Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Thanks for that wonderful and rational defense of your beliefs, Lugman.
I would disagree with Pierce's example of the writing desk in his critique of Descartes. I find it not at all difficult to believe someone might doubt the existence of the desk upon which they're writing. How do we know for certain that what we're presently experiencing is a moment of lucidity? For all we know, for one reason or another the table may be an hallucination. Then again, we may be dreaming. Are we always aware in the dream state that what we are experiencing is not, in fact, real? Are we butterflies dreaming that we're Chinese philosophers? Many's the time when I felt certain I had placed my car keys on a table or in a drawer, only to discover I was mistaken. From your own tradition; could a Jinn be deceiving us into believing black is white? As many experiments into the nature of memory reveal; I think our grasp on reality is much less tenacious that we normally care to admit. There have been many detractors upon Descartes cogito ergo sum over the years (Russell, as I recall, said that he would have been better to begin with the preposition "There are thoughts"); but the idea that the existence of a table upon which one is writing could not be doubted is, in my opinion, erroneous.
|
I think a thorough Piercean would say that it is the act of continuing to use the desk while maintaining a verbal claim to doubt its existence that is illegitimate. If you were really seized by a doubt that the desk was there, would you lean on it? Would you trust it with your safety? You may in fact begin to doubt that one is really sitting at a desk and writing, but the companion of that realization is a cessation of activity involving the things which you doubt. My old philosophy Professor would make a distinction between Piercean (or living) doubt and Cartesian (or intellectual) doubt. Perhaps that distinction needs to be maintained, although I don't the latter is really in line with experience reality of 'living' doubt. The intensity of confusion, of having lost one's way, of dizziness and nausea are hall-marks of living doubt missing in Cartesian doubt.
Luqman