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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2016
Descartes first invokes the errors of the senses in the Meditations to generate doubt; he suggests that because the senses sometimes deceive, we have reason not to trust them. This use of sensory error to fuel a sceptical argument fits a traditional interpretation of the Meditations as a work concerned with finding a form of certainty that is proof against any sceptical doubt. If we focus instead on Descartes's aim of using the Meditations to lay foundations for his new science, his appeals to sensory error take on a different aspect. Descartes's new science is based on ideas innate in the intellect, ideas that are validated by the benevolence of our creator. Appeals to sensory error are useful to him in undermining our naïve faith in the senses and guiding us to an appreciation of innate ideas. However, the errors of the senses pose problems in the context of Descartes's appeals to God's goodness to validate innate ideas and natural propensities to belief. A natural tendency to sensory error is hard to reconcile with the benevolence of our creator. This paper explores Descartes's responses to the problems of theodicy posed by various forms of sensory error. It argues that natural judgements involved in our visual perception of distance, size and shape pose a problem of error that resists his usual solutions.
An earlier version of some of this material was presented to a Birkbeck work-in-progress seminar. I am grateful to my colleagues, especially Stacie Friend, for helpful comments and questions on that occasion.
2 AT VII 17, CSM II 12, tr. alt. References to AT are references by volume and page number to C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds), Oeuvres de Descartes, 11 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1904). References to CSM are references by volume and page number to J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (eds), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vols. I and II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
3 This is aptly reflected in the title of John Carriero's recent study of the Meditations, Between Two Worlds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
4 This approach to the Meditations has gained prominence in recent decades. For influential examples of it, see Margaret Dauler Wilson, Descartes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Daniel Garber, ‘Semel in vita: The Scientific Background to Descartes’ Meditations’ and Gary Hatfield, ‘The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises’, both in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), and Carriero, John, ‘The First Meditation’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987), 222–48Google Scholar.
5 Letter to Mersenne of 1629, AT I 70, CSMK 7. References to CSMK are references to J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny (eds.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
6 Letter to Mersenne of 1633, AT I 271, CSMK 41.
7 Letter of 1641, AT III 298, CSMK 173, tr. alt.
8 See AT VII 440–1, CSM II 296–7.
9 AT VII 375, CSM II 258, emphasis added.
10 AT VII 157, CSM II 111, tr. alt., emphasis added.
11 AT VII 440, CSM II 297, tr. alt.
12 AT VII 158, CSM II 112.
13 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, question 84, article 6.
14 Descartes alludes to the Aristotelian slogan, ‘Whatever is in the intellect must previously have been in the senses’ when describing his pre-meditative views in the Sixth Meditation (AT VII 75, CSM II 52).
15 AT VII 12, CSM II 9, tr. alt.
16 The evil demon doubt (on which the traditional reading focuses) is differentiated in the text from the doubt based on ignorance of the origin of our nature. Worries about the origin of our nature are introduced as a reason for doubt; the evil demon is introduced simply as a device to counteract habitual tendencies to belief (AT VII 22, CSM II 15). This point is stressed by Carriero, op. cit. note 3, 57–8.
17 Carriero, op. cit. note 4, argues for interpreting Descartes's concern with the origin of our natures in light of his innatism.
18 AT VII 21, CSM II 14, emphasis added.
19 AT VII 21, CSM II 14, emphasis added.
20 AT VII 21, CSM II 14; tr. alt.
21 The significance of this dilemma argument is stressed by Carriero, op. cit. note 4, and by Stoothoff, Robert, ‘Descartes' Dilemma’, The Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), 294–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 AT VII 52, CSM II 35.
23 AT VII 52, CSM II 35.
24 AT VII 55, CSM II 38.
25 For helpful discussion of the negation/privation distinction and its role in Descartes's argument, see Newman, Lex, ‘The Fourth Meditation’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (1999), 559–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially sections 1.1–2.
26 As is often noted, Descartes's solution to the problem of judgement error parallels a traditional solution to the problem of evil. That solution reconciles the evil of human sin with the perfection of our creator by attributing it to our misuse of our freedom of will.
27 AT VII 59–60, CSM II 41, emphasis added.
28 AT VII 60, CSM II 41.
29 AT VII 60, CSM II 41.
30 AT VII 58, CSM II 40.
31 AT VII 58, CSM II 40.
32 Descartes says in the Third Meditation that ideas considered solely in themselves, and not referred to anything else, cannot strictly speaking be false (AT VII 37, CSM II 26). This might suggest that ideas considered solely in themselves cannot be true either. However, the Fourth Meditation passage is one of several places in which Descartes speaks of ideas as being true. See also AT VII 46, CSM II 32, where he describes the idea of God as true. See Carriero, op. cit. note 3, 309–11, for helpful discussion.
33 AT VII 62, CSM II 43, tr. alt.
34 AT VII 22, CSM II 15.
35 AT VII 418, CSM II 281–2.
36 AT VII 418, CSM II 282.
37 Ibid.
38 AT VII 436–7, CSM II 294–5.
39 AT VII 347, CSM II 294.
40 AT VII 437, CSM II 295, tr. alt., emphasis added.
41 Ibid,, tr. alt.
42 AT VII 438, CSM II 295, tr. alt., emphasis added.
43 AT VII 438, CSM II 295–6, tr. alt., emphasis added. The claim that there is no falsity in the senses has a long pedigree. Aristotle writes in De Anima III.6 that the senses cannot be deceived about their proper objects (418a11). However, error is possible about objects perceived by more than one sense, such as size (De Anima III.3, 428b17).
44 As we will see in sections 8 and 9 below, Descartes holds that sensations of thirst and pain occurring at the second grade of sensation can be erroneous when conditions are abnormal, and he has a story to tell about how this comports with God's goodness. The objectors to whom he is responding in the Sixth Replies explicitly limit their discussion to cases where the senses are working as they should, which may be why he does not mention these errors here.
45 AT VII 438–9, CSM II 296.
46 AT VII 439, CSM II 296.
47 AT VII 438, CSM II 295.
48 Some interpreters hold that third-grade judgements are not judgements in the full-blooded sense of the Fourth Meditation. This is the view taken by Simmons, Alison, ‘Descartes on the Cognitive Structure of Sensory Experience’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 67 (2003), 549–79, 566–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar and by Cecelia Wee, Material Falsity and Error in Descartes's Meditations (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 69–70. Since Descartes attributes third-level judgements to the intellect alone, they read him as referring to an act of combining ideas that involves only the intellect and not the will. I read Descartes's talk of the intellect alone as designed to emphasise that the senses are not involved, rather than to exclude any role for the will. This reading gains support from the fact that Descartes associates judgements in the full-blooded sense with the ‘intellect alone’ at the end of the Second Meditation, where his point is also to contrast judgement with the senses and imagination (AT VII 33, CSM II 22). Here Descartes uses ‘intellect’ as an umbrella term to cover intellect and will, the faculties of pure mind, when a contrast is being made with the faculties of the embodied mind.
49 AT VII 37, CSM II 26.
50 AT VII 82, CSM II 56–7.
51 AT VII 38, CSM II 26; AT VII 76, CSM II 53.
52 See for example, Gary Hatfield, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations (London: Routledge, 2003), 262. He writes that ‘we have a natural inclination to affirm the resemblance thesis’ and that ‘He [God] has given us a tendency to believe that things are as they appear to us’. Deborah Brown, ‘Descartes on True and False Ideas’ in J. Broughton and J. Carriero (eds), A Companion to Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), speaks of the senses as disposing us to judge incorrectly that the world is a certain way (197), and of our having ‘a very natural and useful inclination’ to externalize the content of our sensory ideas (214). Raffaela De Rosa, Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 26, claims that according to Descartes, our nature as a combination of mind and body erroneously teaches us that heat in a body is something exactly resembling the idea of heat which is in us, and so on.
53 AT VII 144, CSM II 103.
54 AT VII 80, CSM II 55.
55 AT VII 80, CSM II 56.
56 AT VII 82, CSM II 56, emphasis added.
57 AT VII 83, CSM II 57, tr. alt., emphasis added.
58 AT VII 144, CSM II 103.
59 AT VII 60, CSM II 41.
60 AT VII 82, CSM II 57.
61 AT VII 83, CSM II 57–8, tr. alt.
62 AT VII 75, CSM II 52.
63 AT VII 82, CSM II 57. I discuss teachings of nature in more detail in ‘Descartes on Nature, Habit and the Corporeal World’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 87 (2013), 235–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, secs. 2 and 3.
64 AT VII 83, CSM II 58, emphasis added.
65 Phantom limb pain is also mentioned earlier in the Sixth Meditation as an example of error in the internal senses, when Descartes is surveying reasons for doubting the senses (AT VII 77, CSM II 53). He presents it alongside cases of error in ‘the judgements of the external senses’, such as errors about the shape of distant towers (AT VII 76, CSM II 53).
66 AT VII 84, CSM II 58.
67 AT VII 86, CSM II 59.
68 AT VII 86, CSM II 59.
69 AT VII 84, CSM II 58.
70 See the Optics, AT VI 129 and the Treatise on Man, AT XI 175, CSM I 105.
71 AT VII 87, CSM II 60.
72 AT VII 87, CSM II 60.
73 AT VII 87, CSM II 60.
74 AT VII 88, CSM II 61; tr. alt., emphasis added.
75 Ibid.
76 Descartes implies both that it is better for God to design the system to preserve the healthy (‘well-constituted’) body, and that the circumstances for which the system is designed are more common than those for which it is not (the motion signalling damage to the foot more frequently arises from such damage than from another cause).
77 Celia Wolf-Devine does recognize that these erroneous judgements threaten to pose a problem of error. She writes that Descartes's assigning our perceptual errors to erroneous judgements helps him to reconcile those errors with God's benevolence. See Descartes on Seeing: Epistemology and Visual Perception (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 87. I argue below that these judgements are ones we are have a natural propensity to make, and that the problem of reconciling them with God's benevolence therefore remains.
78 For further discussion of Descartes's account of vision, see op. cit. note 77, Gary Hatfield, ‘Descartes’ Physiology and its Relation to his Psychology’ in J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Celia Wolf-Devine, ‘Descartes’ Theory of Visual Spatial Perception’ in S. Gaukroger, J. Schuster and J. Sutton, Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000).
79 AT VI 128, CSM I 167.
80 AT VI 130, CSM I 167.
81 AT VII 437, CSM II 295.
82 AT VI 130, CSM I 167.
83 Descartes says in the Optics that we can only discriminate the parts of the bodies we look at if they differ in colour (AT VI 133, CSM I 168), and speaks in the Sixth Replies of a perception of ‘the extension of the colour and its boundaries’ (AT VII 437, CSM II 295). So, as Simmons notes, expanses of colour are represented at the second grade (op. cit. note 48, 558).
84 AT VI 130, CSM I 167.
85 AT VI 137, CSM I 170.
86 Ibid.
87 AT VI 138, CSM I 170. I quote from the translation of the Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology by Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 106.
88 Ibid.
89 AT VI 138, CSM I 172.
90 AT VI 138–40, CSM I 172, Olscamp 107.
91 AT VI 140, CSM I 172, Olscamp 107.
92 Ibid. In this case, presumably, the greater brightness of the mountain would lead us to judge it to be nearer than the forest, if we did not already know that the forest was in front of it.
93 Ibid. It is not completely clear what is meant to be going on in this example, but perhaps Descartes's point is that we will judge a ship to be nearer if we perceive its shape and colour more distinctly. (He has already explained why different colours cannot be discriminated in distant objects, AT VI 134, CSM I 168–9.)
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid. Descartes explains the phenomenon of size constancy by appeal to the nature of these judgements. We obviously do not judge the size of objects by the absolute size of the retinal image alone, he says, because we do not see objects as a hundred times larger when they are close to us, even if the image they produce on the retina is a hundred times larger than the one they produce when ten times further away. Instead, we see them as the same size, but far away.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 This is emphasised in the Sixth Replies, where Descartes writes that he explained in the Optics ‘how size, distance and shape can be perceived by reasoning alone, which works out any one feature from the others’ (AT VII 438, CSM II 295).
99 Alongside these references to judgement, Hatfield sees Descartes as presenting an account of distance perception as purely psychophysical (op. cit. note 78, 356–7). In the Treatise on Man (AT XI 170, CSM I 106), he depicts perceptions of distance as depending directly on changes in the pineal gland. In the Optics (AT VI 137, CSM I 170), he says that changes in the shape of the eye are accompanied by changes in the brain ‘ordained by nature’ to make the soul perceive distance. Even on this psychophysical account, processes of reasoning and judgement would presumably be needed to yield perceptions of shape and size, but vision would involve fewer (erroneous) judgements.
100 Op. cit. note 48, 569. Though I disagree with it on some details, I have learned much from Simmons’ paper.
101 AT VI 144, CSM I 173.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
104 AT VII 438, CSM II 295.
105 For example, see Hatfield, op. cit. note 78, 357–8 and Simmons, Alison, ‘Spatial Perception from a Cartesian Point of View’, Philosophical Topics 31 (2003) 395–423, 398CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
106 AT VII 440, CSM II 296.
107 AT VII 446, CSM II 300. The same comparison appears in the later Principles of Philosophy, section I.72, AT VIIIA 36–7, CSM I 219–20.
108 The fact that Descartes speaks of the difficulty of ‘imagining’ the sun and stars as being larger than we are accustomed to do may be a sign that he is tempted by this view, if ‘imagine’ is read as an allusion to experience. This terminology appears in the Sixth Replies, AT VII 446, CSM II 300 and the Principles, AT VIIIA 37, CSM I 220.
109 As noted earlier (note 48), Simmons denies that constructive judgements involve the will. She takes them to involve mental operations falling ‘somewhere between the mere perception of ideas and the affirmation by the will of whatever those ideas present to the mind’ (op. cit. note 48, 566). These operations yield sensory experience, which cannot be revised, rather than belief, which can (see 567). Some kind of affirmation still seems to be involved here, even if it does not involve the will; so even on this view, we are so constructed as to naturally affirm falsehoods, though not because of a natural propensity to believe.
110 For example, Brown writes, ‘We learn from the Sixth Meditation that the primary function of sensation is to deliver us the world not so as to know it but so as to navigate it as embodied agents. …Take seriously this idea and much can be explained about how the senses dispose us to judge incorrectly that the world is a certain way…’ (op. cit. note 52, 19).
111 For an extended discussion of Malebranche's account of spatial perception that compares it with Descartes's, see Simmons, op. cit. note 105.
112 Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, tr. and ed. T. M. Lennon and P. J. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Book I, Part 9, 46. Hereafter cited as Search.
113 Search I.7, 35, emphasis added.
114 Search I.7, 34. Malebranche here notes that there are many errors that these natural judgements or compound sensations enable us to avoid. For example, we see people walking towards us as getting closer but not as getting larger, though the images they project on the retina do get larger (cf. note 95 However, they are also the cause of many errors.
115 Search I.9, 47.
116 Search I.6, 25.
117 Search I.9, 43.
118 Search I.9, 46.
119 Search I.6, 30.
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid.
122 Search I.10, 52.
123 Search I.11, 55.
124 Ibid.
125 Search I.12, 58. This memorable image was later borrowed by Hume (see A Treatise of Human Nature, I.3.14).
126 Search I.12, 59.
127 Presumably this is one reason why Malebranche begins with them in his campaign to set us right by bringing us ‘to a general distrust of all the senses’ (Search I.6, 25). The falsity of natural judgements of distance can be used to prepare the way for his more controversial claims about the error of perceiving sensible qualities such as colour and heat in bodies.
128 He writes, ‘in many cases the grasp of the senses is very obscure and confused’, AT VII 80, CSM II 55.
129 This point is stressed by Simmons, Alison, in ‘Are Cartesian Sensations Representational?’, Noûs 33 (1999), 347–69, 350CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
130 In Principles I.198–9, Descartes describes heat, colours and so on as nothing but certain arrangements or dispositions (dispositiones) in objects, depending on size, shape and motion (AT VIIIA 323, CSM I 285). We are accustomed to distinguish between mechanical properties per se and dispositions grounded in them, but Descartes shows little sign of being concerned with this difference.
131 Interpreting sensory perceptions as perceptions of features existing in bodies has the advantage of providing objects for them. Sensory perceptions are ideas, and all ideas are directed on objects. Indeed, according to the traditional model that Descartes inherits, ideas are objects existing in the mind. For further discussion, see my ‘Clear and Distinct Perception’ in J. Broughton and J. Carriero (eds), A Companion to Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 217–8 and John Carriero's very helpful ‘Sensation and Knowledge of Body in Descartes’ Meditations’ in K. Detlefsen (ed.), Descartes’ Meditations: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), particularly 117–8.
132 This is the view I suggest in op. cit. note 131, 229. Gary Hatfield interprets the obscurity and confusion of sensory ideas in this way in ‘Descartes on Sensory Representation, Objective Reality, and Material Falsity’ in K. Detlefsen (ed.), op. cit. note 131, 141.
133 Malebranche and Descartes agree that we habitually mistake the purpose of sensory perceptions when we match our free judgements to them, but they differ over the nature of our mistake. For Malebranche, we mistakenly assume that sensory perceptions aim at truth. For Descartes, we mistakenly assume that sensory perceptions clearly reveal the nature of their objects (i.e., what they are perceptions of).
134 In the Third Meditation, Descartes contrasts our visual perception of the sun's size with astronomers’ calculations of its size to illustrate lack of resemblance between objects and sensory perceptions (AT VII 39, CSM II 27). The example is dialectically useful because it requires no controversial assumptions about the nature of sensible qualities.
135 See Simmons, op. cit. note 129 for further discussion of the preservative role of the senses.
