ABSTRACT
This passage introduces a discussion built on a sustained metaphor of treating the senses as unreliable witnesses (hereafter referred to as ‘the witness-metaphor’). It is the opening shot in Descartes’ exposition of the strategy of ‘methodological doubt’; indeed the initial move in his ambitious project to demolish the whole edifice of his so-called ‘knowledge’ and to rebuild it afresh on solid foundations. Though one of the best known and widely discussed bits of the text of the Meditationes, the argument is not well understood, at least not by many twentieth-century Anglophone analytic philosophers.
