ABSTRACT
This leaves us with a puzzle. It is certain Descartes wants to hold that ‘perceptions’ of color, odor and so forth are to be classed as ‘sensations,’ like pain; that is, they have very little objective cognitive significance. But what about the perception of what Locke will call primary qualities? Well, we know that Descartes recognizes that the senses are not consistently reliable guides to shape, figure and so on: towers that look round in the distance look square close up, as he has just pointed out in the Sixth Meditation. On the other hand, as we have seen above, he does claim in the Principles that perceptions of extension, figure and motion have some kind of objectivity that distinguishes them from mere sensations (see Chapter III, Section 2). Perhaps the ‘examination by the understanding’ is meant to establish first, which of our sense perceptions have some internal claim to objective significance; and second, which of these were obtained under acceptable conditions of observation (the tower not too far off, etc.). Perhaps sense perceptions, thus doubly cleansed, may be counted as clear and distinct. Perhaps. What we must recognize is that Descartes, as his rationalism permitted, was much less explicit on this point than, for example, Locke. He was correspondingly inexplicit about what kinds of judgments we can make with certainty concerning the ‘particulars’ of sense.
