Material Falsity and Error in Descartes' Meditations

Cecilia Wee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134270934
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Material Falsity and Error in Descartes's Meditations approaches Descartes's Meditations as an intellectual journey, wherein Descartes's views develop and change as he makes new discoveries about self, God and matter. The first book to focus closely on Descartes's notion of material falsity, it shows how Descartes's account of material falsity – and correspondingly his account of crucial notions such as truth, falsehood and error – evolves according to the epistemic advances in the Meditations. It also offers important new insights on the crucial role of Descartes's Third Meditation discussion of material falsity in advancing many subsequent arguments in the Meditations.

This book is essential reading for those working on Descartes and early modern philosophy. It presents an independent reading on issues of perennial interest, such as Descartes's views on error, truth and falsehood. It also makes important contributions to topics that have been the focus of much recent scholarship, such as Descartes's ethics and his theodicy. Those working on the interface between medieval and modern philosophy will find the discussions on Descartes's debt to predecessors like Suárez and Augustine invaluable.

1
An Introduction to Descartes’s Materially False Ideas

The importance of materially false ideas in Descartes’s philosophy

Descartes distinguishes between two types of falsity in his Meditations – formal falsity and material falsity. In the Third Meditation, he points out that formal falsity is a feature of judgements. However, he comes to own later that there is ‘another kind of falsity’ – material falsity – which applies to ideas.

The argument presented in this book is that Descartes’s account of falsehood and error can best be understood through an examination of his account of material falsity in ideas. While Descartes thinks that ideas cannot be ‘strictly speaking’ false, he also thinks that ideas that are materially false somehow provide ‘material’ for false judgements and error. What Descartes says about such ideas indicates that these ideas provide such material for error because they somehow fail in their representational function. An account of materially false ideas would thus involve an examination of precisely how they fail in this function. This requires one to deal with issues such as: What are the objects represented by such ideas? In what sense do these ideas fail to represent such objects? How exactly does such failure in representation lead to the making of false judgements, and hence to error? In answering these questions, one comes to a thorough understanding of the nature of Cartesian truth and falsehood, and of the elements that are involved in the making of true and false judgements.

An understanding of material falsity in ideas is thus essential for an understanding of how false judgements, and hence epistemic error, come about. The account of material falsity in ideas also helps illuminate the account of error in another way. A close examination of Descartes’s account of material falsity reveals important features of his view on the metaphysical status of error and falsity. This in turn is directly relevant to understanding the precise structure of the much-discussed Third Meditation proof(s) of God’s existence. It also helps illuminate Descartes’s views on how human error is possible within the context of his theodicy. Recognizing how and why human error takes place within the Cartesian theodicy will reorient one’s perspective of the issues at stake in the Fourth Meditation treatment of error. It also serves to make sense of Descartes’s somewhat neglected discussion of the ‘true errors of nature’ in the Sixth Meditation, and offers insight into Descartes’s ethical views.

In short, a sustained attempt to understand Descartes’s account of materially false ideas by reference to the wider context of the Meditations, and conversely, an attempt to trace the impact of this account on the subsequent argument of the Meditations, will yield useful insights into Descartes’s overall account of falsehood and error, as well as into his ethics. But an enterprise of this sort is relatively rare in the literature. Writers who offer a more general explication of Descartes’s views seldom accord his account of materially false ideas very detailed consideration. Materially false ideas are often either briefly discussed by such commentators¹ or not mentioned at all.² One dictionary on Descartes (Cottingham 1993) does not include materially false ideas as an entry; and a recent book on human error in Descartes (Tierno 1997) does not mention them.

Conversely, commentators who embark on a detailed examination of Descartes’s account of materially false ideas have tended to consider it in relative isolation from the rest of his views. This is to some extent because the account in itself presents a major intellectual challenge: it is obscure in the extreme, and it is not clear that it is entirely coherent. Most commentary on the issue thus focuses primarily on making sense of Descartes’s account of material falsity. Seldom is any attempt made to address explicitly the issues of why it is important that one make sense of the notion, or why the notion is brought into play in the Meditations at all.

This book aims to locate the account of material falsity both within the wider account of error by Descartes, and within his views as a whole. Before one can do this, however, one needs to first understand his position on materially false ideas. The latter, as commentators who have examined the issue make clear, is indeed a challenge. Descartes’s account of materially false ideas has been described as ‘exceptionally difficult to understand’ (Wilson 1990:2), and ‘a headache … if not a plain inconsistency’ (Beyssade 1992:5).

The challenges posed by Descartes’s account of materially false ideas

Descartes specifically discusses materially false ideas only in the Meditations, and the accompanying Objections and Replies. In the Third Meditation, Descartes gives his first specific account of materially false ideas. The theologian and philosopher Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) then criticizes this account in the Fourth Set of Objections, and Descartes defends his views in the Fourth Set of Replies.

Descartes’s account of materially false ideas in the Third Meditation

At the beginning of the Third Meditation, Descartes tries to classify his thoughts and to determine which of them might properly be said to be ‘bearers of truth and falsity’ (AT 7:37, CSM 2:25). He finds that some of his thoughts are ‘as-if images of things’ (tanquam rerum imagines) – for example, when he thinks of ‘a man, or a chimera, or the sky, or an angel, or God’. Only these thoughts strictly qualify as ‘ideas’; and insofar as they are ‘considered solely in themselves and are not referred to anything else’, they cannot ‘strictly speaking’ be false.

Then there are other thoughts with ‘additional forms’:

Other thoughts have various additional forms: thus when I will or am afraid, or affirm, or deny, there is always a particular thing which I take as the object of my thought, but my thought includes something more than the likeness of that thing. Some thoughts in this category are called volitions or emotions, while others are called judgements.

(AT 7:37, CSM 2:25–6)

Thus, such thoughts include an idea (say, of a lion) with an additional form (of fear, or desire, or judgement) towards the object of the idea. Descartes maintains that ‘one need not worry about falsity’ in the thoughts that involve volitions and emotions. As he points out, ‘even if the things I may desire are wicked or even non-existent, that does not make it any less true that I desire them’. Thus, he concludes that ‘the only remaining thoughts where I must be on my guard against making a mistake are judgements’ (AT 7:37, CSM 2:26). It appears then that the only thoughts which are ‘bearers of truth and falsity’ are judgements.

A couple of pages later, however, Descartes qualifies this view. Upon subjecting his ‘ideas of corporeal things’ to scrutiny, he concludes that

The things which I perceive clearly and distinctly in them are very few in number. The list comprises size, or extension in length, breadth and depth; shape, which is a function of the boundaries of this extension; position, which is a relation between various items possessing shape; and motion, or change in position … But as for all the rest, … I think of these only in a very confused and obscure way, to the extent that I do not even know whether they are true or false, that is, whether the ideas I have of them are ideas of real things or no things.

(AT 7:43, CSM 2:30)*³

After dividing his ideas of corporeal things into these two classes, he then significantly states:

For although, as I have noted before, falsity in the strict sense, or formal falsity, can only occur in judgements, there is another kind of falsity, material falsity which occurs in ideas when they represent no things as things.

(AT 7:43, CSM 2:30)*

Descartes admits now that, although falsity ‘in the strict sense’ occurs only in judgements, there is a certain kind of falsity which applies to ideas (as opposed to judgements) – that is, material falsity. Such falsity occurs when ideas ‘represent no things as things’.

He then uses a pair of ‘confused and obscure’ ideas – the opposing ideas of heat and cold – to illustrate material falsity in ideas:

For example, the ideas that I have of heat and cold contain so little clarity and distinctness that they do not enable me to tell whether cold is merely the privation (privatio) of heat or vice versa, or whether both of them are real qualities, or neither is. And since there are no ideas which are not as-if of things, if it is true that cold is nothing but the privation of heat, the idea which represents it to me as something real and positive deserves to be called false, and the same goes for other ideas of this kind.

(AT 7:43–44, CSM 2:30)*

Descartes had said that all ideas are ‘as-if images of things’, that is, an idea purports to be of a thing. But suppose, for instance, cold is really a privation or absence of heat. Then the idea which presents cold as if of a thing is materially false: it presents cold as if it is a thing, when cold is really a thing’s absence, not a thing at all.

One of Descartes’s concerns in the Third Meditation is to search for means by which he may trace the source or cause of his various ideas. His materially false ideas, he adds, are seen by ‘the natural light’ to ‘proceed (procedere) from nothing’, and to have their source in defect and imperfection in himself:

if [my ideas] are false, that is, represent no things, I know by the natural light that they proceed from nothing – that is, they are in me only because of a deficiency and lack of perfection in my nature.

(AT 7:43–44, CSM 2:30)*

While Descartes does mention materially false ideas briefly in a later passage in the Third Meditation (AT 7:46, CSM 2:31), the extended passage outlined above clearly presents his key doctrines concerning material falsity in ideas – at least as they stand at the point of the Third Meditation. For convenience (and to distinguish it from the later brief mention of material falsity at AT 7:46), I shall refer henceforth to this extended Third Meditation discussion of material falsity as TMD.

Arnauld’s Fourth Set of Objections

Descartes’s attempt to attribute (material) falsity to ideas was criticized by Arnauld in the Fourth Set of Objections. Arnauld argued that it was ‘inconsistent with the author’s own principles’. He maintained that the notion that ideas could be materially false was incompatible with what Descartes had earlier said about the nature of ideas.

As mentioned, Descartes had said that all ideas are as-if images of things. Insofar as they are as-if images of things, they have what Margaret Wilson calls ‘representational character’ (Wilson 1978:102). That is, an idea presents itself as if it is of a certain thing, and hence as a representation of that thing.

Just prior to his extended Third Meditation discussion on material falsity, Descartes had pointed out that ideas have different levels of objective reality according to what they present themselves as being of, and hence as representations of. He writes:

But insofar as different ideas … represent different things, it is clear that they differ widely. Undoubtedly, the ideas which represent substances to me amount to something more and, so to s...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An Introduction to Descartes’s Materially False Ideas
• 2 ‘Static’ Interpretations of Materially False Ideas – A Survey
• 3 A ‘Dynamic’ Interpretation of Materially False Ideas
• 4 The Metaphysical Status of Material Falsity (and of Error)
• 5 Falsehood, Error and Ethics
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index