ABSTRACT
Frankfurt holds, faith in the senses specifically; it is rather faith in the truthconferring nature of the immediate causes of our beliefs. Ordinary senseperception provides the most obvious example of situations where beliefs are generated in what we take to be truth-conferring ways. Thus, we take it that to see a pencil in front of us is to be caused to believe there is a pencil in front of us through stimulation of our visual apparatus as the result of the presence of a pencil in front of us. Or, to put it a little differently, we suppose that its looking to us as if there is a pencil in front of us is caused by the presence, in front of us, of a pencil. But we may in some sense take it for granted that our beliefs are caused in truth-conferring ways, without having a specific conception of the causal mechanism in mind. Descartes does not need specifically to suppose that the cause of the belief in simple natures or mathematical propositions is sensory in order to question that they are founded on a truth-conferring causal process. (Incidentally, the present interpretation has the advantage of serving to enhance, rather than to diminish continuity between the First Meditation and later parts of the work, where the hypothesis of the Deceiving God is explicitly extended to the distinct perceptions of philosophical maturity.)
9 Real doubts
Finally, I return to the peculiar and perplexing question of how Cartesian skepticism relates to real doubt-or whether, in Kenny’s terminology ‘Descartes ever really doubts’ his most basic philosophical and commonsense opinions. Now, of course, as Descartes points out to Regius,
What could be more foolish than to suppose that, at least at the time at which these false opinions [that God is to be denied, that all credibility is to be denied to the senses, etc.] are being propounded and are not yet refuted, they are being taught, and that, accordingly, the man who states the arguments of the Atheists is temporarily an Atheist? What more puerile than to say that, if he were to die meantime, before writing or discovering the hoped for demonstration he would die an atheist…?… Is there anyone obtuse enough to think that the man who composed such a book [as the Meditations] was ignorant, while he was writing its first pages, of what he had undertaken to demonstrate in the following? (AT VIII-2, 367; HR I, 448-9)
But in fact it is not very relevant (at least to our concern) whether Descartes knew how he would ‘answer’ his ‘doubts’ when he started writing the Meditations. What we want to know is whether the ‘doubts’ did precede their ‘answer,’ in Descartes’s mind, and whether someone who has gotten no further than Meditation I should really be said to be in doubt.
