Intueri, ergo cogito,
cogitando intueri
Preterea.
Dicere nichil aliud est summo spiritui quam cogitando
intueri, ut dicit Dyonisius; sed cogitatio
in nobis representat uerbum Dei: ergo ad representandum uerbum Dei, magis
debuit poni cogitatio quam intelligentia. Sancti
Thomae de Aquino Lectura Romana in primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi
Intuition in decision making
In psychology,
intuition can encompass the ability to know valid solutions to problems and decision
making. For example, the Recognition Primed Decision (RPD) model
was described by Gary Klein in order to explain how people can make
relatively fast decisions without having to compare options. Klein found that
under time pressure, high stakes, and changing parameters, experts used their
base of experience to identify similar situations and intuitively choose
feasible solutions. Thus, the RPD model is a blend of intuition and analysis.
The intuition is the pattern-matching process that quickly suggests feasible
courses of action. The analysis is the mental simulation, a conscious and
deliberate review of the courses of action.
An
important intuitive method for identifying options is brainstorming.
Intuition
is sometimes popularly thought of as the sixth sense. Apparently there are many
unconscious processes occurring within a person and when those unconscious
signals become strong enough, a conscious thought is experienced. For example,
a person might be walking in a dark alley and suddenly, she gets the feeling
that something is wrong. Her intuition has become strong enough to warn her
about the possible danger. The information that contributes to the intuition
comes from different hardly noticeable observations about the environment that
a person doesn't consciously register.
Decision
making
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Decision
making is the cognitive process
leading to the selection of a course of action among alternatives.
Every decision making process produces a final choice. It can be
an action or an opinion. It begins when we need to do something but we do not
know what. Therefore, decision making is a reasoning process which can be
rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions
or tacit assumptions.
Common
examples include shopping, deciding what to eat, when to sleep, and deciding
whom or what to vote
for in an election
or referendum.
Decision
making is said to be a psychological construct. This means that although we can
never "see" a decision, we can infer from observable behaviour that a decision has been made. Therefore, we
conclude that a psychological event that we call "decision making"
has occurred. It is a construction that imputes commitment to action. That is,
based on observable actions, we assume that people have made a commitment to
affect the action.
Structured
rational decision making is an important part of all science-based professions,
where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to making informed decisions. For
example, medical decision making often involves making a diagnosis and
selecting an appropriate treatment. Some research using naturalistic methods shows, however,
that in situations with higher time pressure, higher stakes, or increased
ambiguities, experts use intuitive decision making rather than structured
approaches, following a recognition primed decision approach to
fit a set of indicators into the expert's experience and immediately arrive at
a satisfactory course of action without weighing alternatives.
Due to
the large number of considerations involved in many decisions, computer-based decision support systems have been
developed to assist decision makers in considering the implications of various
courses of thinking. They can help reduce the risk of human errors. The systems
which try to realize some human/cognitive decision making functions are called
Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS), see for ex. "An Approach to the
Intelligent Decision Advisor (IDA) for Emergency Managers, 1999".
Recognition
Primed Decision
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The Recognition-Primed
Decision (RPD) model was described by Gary
Klein in order to explain how people can make relatively fast decisions
without having to compare options. Previously, decision researchers had argued
that unless people used some sort of decision analysis or multi-attribute
utility analysis, their decisions would be inadequate and prone to biases. Klein and his
colleagues studied the way experienced fireground
commanders made difficult decisions under time pressure and uncertainty. The
researchers speculated that the commanders only compared two options instead of
a full range of options. However, the firefighters
insisted that they rarely compared any options at all. This created two
mysteries – how could the firefighters be so confident of the first option that
popped into their heads, and how could they evaluate an option without
comparing it to another option?
By
reviewing incident accounts collected through cognitive task analysis,
for 156 decision points collected from 26 highly experienced commanders
averaging 23 years as firefighters, the researchers determined that the
commanders had accumulated a large repertoire of patterns and could use these
patterns to rapidly categorize situations. Once the situation was understood,
the commanders knew, through experience, how to respond. That resolved the
first mystery.
The
incident accounts also showed that the commanders evaluated an option by
conducting a mental simulation
to see if it would work. If the mental simulation looked good, the commanders
would take action. If the mental simulation showed flaws in the course of
action, the commanders would revise and improve the option. And if they
couldn’t find a way to eliminate the flaws, the commanders would look at the
next option in the action queue, continuing until they found one that looked
like it would work. That resolved the second mystery. The commanders evaluated
options by imagining them in the context of the current situation.
The
RPD model is a blend of intuition and analysis. The intuition is the pattern-matching process
that quickly suggests feasible courses of action. The analysis is the mental
simulation, a conscious and deliberate review of the courses of action. In this
way, the RPD model is compatible with the System 1/System 2 framework suggested
by Daniel Kahneman and
others.
Brainstorming is a group creativity technique that was intended to be a
method for generating ideas
for the solution of a problem. Brainstorming originated in 1957 in a book called Applied
Imagination by Alex Faickney Osborn,
an advertising executive.[1]
Brainstorming
has become so well known that the word is part of our everyday language.
Unfortunately, the specific methods of brainstorming have generally failed to
demonstrate any measurable superiority under controlled, experimental
conditions. Neverthless, Brainstorming remains a
popular and commonly used technique in a variety of corporate settings.
Blue-Sky
Thinking is similar to brainstorming. Other methods of generating ideas are
individual ideation
and the morphological analysis approach.
Intuition in philosophy
In the
philosophy
of Immanuel
Kant, intuition is one of the basic cognitive
faculties, equivalent to what might loosely be called perception.
Kant held that our mind
casts all of our external intuitions in the form of space, and all of our
internal intuitions (memory, thought) in the form of time.
Intuitionism
is a position in philosophy of mathematics derived from
Kant's claim that all mathematical knowledge is knowledge of the pure forms of
the intuition - that is, intuition that is not empirical (Prolegomena, p.7).
Intuitionistic logics
are a class of logics,
devised and advanced by Arend Heyting
and Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer and more
recently by Michael Dummett, to
accommodate intuitionism about mathematics
(as well as anti-realism more generally). These logics are
characterized by rejecting the law of excluded middle: as a consequence
they do not in general accept rules such as disjunctive syllogism and reductio ad absurdum.
Intuitionism is a form of constructivism.
A
situation which is or appears to be true but violates our intuition is called a paradox (a
paradox can also be a logical self-contradiction). An example of this is the Birthday
paradox.
A few
systems act in a counter-intuitive way. Attempts to change such
systems often lead to unintended consequences.
Intuition does not mean to find a solution immediately, though it does mean the solution comes inexplicably. Sometimes it helps to sleep one night. There is an old Russian
maxim: "The morning is wiser than the evening" ("Утро вечера мудренее"). However, it is up to one's own intuition to decide when to act.Intuition
plays a key role in Romanticism, and it is the highest form of skill acquisition in
the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model.
Mind refers to the collective aspects of intellect and
consciousness
which are manifest in some combination of thought, perception,
emotion, will and imagination.
There
are many theories of what the mind is and how it works, dating back to Plato, Aristotle and
other Ancient Greek and Indian
philosophers.
Pre-scientific theories, which were rooted in theology,
concentrated on the relationship between the mind and the soul, the supposed
supernatural or divine
essence of the human person. Modern theories, based on a scientific understanding
of the brain, see the mind as a phenomenon of psychology,
and the term is often used more or less synonymously with consciousness.
The
question of which human attributes make up the mind is also much debated. Some
argue that only the "higher" intellectual functions constitute mind:
particularly reason
and memory. In
this view the emotions - love, hate,
fear, joy
- are more "primitive" or subjective in nature and should be seen as
different in nature or origin to the mind. Others argue that the rational and
the emotional sides of the human person cannot be separated, that they are of
the same nature and origin, and that they should all be considered as part of
the individual mind.
Cognition
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Look up Cognition in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The
term cognition (Latin: cognoscere, "to
know") is used in several loosely related ways to refer to a faculty for
the human-like processing of information, applying knowledge and changing preferences.
Cognition/(cognitive processes) can be natural and artificial, conscious and
not conscious; therefore, they are analyzed from different perspectives and in
different contexts,
in anesthesia,
neurology,
psychology,
philosophy,
systemics and computer
science. The concept of cognition is closely related to such abstract concepts as mind, reasoning, perception,
intelligence,
learning,
and many others that describe numerous capabilities of human mind and expected
properties of artificial or synthetic intelligence. Cognition is an abstract
property of advanced living organisms; therefore, it is studied as a direct property of
a brain or of an abstract mind on subsymbolic and
symbolic levels.
In psychology
and in artificial intelligence, it is used to
refer to the mental functions, mental processes
and states of intelligent entities (humans, human organizations,
highly autonomous robots), with a particular focus toward the study of such
mental processes as comprehension, inferencing, decision-making,
planning and
learning
(see also cognitive science and cognitivism). Recently, advanced cognitive researchers
have been especially focused on the capacities of abstraction,
generalization, concretization/specialization and meta-reasoning which
descriptions involve such concepts as beliefs, knowledge,
desires, preferences
and intentions of intelligent individuals/objects/agents/systems.
The
term "cognition" is also used in a wider sense to mean the act of
knowing or knowledge,
and may be interpreted in a social or cultural sense to describe the emergent
development of knowledge and concepts within a group that culminate in both thought and
action.
Knowledge
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For the study of
Personification of knowledge (Greek
Επιστημη,
Episteme) in
Celsus Library in
Knowledge is what is known. Like the related concepts
truth, belief, and wisdom, there is no
single definition of knowledge on which scholars agree, but rather numerous
theories and continued debate about the nature of knowledge.
Knowledge
acquisition involves complex cognitive processes: perception, learning, communication,
association, and reasoning. The term knowledge is also used to mean
the confident understanding of a subject, potentially with the
ability to use it for a specific purpose.
Defining knowledge
See also: epistemology
|
“ |
We suppose ourselves to
possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed to knowing it
in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we know
the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no
other, and, further, that the fact could not be other than it is. Now that
scientific knowing is something of this sort is evident-witness both those
who falsely claim it and those who actually possess it, since the former
merely imagine themselves to be, while the latter are also actually, in the
condition described. Consequently the proper object of unqualified scientific
knowledge is something which cannot be other than it is. |
” |
|
|
— Aristotle, Posterior
Analytics (Book 1 Part 2) |
|
The definition of knowledge
is a live debate
for philosophers.
The classical definition, found in Plato[1],
has it that in order for there to be knowledge at least three criteria must
be fulfilled; that in order to count as knowledge, a statement
must be justified, true, and believed. Some claim
that these conditions are not sufficient, as Gettier case examples allegedly demonstrate. There are
a number of alternatives proposed, including Robert Nozick's arguments for a
requirement that knowledge 'tracks the truth' and Simon
Blackburn's additional requirement that we do not want to say that those
who meet any of these conditions 'through a defect, flaw, or failure' have
knowledge. Richard Kirkham suggests
that our definition of knowledge requires that the believer's evidence is such
that it logically
necessitates the truth of the belief.
In contrast to this approach,
Wittgenstein observed, following Moore's
paradox, that one can say "He believes it, but it isn't so", but
not "He knows it, but it isn't so". [2]
He goes on to argue that these do not correspond to distinct mental states, but
rather to distinct ways of talking about conviction. What is different here is
not the mental state of the speaker, but the activity in which they are
engaged. For example, on this account, to know that the kettle is
boiling is not to be in a particular state of mind, but to perform a particular
task with the statement that the kettle is boiling. Wittgenstein sought to
bypass the difficulty of definition by looking to the way "knowledge"
is used in natural languages. He saw knowledge as a case of a family resemblance.
Extra-sensory
perception
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Extra-sensory
perception, or ESP,
is defined in parapsychology as the ability to acquire information
by means other than the five main senses of taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing,
such as telepathy,
clairvoyance
and precognition.[1] The term implies sources of information currently
unknown to science. Extra-sensory perception is also sometimes referred to as a
sixth sense (as in coming after the first five listed, which are
considered the five "classical" senses). The active agent through which
the mind is able to receive ESP impressions has been named psi (Ψ,
ψ).[2]
Perception
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In psychology
and the cognitive sciences, perception is the
process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information.
The word perception comes from the Latin capere,
meaning "to take," the prefix per meaning
"completely." Methods of studying perception range from essentially biological or physiological
approaches, through psychological approaches through the philosophy of mind and in empiricist epistemology,
such as that of David Hume, John Locke,
George
Berkeley, or as in Merleau Ponty's affirmation of perception as the basis of all science
and knowledge.
Romanticism
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Romanticism is an artistic and intellectual movement
that originated in late 18th century Western
Europe. In part a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms
of the Enlightenment period and a reaction
against the rationalization of nature, in art and literature it stressed strong
emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such
emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature. It elevated folk art,
nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology
based on usage and custom. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and
elevated medievalism
and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The
name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance"
which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature.
The
ideologies and events of the French
Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism
elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals
and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual
imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical
notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural
inevitability in the representation of its ideas.
Many intellectual
historians have seen Romanticism as a key moment in the Counter-Enlightenment, or the reaction against
the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of
the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism
emphasized intuition,
imagination,
and feeling,
to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
Positivism
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For other meanings of positivism, see positivism (disambiguation).
Positivism is a philosophy
developed by Auguste Comte (widely
regarded as the first true sociologist) in the middle of the 19th century that stated
that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such
knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict
scientific method. This view is sometimes referred to as a scientist ideology, and
is often shared by technocrats who believe in the necessary progress
through scientific progress, and by naturalists, who argue that any method for
gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical, and material
approaches. As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment
thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others),
positivism was first systematically theorized by Comte, who saw the scientific
method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed
the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Comte was thus
one of the leading thinkers of the social evolutionism thought. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and
Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland. Positivism is the most evolved stage
of society in anthropological Evolutionism, the point where science and
rational explanation for scientific phenomena develops. Marxism and predictive
dialectics is a highly positivist system of theory. However Marxism rejects
positivism and views it as subjective idealism, because it limits itself only
to facts and does not examine the underlying causes of things.
Naturalism
(philosophy)
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This article is about methodological naturalism.
For metaphysical naturalism, see Metaphysical naturalism.
Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances,
typically those descended from materialism
and pragmatism,
that do not distinguish the supernatural (including strange entities like
non-natural values, and universals as they are commonly conceived) from nature. Naturalism
does not necessarily claim that phenomena or hypotheses commonly labeled as supernatural
do not exist or are wrong, but insists that all phenomena and hypotheses can be
studied by the same methods and therefore anything considered supernatural is
either nonexistent, unknowable, or not inherently different from natural
phenomena or hypotheses.
Any
method of inquiry or investigation or any procedure for gaining knowledge
that limits itself to natural, physical, and material approaches and
explanations can be described as naturalistic.
Many
modern philosophers of science[1][2] use the terms methodological naturalism or scientific
naturalism to refer to the long standing convention in science of the scientific
method, which makes the methodological assumption that observable
effects in nature
are best explainable only by similarly natural causes, and with irrelevance to
the assumption of the existence or non-existence of supernatural elements, and
so considers supernatural explanations for such events to be outside of
science. They contrast this with the approach known as ontological
naturalism or metaphysical naturalism, which refers
to the metaphysical
belief that the
natural world (including the universe) is all that exists, and therefore
nothing supernatural
exists.
This
distinction between approaches to the philosophy of naturalism is made by
philosophers supporting science and evolution in
the creation–evolution controversy to
counter the tendency of some proponents of Creationism
or intelligent design to refer to methodological
naturalism as scientific materialism or as methodological
materialism and conflate it with metaphysical naturalism to support
their claim that modern science is atheistic. They
contrast this with their preferred approach of a revived natural philosophy which welcomes supernatural
explanations for natural phenomena and supports "theistic
science" or pseudoscience.
Cogito
ergo sum
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"Cogito,
ergo sum" (Latin:
"I think, therefore I am") is a philosophical
statement used by René Descartes, which became a foundational element
of Western philosophy.
"Cogito ergo sum" is a translation of Descartes' original French
statement: "Je pense,
donc je suis", which occurs in his Discourse on Method (1637).
Although
the idea expressed in "cogito ergo sum" is widely attributed
to Descartes, many predecessors offer similar arguments—particularly St. Augustine of Hippo in De Civitate Dei (books XI, 26), who also anticipates
modern refutations of the concept. (See Principles of Philosophy, §7: "Ac
proinde haec cognitio, ego cogito, ergo sum, est
omnium prima et certissima
etc.").
Introduction
The
phrase "cogito ergo sum" is not used in Descartes' most
important work, the Meditations on First Philosophy,
but the term "the cogito" is (often confusingly) used to refer
to an argument from it. Descartes felt that this phrase, which he had used in
his earlier Discourse, had been misleading in its
implication that he was appealing to an inference, so he changed it to "I
am, I exist" (also often called "the first
certainty") in order to avoid the term "cogito".
At the
beginning of the second meditation, having reached what he considers to be the
ultimate level of doubt – his argument from the existence of a deceiving god –
Descartes examines his beliefs to see if any has survived the doubt. In his
belief in his own existence he finds it: it is impossible to doubt that he
exists. Even if there were a deceiving god (or an evil demon, the tool he uses
to stop himself sliding back into ungrounded beliefs), his belief in his own
existence would be secure, for how could he be deceived unless he existed in
order to be deceived?
"But I have convinced myself that there is
absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no
bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself
of something [or thought anything at all] then I certainly existed. But there
is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly
deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and
let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am
nothing so long as I think that I am something. So, after considering
everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that the proposition, I
am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or
conceived in my mind." (AT VII 25; CSM II 16–17)
There
are three important notes to keep in mind here. First, he only claims the
certainty of his own existence from the first-person point of view — he
has not proved the existence of other minds at this point. This is something
that has to be thought through by each of us for ourselves, as we follow the
course of the meditations. Second, he is not saying that his existence is
necessary; he is saying that if he's thinking, then necessarily he
exists (see the instantiation principle). Third, this
proposition "I am, I exist" is held true not based on a deduction (as
mentioned above) nor on empirical induction, but on the clarity and
self-evidence of the proposition.
Descartes
does not use this first certainty, the cogito, as a foundation upon
which to build further knowledge; rather, it is the firm ground upon which he
can stand as he works to restore his beliefs. As he puts it:
"Archimedes used to demand just one firm and
immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great
things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and
unshakeable." (AT VII 24; CSM II 16)
According
to many Descartes specialists including Etienne Gilson, the goal of Descartes
in establishing this first truth is to demonstrate the capacity of his
criterion -the immediate clarity and distinctiveness of self-evident
propositions- to establish true and justified propositions despite having
adopted a method of generalized doubt. As a consequence of this demonstration,
Descartes considers science and mathematics to be justified to the extent that
their proposals are established on a similar immediate clarity,
distinctiveness, and self-evidence that present itself to the mind. The
originality of Descartes thinking, therefore, is not so much in expressing the
cogito -a feat accomplished by other predecessors, as we have seen- but on
using the cogito as demonstrating the most fundamental epistemological
principle, that science and mathematics are justified by relying on clarity,
distinctiveness, and self-evidence.
[edit] History of the
Quotation
In
Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, he employs hyperbolic doubt to
re-establish his existence. Through hyperbolic doubt, he disbands his belief in
the existence of everything that has questionable existence. His purpose is to
rebuild the true things in the world. With everything doubted and falsifed, anything recognized as true will completely be
true and there can be no doubt about its validity. Through his method, he
derives his first major saying "dubito sum"
meaning "I doubt, I am". He recognizes that
to be able to doubt, he must exist--within the doubting, there is existence,
and vice versa. And as doubting is a form of thinking, "cogito sum"
was born.
Contrary
to popular belief, Descartes never said the phrase "cogito ergo sum."
Rather, he said "cogito, sum", which got lost in the translation from
French to Latin to English. "Cogito ergo sum" translates as "I
think therefore I am" which implies that existence is the effect of the
cause of thinking, which is a philosophical fallacy. This jargon is equivalent
to making existence a quality with which can be put on an object. [E.g. This
ball is red, round, filled with air, and (oh by the way) it exists.]
Contrarily, "cogito, sum" translates as "I think, I am"
meaning that in doing the thinking, he is also existing at the same time. The
thinking and the existing are simultaneous and not causal. Through this point,
Descartes has found a point to his Archimedean lever and thus can extrapolate
his next major point, the "res cogitans." Which is thus followed by the great deceptor,
the existence of God, and the re-establishment of the material world.
He
isn't saying that existence necessarily exists because of God like Umansky's argument. That's a different a argument that came
before the cogito where he stated that it's possible that an evil demon could
be controlling our perceptions and because of that we have no way to know for
sure that this isn't true. What Descartes was trying to do was refute the
skeptical argument that knowledge is not possible, because skepticism was
basically irrefutable at that point in time. What the cogito was,
was an argument that transcended the skaptics tools
of doubt. He wasn't attempting to prove the existence of god,
he was attempting to refute the skeptics. The cogito, as previously said, is the statement translated to "I think, therefore I
am." What is failed to be explained is that, what this means, is that just
because he is able to think means that he exists in one form or another. This
doesn't infer the properties of his existence, it just
means he, one way or another, exists. How does he know this? Because he is able
to think that thought. All it means is if you are able to think you deductively
know that you somehow exist as a consciousness because you couldn't have one if
there was no such thing as existence. And, in fact, by thinking about such a
concept you are proving him right. This is because by thinking you prove you
have a consciousness and by having a consciousness you prove that you somehow
exist. Whether this is as you perceive your existence or maybe you're just a
brain floating in the vat like you're in the matrix. It is impossible to think
if you don't exist somehow. So by thinking you prove that you exist in some
way. This doesn't imply that there must be a God unless you yourself infer that
there must necessarily be a God for there to be an existence, which I'm not
refuting. I'm merely stating that you can't say the cogito was made to prove
that there was a god. He made Ontological arguments for that 'fact.' All the
cogito meant to do was to appease the 'knowledge is a true justified belief' requirements
of knowledge in epistemology and show that skepticism is wrong.
[edit] Criticisms of the
cogito
There
have been a number of criticisms of the cogito. The first of the two
under scrutiny here concerns the nature of the step from "I am
thinking" to "I exist". The contention is that this is a syllogistic
inference, for it appears to require the extra premise: "Whatever has the property of
thinking, exists", and that extra premise must surely have been rejected
at an earlier stage of the doubt.
It
could be argued that "Whatever has the property of thinking, exists"
is self-evident, and thus not subject to the method of doubt. This is because
the instantiation principle states that:
"Whatever has the property F, exists", but within the method
of doubt, only the property of thinking is indubitably a property of the meditator. Descartes does not make use of this defence, however; as we have already seen, he responds to
the criticism by conceding that there would indeed be an extra premise needed,
but denying that the cogito is a syllogism. Jaakko Hintikka offered a
non-syllogistic interpretation. "I exist" is immune to Descartes'
method of doubt because it is impossible to be mistaken about one's own
existence. If we don't exist then we can't be mistaken, so we might as well
believe we do.
Perhaps
a more relevant contention is whether the 'I' to which Descartes refers is
justified. In Descartes, The Project of Pure Enquiry Bernard
Williams provides a history and full evaluation of this issue. The main
objection, as presented by Georg Lichtenberg, is that rather than
supposing an entity that is thinking, Descartes should have said:
"thinking is occurring." That is, whatever the force of the cogito,
Descartes draws too much from it; the existence of a thinking thing, the
reference of the "I", is more than the cogito can justify.
Williams
provides a meticulous and exhaustive examination of this objection. He argues,
first, that it is impossible to make sense of "there is thinking"
without relativising it to something. It seems
at first as though this something needn't be a thinker, the
"I", but Williams goes through each of the possibilities,
demonstrating that none of them can do the job. He concludes that Descartes is
justified in his formulation (though possibly without realising
why that was so).
Note,
however, that there is a more fundamental potential refutation to the cogito;
i.e., namely of the thesis that 'perception' requires 'thinking.' If the
solipsist were merely being created instantaneously from moment to moment with
all memory intact and updated, he would only think he is 'thinking' — i.e.,
have a perception of thinking. In fact, no operation or activity
has truly taken place from percept to percept (think of how the 'still' frames
of a moving picture film strip blend into the appearance of motion) — only the
passage of time.
[edit] Williams'
argument
Whilst
the preceding two arguments against the cogito fail, other arguments
have been advanced by Williams. He claims, for example, that what we are
dealing with when we talk of thought, or when we say "I am thinking",
is something conceivable from a third-person perspective; namely objective
"thought-events" in the former case, and an objective thinker in the latter.
The
obvious problem is that, through introspection,
or our experience of consciousness, we have no way of moving to conclude the
existence of any third-personal fact, verification
of which would require a thought necessarily impossible, being, as Descartes
is, bound to the evidence of his own consciousness alone.
[edit] Umansky's argument
Another
flaw in Descartes' method, which perhaps invalidates all he hoped to achieve,
is the fact that though he claimed that the ultimate level of doubt was
assuming God to be a
great deceiver rather than a benevolent creator, he never doubted the existence of
God, only His attitude towards humanity. This is the flaw of cognito; since he states in his introduction to the
Meditations, that he feels it necessary to try, as all good Christian
philosophers should, to logically prove the existence of God. This was his true
intent; to prove the existence of God. To doubt the existence of everything was
only for the purpose of trying to find out what could be objectively true, and
since Descartes was a believer in God, he was not interested in doubting His
existence. Rather, he was trying to prove the existence of something,
namely God, who he was already convinced did
exist. Therefore God was immune to the radical doubt he employed to doubt the
existence of all things, even though God, regardless of qualities ascribed to
Him, must be included in the set that includes all things.
So if cognito, sum is is
dependent upon Descartes' proving that everything can be doubted except the
existence of doubt itself, and he never truly doubted the existence of God,
then cognito, sum is dependent upon the
existence of a Creator Being, and is therefore not necessarily true.