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

[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."