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Descartes’s Secular Semantics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
… if we bear well in mind the scope of our senses and what it is exactly that reaches our faculty of thinking by way of them, we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking. So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge that this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgment not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions… in accordance with my own principles. But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs, as I have explained at length in my Optics. Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. The ideas of pains, colors, sounds and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.
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References
1 Descartes, Rene ‘Comments on a Certain Broadsheet,’ in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 Vols. Cottingham, John Stoothoff, Robert and Murdoch, Dugald trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985), I, 304; hereafter (CSM).Google Scholar
2 As does, for example, Watson, Richard A. in The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Humanities Press International 1987).Google Scholar The failure of Cartesian semantics, given Descartes’s distinction between mind and body, is the central theme of Watson’s book.
3 In Hooker, Michael ed., Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), 287-97Google Scholar
4 We ignore for now the fact that in the Meditations Descartes clearly indicates that judgments, not ideas, are the vehicles of truth and falsity. See Third Meditation (CSM II), 26. See also Margaret Wilson’s discussion in Descartes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul1978), esp. 109 ff. We shall, however, return to this point later in the paper.
5 Dante, 288
6 lbid.,292
7 Thomason, Richmond Symbolic Logic (London: Macmillan 1970)Google Scholar, 241ff. We are not maintaining, of course, that this semantic picture is neatly drawn anywhere in Descartes’s work. Our interpretation is an idealization which we feel fits many important texts and makes sense of many others. It is, we think, in the spirit rather than the exact letter of what he says.
8 First Meditation (CSM II), 13-14
9 This distinction is made quite clearly in Descartes’s early work, as well as in the Meditations. For our purposes, whether Descartes changes his mind about which entities are simple is not important. What is important is that some entities are taken as simples and others as complexes whose constituents are simples. See Rule XII, Rules for the Direction of the Mind (CSM I), esp. 43ff.
10 We will not argue here that Aquinas’s theory is not an intentional one; we merely point out that on Aquinas’s view the object perceived shares something with the perception of it, namely a form, the so-alled sensible species. But on Descartes’s view the idea with objective reality does not share something with what it is an idea of. See Optics (CSM 1), 153, 154, 164 ff. For a characterization of Aquinas see Anthony Lisska, ‘Axioms of Intentionality in Aquinas’s Theory of Knowledge,’ International Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1976) 305-22.
11 Optics (CSM 1), 165. The entire passage of which this quotation is a small part is of crucial importance to our argument.
12 There is a continuing controversy over whether Descartes embraced a transference model even in the case of body-body causation. See Lennon’s ‘Philosophical Commentary’ in Nicholas Malebranche, Thomas A. Lennon and Paul Olscamp, trans. (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press 1980), 810ff.; and Loeb, Louis From Descartes to Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1981), 126ff., 210ff.Google Scholar
13 See Sixth Meditation (CSM II), 56-7.
14 We do not believe this regress is genuine, but we shall not argue the point here.
15 See, for example, Dennett, Daniel C. Brainstorms (New York: Bradford Books 1978), 119ff.Google Scholar Also see Fodor, Jerry A. ‘The Mind-Body Problem,’ Scientific American 244 (1981) 114-23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
16 Optics (CSM I), 167
17 As we have argued above, such a view would also seem to return us to that of the sensible species, since at least the same kind of property that characterizes objects would now characterize ideas in minds.
18 Third Meditation (CSM II), 28
19 Ibid.
20 Meditations (CSM II), 28-9; see also Second Set of Replies, 97.
21 God’s power, or lack of it, over eternal truths has been the subject of much controversy. Harry Frankfurt, in his highly interesting ‘Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths,’ The Philosophical Review 1 (1977) 36-57, claims that Descartes believes that truths that humans find necessary may not be such from God’s point of view, but that the goal of the Meditations is only to find what it would be rational for us to believe, not what might be ‘absolutely’ true. This stand has the peculiar result (among many) of rendering the Meditations circular from God’s point of view but not ours. See also Curley’s, E.M. fine discussion of Frankfurt and his own views in ‘Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths,’ The Philosophical Reuiew 4 (1984) 569-97Google Scholar, and Kennington’s, Richard ‘The Finitude of Descartes’ Evil Genius,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971) 441-6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22 We shall continue to use the tenn ‘exemplars’ even though Descartes does not explicitly use the concept very often. The tenns ‘archetype’ and ‘exemplar,’ however, have been used by scholars in discussing those entities, perhaps as they are in the mind of God as His ideas, perhaps independent of Him, from which God creates at least material things. See Nonnore, Calvin ‘Meaning and Objective Being: Descartes and His Sources,’ in Essays on Descartes’ Meditlztions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1986) 223-41Google Scholar, and Frankfurt. Descartes’s discussions of formal and objective reality, eminent containment and the example principle make it clear that he is committed to the existence of exemplars. Whether they are ideas in the mind of God or somehow independent of Him is a question that exercises both Malebranche and Leibniz. See, for a typical discussion, First Set of Replies (CSM II). 75ff. See also footnote 21, above.
23 CSM II, 291. For other relevant Cartesian passages see Frankfurt and Curley.
24 For an argument on this point, see Kennington.
25 See Rule III, Rules for the Direction of the Mind (CSM I), 15.
26 Optics (CSM I), 153
27 Third Meditation (CSM II), 29
28 In their discussion of necessary truths and the corresponding essences involved in them, neither Curley nor Frankfurt seems to us to be clear about the issue of the ontological status of essences: as ideas in God’s mind, or exemplars outside.
29 See Treatise on Man (CSM I), 106.
30 Optics (CSM I), 167
31 Optics (CSM I), 167 ff.
32 Wilson, Chapter III, 100 ff.
33 It is clear that Descartes does not think that some ideas of heat may, and others may not, have objective reality. The argument is about kinds of ideas.
34 We have already established the relationship between innate ideas and ideas in the visual field.
35 Cottingham, John ‘Descartes on Color,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 90 (1989-90) 231-46CrossRefGoogle Scholar