time, depends on our not doubting our senses and our spelling at other times.

Anyway, even though I don't bet that it's doable, I do have thoughts about how one can try to doubt the senses wholesale, or doubt spelling wholesale, but I don't have time right now for those thoughts.

In general, what Descartes himself seems to be failing to doubt, or to question, or to test, is that we know for sure and agree on what "doubt" means and that it's the same operation in all circumstances, that if we can doubt one member of a class we can doubt all members of that class and doubt the existence of the entire class, that we can be sure what belongs in a class and what doesn't, and that being 100 percent certain on one thing makes that one thing a good starting point - a foundation, even - for trying to figure out other, not-so-related things. (Why would believing "I think, therefore I am" be of help in determining that I've spelled "siege" correctly?)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

descartes' project is primarily an argument against scepticism: he's moving back from a point of maximal theoretical doubt to establish that actually yes stuff exists and yes we're allowed to assume we know this -- so i think there's a a nested set of "for the sake of arguments" wrapped around his claim we can doubt all our senses, which means he would (possibly) respond to your argument by saying "yes, frank, i think you're right, but for the sake of argument let's nevertheless assume we CAN doubt all our senses -- well, even if we CAN (and i agree with frank we actually can't), there remains this further thing we can never doubt" (eg the cogito)

so he's positing an extreme form of failure of common sense to set up the strongest possible row-back against scepticism

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

so to put it in terms of your spelling argument, he would say: "(A) we all know there's words we know we don't KNOW how to spell, well, (B) imagine someone who doubts the very possibility of spelling*: EVEN SUCH AN EXTREME DISBELIEVER still believes in the existence of [whatever stands in for the cogito]"

now there's no very logical jump from (A) to (B), and it's true the that nature of doubt in (B) is - the existential status of the thing being doubted? - is different to that in (A), but does this in itself undermine his larger claim... that there can be no doubt so extreme, so all-encompassing, that it's TOTAL

*i suppose i'm imagining some kind of militant anti-writing illiterate, who invokes the concept of variations in spelling as a demonstration that the absolute ideal of Right Spelling is a fiction...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my feeling is that descartes' edifice is topsyturvy, and that your spelling counterexample begins to get at why

the problem is descartes' nesting of cognitive affects -- or whatever you want to call them -- puts reason at the heart; makes it (albeit "for the sake of argument") as the most primal, most basic, most uncedable processes

and this has a long quasi-religious history, in that the christian-platonist combo argues that the "real" as we normally mean it is all in fact unreal (because so error-strewn), and what's real is where no mistakes can be made, viz GOD, or THE IDEAL OF REASON or LOGIC or the IDEAL OF OBJECTIVE SCIENCE

but actually -- physiologically and as regards our status as the beasts who learnt to write -- "logic" comes quite late in our tree of affects; is a lot more unstable and rationalised and questionable

a better basic line than the cogito would be "i feel therefore i am" -- meaning not simply "i experience sensation", but that sensation is NOTHING if not the interface between "me" (a complex machinery of Feeling Devices) and The World

the errors descartes is citing -- as reasons not to trust the claim "i feel therefore i am" -- operate at the interpretative level (when you compare the shape of this feeling with memories of earlier similar ones, and categorise them accordingly: "my model of shapes-that-towers-can-take tells me to interpret this so-far-categorised sense datum thusly --- except OOPS"); but the interprative level is (by definition) NOT a basic cognitive affect... it's learning-shaped and history-shaped, and in fact [tho this is a terrain descartes steers entirely away from] socially shaped also)

so at heart what the doubting-proposal is looking at is, given that (see above) "sensation is NOTHING if not the interface between "me" (a complex machinery etc) and The World", what claim would we be making about The World were we to suggest that sensation may ALWAYS be total error

my memory is that RD is rather shy of the full implication of this thought experiment -- he says something like "I refuse to believe that God could behave like be a malicious demon"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

ok i just changed my mind a bit -- what descartes actually puts at the centre, not in the phrase "cogito ergo sum" but in the actual story he tells, is communicable imagination

viz he says "ok we all know we sometimes doubt sensations -- well, imagine ALL our sensations are mistaken"

and we say "hmm, not sure about this -- bearing in mind what frank's talking about -- but OK, yes, consider that imagined, i can sorta kinda imagine this, it would involve God being a hyper-malicious demon interfering at the level of our logic-boards, but, here is me imagining this, mmm *imagine imagine imagine*"

and rene should then have said (and the logic of his STORY does say, but his way of expressing doesn't) "RIGHT THERE is the proof we exist rather than don't -- we have the capacity to communicate the idea of imagination as something sharable therefore we are: because even if the world in which this capacity operates is ENTIRELY MADEY-UPPY by the demon-god, there's NO DIFFERENCE between it being made-up and being real, hence we are entitled to say it exists and so do we (now let's sort out some of these stupid persistent errors we keep making)"

the above is not very cartesian -- it seems rather post-nietzschean actually -- but it's where the energy of the conviction in the story lies (which is rather a long way from where descartes thinks it is)

[koganbot]

Yes, I have written several pages of wondering to myself why Descartes didn't say "I feel therefore I am," and that is to be my next post. And my answer, like yours, is that he basically wants to enthrone "thinking," which I put in quotation marks because his notion of thinking is not at all clear or distinct - in fact, seems to be something of a coalition of different operations. But I need to reread the first three meditations to really see if, or how, he wrestles with this. Right now my hypothesis is that he basically wants to enthrone reason at the top of "thinking," but he can't simply run to "I reason, therefore I am," given that his whole line of argument has been I can doubt everything I can doubt, but I can't doubt that I'm doubting (and incidentally I can't doubt that I have sensations either, all I can doubt is the source of the sensations). However - though he doesn't make this argument - his doubts don't have to be at all reasonable to generate the cogito, all they have to do is exist. And while you're right that the cogito is an argument against skepticism, skepticism isn't his issue. My hypothesis here is that he didn't come up with the cogito in order to ward off skepticism, he came up with his skeptical thought experiment in order to generate the cogito - or at least to generate some first principle.

But the point of my spelling example is two-fold (1) in order to doubt the spelling of a particular word (or doubt what a particular sensation seems to be telling us) you have to not doubt most other spelling (and not doubt most other sensations), even though it's not a given that there's any single word whose spelling is indubitable (or any single sensation that is indubitable); so (2) doubting the existence of spelling (and doubting everything the sensations tell us) is a different doubt from doubting this or that spelling (or doubting the inference we drew from this or that sensation), and it's not based on those particular doubts (in fact is inimical to them), even though Descartes says that such wholesale doubt derives from those specific doubts. That doesn't mean that wholesale doubt of spelling and the senses is necessarily illegitimate, just that there's no logic in the jump from a doubt of this or that spelling/sensation to our doubting all spelling/sensation.

[koganbot]

I think Descartes could have made a much better argument, one from analogy: since in my waking hours I came up with a better explanation for what was going on than the one my dream gave me, and since my reexamination of rooms and my close-up examination of formerly distant objects gave better explanations than the ones I originally inferred, maybe there are also explanations for other phenomena that are better than the explanations we take for granted - just as there are better explanations for solar and planetary motions and for the motions of objects on earth than the explanations that common sense and Aristotle and Ptolemy had given us. (He never mentions in the Meditations that he believes the Copernican model, and I haven't done enough outside reading to know if the Meditations and the Discourse precede or postdate his Heliocentric beliefs.)

However, this kind of doubt - "wonderment" would actually be a better word - allows us to bypass altogether first principles and inner mental space and mind-matter dualism and God. It possibly allows us to bypass philosophy as well, thought that depends on what one means by "philosophy."

But it doesn't allow us to bypass thinking. So, back to Descartes, he wants to enthrone thinking, with math and reason being crucial components of the thinking. And no matter his arguments for why God must exist and why the existence of God guarantees the existence of the external world (which I would sum up ungenerously as "I've defined God as existing and not a trickster, so therefore he exists and is not a trickster"), he's put thought and reason in charge, not God, and basically put the thinker and the reasoner - not God - in charge of thinking and reasoning. --Am I right about this? It seems to me that one thing he's done with the mind-matter split is to put reason into the mind. This is drastically different from current standard everyday usage (where we ask if a person is reasonable and whether an argument is reasonable, but we don't ask where reason is located) but I think it was also drastically different from previous philosophy. But I don't know the history of philosophy well enough to say this. Plato certainly didn't divide everything up between mind and matter. If I understand him right, the eidos - the ideas, the forms - existed autonomously, and I assume reason and math and geometry did as well. I have no idea what Medieval nominalists thought on the subject. Was location even an issue before Descartes?

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well the issue is widely referred to as "cartesian mind-body dualism", which it probably wouldn't be if someone before RD was as much implicated in attempting to set it up as a given

he also argues somewhere that animals -- specifically dogs -- are basically programmed robots, because they can't/don't reason

(apologies: i am as usual doin the dubdobding of not reasoning from the writing to hand, but from what i vaguely half-recall of it back when i did read it: partly this is bcz i know if i really actually plunge right in, i will not surface till long after you've moved on) (bcz i will get distracted by something shiny)

[koganbot]

Oh, I understand about the not working from the writing at hand*, though one thing I want to do - what I was especially trying to do with Plato - is to find out what else is going on in Descartes other than "Cartesian dualism." Was dualism an end in itself - did he want to dissassociate mind and body - or was it a means to an end? By the way, reading the chronology I see he was set to publish his scientific work Le Monde several years before he wrote the Discourse, but then heard about Galileo being forced to recant, so he chickened out (even though he was in Holland and nowhere near the Italian authorities). But he'd written (but not published) precursors to the Discourse before then. One of my hypotheses is that the dualism is meant to run interference for the Copernicanism, but that's hardly all it does, of course. In any event, shiny thing in Descartes that distracts you may well be something that's not part of the standard conversation about Descartes.

(And there's no rule against going back to, say, Plato.)

*I good way to to do things, actually, is to read, write down what I think I read, then reread and discover that I was all wrong.

[koganbot]

I good way to to do things

I good way to to do things is for I and I to proofread before pressing "submit."

[koganbot]

martinskidmore wrote last week: "Descartes failed anyway, probably due to using Latin, where the action and the actor are bound together in one word such as cogito."

But the Discourse was actually written in French, so I don't know where the phrase "cogito ergo sum" comes from. Was there a subsequent version in Latin? The Meditations, which came after the Discourse, was in Latin (followed by a slightly revised French version). But "I think, therefore I am" ["je pense, donc je suis"] is in the Discourse. In the Meditations he says "I am, I exist," not "I think, therefore I am," and from "I am, I exist" he further decides that the only thing that this "I" can be for sure is a thinking thing. But his idea of the relation among thinking and existing and the "I" that thinks and exists is not at all clear or distinct. Is thinking a precondition of his existing, is thinking a confirmation of his existing, or are thinking and existing one and the same? Not that I think we need to answer such questions, but then I don't think I need to drill down to absolute first principles, either.

In Descartes' prose the inner eye (or the mind's eye) seems to be looking out at his sensations, which are in the mind but don't seem to be in the self, and the "I" seems to be contemplating or evaluating "2 + 3 = 5" and the like, but the doubting and the various refusals to doubt seem to be more tightly bound to the "I." (The eye and the I.) The "I" doubts and then there is what it is doubting. Descartes seems not to be altogether aware of how his prose creates splits in the inner mental space between the self and what it's thinking, and between the self and what it's experiencing. (Btw, I think I misspoke above when I put "doubting" as the first step in deriving the "I." I just skimmed the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the writer there - Bernard Williams - argues that in the Discourse the thinking "I" rests on doubt, but that the Meditations is broader in allowing any form of thought to generate the "I." (But what's a form of thought and what isn't?)

[koganbot]

I need to go back and look at Meditation Two, where he's classifying what's in the mind. I don't recall him taking a stand as to whether "images" are thoughts. He does say that his being a thing that thinks means he's a thing that "doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and that also imagines and senses." In everyday life, when I say someone is thinking or not thinking, I'm referring to what he says and does, not to whether something in my mind can be categorized as a thought. The thing is, feeling a sharp pain, smelling coffee, and seeing a house aren't quite the same operation but are loosely related as "sensations," and adding 2 + 3 and getting 5 doesn't seem much like them at all, and having a sensation wouldn't normally be called "thinking," whereas wondering "Is that a house or a shed that I see?" would be considered thinking, as would wondering about whether the whole classification system that divides buildings into houses and sheds and garages etc. needs to be reworked, or wondering whether the definition needs to be reworked of what counts as a bank and what doesn't, and so on. But I can imagine someone who has given no thought to the classification system that separates houses from sheds simply having the image in his mind of a person in a shed - maybe for no apparent reason the image comes to him in a dream - but this is the first step in thinking, "Hmmm, maybe structure that could be lived in can be called a 'house,' whether it's intended as such or not." So simply experiencing the image - person in shed - could be considered a thought, in contrast, say, to my not considering a sharp pain to be a thought. But what if I experience sharp physical pains whenever I see a particular person, and I eventually figure out that I'm frightened of the person? Couldn't the pain be considered the vanguard of my thought, as it were?

Again, these ontological musings of mine seem utterly unnecessary. They only exist because Descartes invented an inner space (though one that's entirely nonspatial: I think in defining matter as that which has extension Descartes is defining mind as essentially nonspatial) and then tried to put everything that was "inside" it under the authority of "thinking." (Am I right, that that's what he did?)

[koganbot]

I now see a light, I hear a noise, I feel heat. These things are false, since I am asleep. Yet I certainly do seem to see, hear, and feel warmth. This cannot be false. Properly speaking, this is what in me is called "sensing." But this, precisely so taken, is nothing other than thinking.

But this doesn't necessarily mean that he considers the sensations to be thoughts, I don't think. Actually, the next paragraph is crucial, where he's contemplating the wax that he precedes to melt, and comes to the conclusion that he perceives the wax "through the mind alone." I don't think I understand this yet, but I see a family resemblance to Plato's argument that you have to already have within you the idea of equality before you can see that things are equal. I don't think Descartes is saying that you have to already have within you the idea of the wax, but he is saying that it is the mind alone that works out what wax is.

[koganbot]

that he precedes to melt

Er, proceeds to melt.