Meditation I Now, the best way to get secure knowledge of reality is first to get used to doubting everything, especially

things concerning bodies. I had seen many ancient writings by the platonists and the sceptics on this subject, and didnt fancy re-heating that old cabbage, but I had to devote a whole Meditation to it. And I would like my readers not just to whip through it briskly but to spend several months (or at least weeks) considering the topics dealt with, before proceeding to the other Meditations. Descartes, Replies to Objections II My topic is not the topics dealt with in Meditation I, but Descartess ways of dealing with them. My central focus will be on a deeply motivated, highly consequential and apparently unnoticed midstream shift in his mode of argumentation, but I shall begin at the beginning in order to note two stark peculiarities of what appears in his early stagesetting. Having noted that certain beliefs he had held early in life were false, and that he had relied on them in acquiring further beliefs, Descartes concludes that all of his current beliefs are under a cloud of suspicion: it seems that any one of them may have inherited the infection, and be false. Here we have immediately the first peculiarity: if all of his current beliefs are suspect, then his current belief that certain of his earlier beliefs were false is suspect. Perhaps he has never held any false beliefs, and has insofar no basis for concern about his current beliefs. Yet Descartes simply ignores this elementary point, and proceeds. Having concluded that all of his current beliefs are suspect, he proposes to subject them to a comprehensive review, in the hope of identifying some that are completely certain and indubitable, and therefore suitable as foundations for his future investigations. He proposes to carry out this review by examining the "sources" of his beliefs and, if a source is found to be less than perfectly reliable - found to yield so much as a single false belief - refusing to rely henceforth on any belief acquired from it. In the event, he examines only one source - his senses - since, he says, all the beliefs he had thitherto accepted as "most true" had been derived from them. His examination consists simply of noting that his senses have sometimes deceived him - yielded false beliefs - and he concludes, therefore, that any belief acquired through his senses is doubtful, so that he should not rely henceforth on any such belief. And here we have the second peculiarity. Leaving aside exotic "possibilities" that he obviously does not have in mind, any occasion on which Descartes had concluded that his senses had deceived him would quite certainly have been one on which he had relied on other beliefs acquired through his senses in arriving at that conclusion. Yet once again, he simply ignores the obvious difficulty. He faults the argument instead on the grounds that his senses having sometimes deceived him about very small or distant things does not show that every belief he has acquired through his senses is doubtful. He has many such beliefs that it would be impossible (would be possible only if he were insane) for him to doubt, ones about which he could not possibly think his senses might be deceiving him, for example, that he is now sitting by the fire, wearing a dressing gown, and holding a piece of paper in his hand.

At this point he advances his famous Dream argument, in which he attempts again to show that every belief acquired through his senses is doubtful. Although this argument is universally spoken of as the Dream argument of Meditation I, I shall argue that it is but the first of two dream-centered arguments to be found there. As we turn now to consider them, we should note that neither they nor their successors are, strictly speaking, attacks on his senses. Rather, they are arguments in which he considers the possibility that those of his beliefs that seem to have been acquired through his senses may actually have been acquired via some entirely different route, and I shall therefore refer to them hereafter as empirical beliefs, rather than beliefs acquired through the senses. Descartes offers the first Dream argument in response to his contention that it would be impossible, when having experiences like his present ones, to doubt such beliefs of his as that he is sitting by the fire and holding a piece of paper in his hands. He now scoffs at that contention, citing what he takes to be the obvious fact that he has often, while lying undressed in bed, had dreams whose apparently sensory contents were indistinguishable from his current experiences, and noting that on those occasions he had falsely believed just such things about his immediate surroundings. He goes on to say that there are no sure signs by which he can distinguish waking from dreaming states, so that he has no reason to believe that he is now awake rather than asleep and dreaming or, therefore, that his current beliefs about his immediate surroundings are true. His argument can be put as follows: In some dreams I have had while lying undressed in bed I have had experiences indistinguishable from those I am now having, and consequently formed false beliefs about my immediate physical surroundings; further, any sensory experiences I could have while awake, I could equally well have while dreaming, and I would acquire the same beliefs in both cases; hence every empirical belief I now have is doubtful, since it may have been acquired in a dream. Descartes takes this second argument to show, and remedy, the inadequacy of his first; some of his false empirical beliefs have not been about very small or distant objects, but about his immediate physical surroundings. Oddly, however, he never explicitly notes the obvious fact that this argument also fails - that the truth of its premise does not suffice to render each of his empirical beliefs doubtful. In particular, it does not render doubtful his belief that he has a body. Note exactly how he frames his factual claims about some of his past experiences: "How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events - when in fact I am lying undressed in bed!" Here Descartes is still thinking entirely in terms of flatfooted common sense, writing about perfectly ordinary dreams he has had while sleeping undressed in bed. Not only does the hypothesis that he is now having yet another ordinary dream not undermine his belief that he has a body, but it entails that he has one, along with much else: that he is sleeping, that he has often in the past awakened from dreams and found himself lying undressed in his bed during some night, and so forth. A host of his current empirical beliefs are not put in doubt by this argument. Rather than pointing out the obvious failure of his second argument, however, Descartes immediately offers a third, which is quite puzzling. Why offer a third argument, when he has found no fault with his second? But it would be unproductive for us to speculate about the answer to that question in light of the content of his third argument. Before considering it, however, we need to note the strong textual evidence that it is a distinct argument.

In introducing it, Descartes begins a new section (the sixth of twelve numbered sections of Meditation I), and for the first time makes no factual claims (comparable to his earlier claims that he had sometimes made perceptual errors, and that he had sometimes, while lying in bed, had dreams that were indistinguishable from waking experiences). Rather, he now asks us to suppose that various things are the case. Here is the original Latin text, which I provide simply to let the reader see that its internal punctuation consists entirely of commas, which suggests, at least, substantial unity: Age ergo somniemus, nec particularia ista vera sint, nos oculos aperire, caput movere, manus extendere, nec forte etiam nos habere tales manus, nec tale totum corpus; . Here is a reasonable translation: Let us suppose then that we are dreaming, and that all these particulars - that we have our eyes open, that we are moving our head, extending our hands, and so forth - are false, and, indeed, that we do not even have hands or such a body at all. Jonathan Bennett divides Descartes's sentence into two, but gets its content exactly right: Suppose then that I am dreamingit isnt true that I, with my eyes open, am moving my head and stretching out my hands. Suppose, indeed that I dont even have hands or any body at all. The unity I want to underscore, and that Bennett preserves, is that Descartes is here proposing that we make a tripartite supposition - that he is dreaming, that he does not have his eyes open and so forth, and that he does not even have a body. This unity is destroyed in some well-known translations. Haldane and Ross, for example, divide his thought as follows: Now let us assume that we are asleep and that all these particulars are but false delusions; and let us reflect that possibly neither our hands nor our whole body are such as they appear to us to be. Cottingham has this: Suppose then that I am dreaming, and that these particulars are not true. Perhaps, indeed, I do not even have such hands or such a body at all. In these translations Descartes is represented as oddly conjoining two very different sorts of things in his single sentence: he first asks us to assume or suppose that one thing is true, and certain others false, and then endorses the idea that a third, quite different, thing is possible. In short, he is portrayed as writing, "Suppose that p is true and q false. It is possible that r is true." The text offers no justification whatever for such a bifurcated reading. Such mistranslations would be serious enough even if the issue at hand were only the correct understanding of this passage, but it is much more serious than that: the shift that they obscure is pivotal in Descartes's exposition, and deeply motivated. In each of his first two arguments, where he makes the factual claims we noted, he concludes that a genuine possibility exists: in the first, that a current empirical belief of his may be mistaken; in the second, that his current apparently sensory experience may actually be a dream experience. In the present passage he does neither. He makes no factual claims, and does not claim that the hypothesis that he does not have a body is possible; rather, he asks us to suppose that the latter is true. (We shall temporarily defer considering the objection that supposing it true presupposes thinking it possible.) This marks a permanent shift in Descartes's mode of argumentation; he never says that

either of his remaining "skeptical" hypotheses - that God is deceiving him, and that an Evil Demon is doing so - is possible. That claim is readily documented, as we shall see, but I want now to go further, to propose a principled explanation for this shift, namely, that he believes himself to have in hand an a priori demonstration of the necessary existence of a supremely perfect being who created him and would not allow him to be massively deceived. Everyone recognizes that Descartes counts himself as massively deceived on the supposition that there is no physical universe, but I shall argue that he also does so on the supposition that he has no body. Let us be clear about exactly what Descartes does, and does not, suppose here. In the first Dream argument he had concluded, on the basis of entirely commonsensical considerations, that he might be having yet another ordinary dream. He now supposes that he is dreaming, and supposes in addition only that he does not have a body. He does not suppose, for example, that there is no world of the sort he thinks he inhabits, or that his life has been one long dream, or, most importantly, that he has lost his body. He simply supposes that he is unembodied. This supposition has dramatic consequences. Consider first Descartes himself. If he has no body, then, although he seems to himself to be leading a life quite like those of other people in most respects, he has in fact never seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted anything, since he has no sense organs; he has never read or written anything, eaten anything, conversed with anyone, embraced or struck anyone, lain dressed or undressed in bed - has never so much as drawn a breath. Consider next other people. Without exception, they behave toward him just as they behave toward one another: they appear to shake his nonexistent hand, for example; they keep up their ends of what appear to be conversations with him; passersby notice nothing unusual about these apparent conversations, and occasionally adjust their paths to avoid colliding with his nonexistent body; and so forth. Finally, consider various bits of the non-human world: his clothing moves as though covering his nonexistent body as he appears to walk; ragamuffins' snowballs disintegrate when they appear to him and others to hit his face; shadows including shadows of what appear to him to be his bare hands and head - accompany him on sunny days; soft earth takes the shape of footprints where he appears to have stepped; pieces of paper rend themselves in midair when he appears to be tearing them; his pen inscribes words on paper as though guided by what appears to be his hand; . This supposition is utterly mad. It includes both massive deception on his part, and something like a mirror image of his later supposition that though there appears to him to be a physical world, there is in fact none; taking a good deal of poetic license, one might say that the entire world is massively deceived, that it appears to the entire world that there is a physical Descartes, though there is in fact none. I submit that on this mad supposition Descartes would have counted himself massively deceived, and for just that reason would have considered it impossible; God would not allow him to exist in such a state, any more than he would allow him to exist in a state of massive deception about the existence of a physical world. That is why he does not say that it is possible that he has no body. Let us return , then, to the question why he offers a second dream argument, when he has found no fault with the first, and ask as well what the point is of supposing that he has no body. The answers to these questions are fairly obvious. To suppose that he is an unembodied dreamer is to suppose, of course, that dreaming does not require having a

body, and the point of making that supposition is precisely to block the obvious inference we noted in faulting his first dream argument - the inference from his dreaming to his having a body. With this second dream argument Descartes takes a significant step beyond the first toward reaching his target: the conclusion that every empirical belief of his is doubtful. Of course he attacks this argument as well, by contending that its (suppositional) premise does not yield the conclusion that every empirical belief of his is doubtful. The supposition that he does not have a body does not render doubtful, he says, his empirical beliefs that eyes, hands, heads, and entire bodies exist; indeed, he says he has good reason to retain those beliefs, namely, that many of his sensory experiences would have to have been patterned on such objects. Given our interests, we need not rehearse the rest of his argumentation in this vein, but simply note its eventual dnouement, namely, that the following belief is not rendered doubtful: that certain very simple and universal things must exist in order to provide the "raw materials" that even the most powerful imagination would require in order to provide him with any images at all. Among these he counts color, corporeal nature, extension, shape, place and time. At this point Descartes launches an entirely new line of thinking that promises to render doubtful even that one surviving belief (or set of beliefs - one for each of the simple and universal sorts of things he thinks must exist). He considers first the hypothesis that God is completely deceiving him about the existence of a physical world and, second, the hypothesis that a powerful Demon is doing so. Our interest in these hypotheses lies solely in the fact that he never says that either is possible. He introduces the first by posing a question: How do I know that [an all-powerful God who made me to be the sort of creature that I am] hasnt brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, nothing that takes up space, no shape, no size, no place, while making sure that all these things appear to me to exist? He introduces the second by supposing a demon to exist: I shall suppose that some malicious, powerful, cunning demon has done all he can to deceive me . I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely dreams that the demon has contrived as traps for my judgment. I shall consider myself as having no hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as having falsely believed that I had all these things. But, one might object, in this posing and supposing doesn't Descartes presuppose the possibility that he is being massively deceived by God or a Demon? and earlier, in supposing that he had no body, didn't he presuppose the possibility of his having none? If the answers to these questions are affirmative, then in each case he presupposes something flatly incompatible with what he believes himself to have proven - the necessary existence of a perfect God who would not allow him to be massively deceived. Let us suppose, then, that Descartes was "bracketing" the questions of these hypotheses' possibility, and ask what he might hope to accomplish by examining them. The first case is of little interest, since even if it is possible that he has no body, that possibility does not put into doubt all of his empirical beliefs; in particular, it does not render doubtful his belief that reality comprises various simple and universal things. The deceiving God and Demon cases are, however, quite another matter; these hypotheses do have the consequence that every empirical belief of his is doubtful. But

unless at least one of them is possible, Descartes's reflections on these, too, are of questionable interest. The challenge he needs to address is this: I grant that if it is possible that God or a Demon is maximally deceiving me, then every empirical belief of mine is rendered doubtful, but why should I suppose that it is possible? The trouble is, of course, that he thinks it is not possible. The upshot of our considerations is that Descartes simply ignores two obvious objections to his early exposition, and later supposes to be true two hypotheses he believes to be necessarily false, and leaves open the truth of a third. I long hypothesized, on the basis of the first of these phenomena, that Descartes's intent at the outset of Meditation I was principally to seduce his readers into joining in his project, so that he was concerned only with the persuasiveness, rather than the cogency, of his reflections. But we now see that neither can he have regarded his later arguments as cogent. In short, it appears that, with the exception of the first dream argument, where he simply concludes that he may be having an ordinary dream, Meditation I may in its entirety be nothing more than an attempt to persuade his readers to join him in his quest for absolute certainties. If so, it has certainly been wildly successful, but Descartes's serious work comes later; Meditation I might have been omitted from the Meditations without the loss of anything of philosophical significance. ***************** Since Descartes never says that the Demon hypothesis is possible, philosophers who think one or another such hypothesis is possible should refrain from counting any skeptical arguments that might stem from such a view as a form of "Cartesian skepticism." Descartes's Strategy and Exposition As I read Meditation I, Descartes is at pains not to say it is possible that he lacks a body or is being massively deceived by God or a Demon, since to do so would contradict what he takes himself to have demonstrated, which demonstration he will provide his readers in subsequent Meditations. But why then does he suppose two of them (alternately) to obtain, or leave open the question whether God is deceiving him? These are not philosophical, or even textual, but psychological or strategic questions, which there is little point in speculating about. However, several things are worth noting. Descartes had hoped to identify some absolutely certain and indubitable truths, and thought he had done so when, in Meditation II, he argued that there were many things about which even his envisaged Demon could not be deceiving him, beginning with his own existence as a thinking thing.

Descartes, Ren, Replies to Objections II. Translation by Jonathan Bennett online at www.earlymoderntexts.com. See, for example, Barry Stroud's account of Meditation I, where he says that with this second argument Descartes has "lost the whole world." Bennett's translation of the Meditations can be found at www.earlymoderntexts.com. Regrettably, I am innocent of all but the most elementary Latin; my suspicions about the translations were aroused entirely by the oddity of these conjunctions. I thank my colleagues Gregory Brown and, especially, Helen Hattab for enlightenment and assistance regarding the text. It is worth noting an unmentioned difficulty here: surely, if Descartes's dream images are to be patterned on real objects, it is not enough that those objects exist, or even that his dream images resemble them; at a minimum, he must have become aware of them and their relevant features in some fashion, which would seem to require that he have some sort of perceptual/receptual capacity.