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 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?)