Descartes on Unknown Faculties and Our Knowledge of the External World

Descartes introduces his skeptical arguments, in the First Meditation, in an order of increasing strength. First, the narrator-meditator notices that judgments concerning the nature of small and distant objects are unreliable; later, that even sensory judgments about large and close objects are in doubt-this after considering an argument related to madness and another related to dreaming; finally, that no judgments resist doubt-the renowned Deceiver Hypothesis is introduced, a skeptical device intended to undermine not only the judgment that an external, corporeal world exists, but even the most certain judgments in mathematics.' For each of these skeptical problems (with the exception of the madness worry), Descartes provides an argument in the later (epistemologically constructive) Meditations that is its complement. He provides an argument that our sensory ideas of corporeal things do not resemble the external objects that cause them (regardless of size and distance); an argument intended to solve the problem of dreaming; another to prove the existence of the external, corporeal world; and an argument to establish the veracity of judgments based on clear and distinct perception. In this paper, I focus on the complementary pair that concerns the problem of the existence of the external, corporeal world. According to (what I shall call) the standard interpretation, the problem is generated only by the strongest of the First Meditation skeptical arguments, the Deceiver Hypothesis;2 it is then dismissed in

Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy

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