The strength of an interpretation lies not only in the interpretation of a core idea, but also in how well it coheres with Descartes' other central theses and ideas. The more that these – interpretation, conjectures, and consequences – dovetail with one another, make other texts more plausible, make surprising connections with other issues in other texts and the claims of contemporary philosophers, make cogent the analysis of the source of errors, make plausible the solution of philosophical problems, the greater is the strength of that interpretation. This is what I aim to do in this chapter and the next. I make conjectures, offer variant readings of Cartesian texts, and draw consequences from claims thus far developed, in the hope of showing that my interpretation of the cogito preserves not only much of what Descartes said about the cogito, but also what he explicitly maintained on other matters.

In section I, I pad up the proof of the core claim, namely, that the cogito is not an argument, by conjecturing what might have led some to think that it was. Section II provides, as a follow-up, the outline of a solution to the problem of the content of the cogito. Finally, section III attempts to explain why the ‘I’ is elusive – it is because one is seeking the content of the ‘I’ in the wrong place.