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What Was Descartes Method Of Doubt?

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What is Descartes’ method of doubt? Can we use it to respond to the sceptic? In this essay I argue that Descartes failed, in the Meditations on first philosophy (Clarke, 1998) to demonstrate the rule of 'clear and distinct perception' for the reason that the argument supporting this assertion is fallacious. Before discussing this specific argument, I will describe Descartes’ project, detailing what the method of doubt is and showing how it is a response to the sceptic. The sceptical challenge consists in the idea that humans cannot acquire knowledge at all, and everything we think we know is doubtful. It typically argues that truth is not a notion that humans can access, or that if something were to be true it could not be known. A …show more content…

This method is special in that, while it accepts to engage into the sceptical argument, it is also used as a means to find truths. Thereby working to prove the sceptics wrong in their claim that there can be no knowledge. The apparent aim of Descartes’ in the Meditations (chapters) was to persuade everyone including the sceptic of certain things such as God’s existence. In order to meet this purpose, the method needed to obey strict laws that would leave no ground for the sceptic to object. The method is meant to identify ideas that can be trusted, using the absence of doubt as a criterion. Wilson referred to the method as a "selective filter" (2003, p. 35) separating ideas into two categories. Wilson called them the "TRUE/BELIEVE" and "FALSE/DOUBT boxes" (2003, p.42). Ideas are scrutinised and can be believed if and only if no doubt is found in them. The meditator (narrator) hopes to reconstruct his whole set of belief, removing doubt from …show more content…

In the third meditation, Descartes argues “(1) I am certain that I am a thinking thing. (2) Do I not therefore also know what is required in order for me to be certain of anything, namely, that there is nothing in this first thought other than a certain clear and distinct perception of what I claim. (3) Evidently that would not be enough to make me certain about something if it could ever happen that what I perceived clearly and distinctly in this way could be false. (4) It seems, therefore, that I could establish as a general rule that everything that I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true.” (Clarke, 1998,

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