Descartes: Meditation One

1. Think of any belief that you’ve taken for granted without questioning. When you were
young you believed many things you were told without questioning the grounds for believing
them. I’m sure that you will reject at least some of your beliefs as baseless or unfounded,
once you examine the reasons for or against those beliefs.

2. Descartes’ aim in Meditation One is to get you to question the grounds (i.e., the reasons or
the justifications, if any) for your beliefs. But not your beliefs taken one by one—that would
take too much time. Instead, Descartes classifies our beliefs into three categories, and finds
three ways of doubting wholesale the grounds for any belief in each category.

3. This is how Descartes classifies our beliefs—

a. Perceptual beliefs about particular objects, based on:
i. external senses (vision, touch, hearing, smell taste), providing information
about other bodies;
ii. internal sensations (pain, pleasure), providing information about my own
body.
b. Conceptual beliefs about the more general features of composite bodies, e.g.:
i. beliefs about their physical features (i.e., physics, astronomy);
ii. beliefs about their medical properties (i.e., medicine), and so on.
c. Conceptual beliefs about the most general features of simple entities, e.g.:
i. “the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees” (i.e., geometry);
ii. “2 + 3 = 5” (i.e., arithmetic).

4. Then he provides grounds for doubting each category of beliefs. These grounds are:
a. Fallibility of the Senses
b. The Dream Argument
c. The Evil Genius Hypothesis

REASON FOR DOUBTING WHAT CAN BE DOUBTED WHAT CANNOT BE DOUBTED

a. Fallibility of the Senses Beliefs based on perceptual That I am sitting in front of the
info about faraway objects, computer, reading these notes
illusions, hallucinations

b. The Dream Argument

(i) the universal possibility That I am sitting in front of the What physics, astronomy, and
of a dream: computer, reading these notes. medicine tell us.
(ii) the possibility of a What physics, astronomy, and What geometry and arithmetic
universal dream: medicine tell us. tell us.

c. The Evil Genius Hypothesis What geometry and arithmetic That I exist, as long as I think
tell us. (as argued in Meditation Two).

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5. Fallibility of the Senses. Our senses can deceive us by giving us wrong information about
the things we perceive, other bodies and our own. Descartes gives detailed examples in
Meditation Six, the last paragraph on p.50. Think of distant objects appearing much smaller
than they actually are (e.g., the sun), colors looking different under different lighting
conditions, a stick looking bent in water, the Mueller-Lyer illusion (you can google images).
Even our internal sensations can be mistaken, as evidenced by the phantom limb
phenomenon (an amputee without his right leg feeling an itch in his nonexistent right foot).

6. The Dream Argument. There is the possibility that we are dreaming. While we are dreaming
we usually suppose that we are awake. But dream-experiences are like wide-awake-
experiences, and we cannot distinguish between them. (Sure, crazy things happen in dreams
but not in waking reality. But when we are dreaming the “crazy” events seem normal to us,
just as “normal” events seem normal in waking reality, but would seem crazy in some dream
world where flying pigs are normal.) If we cannot distinguish between dream-experiences
and wide-awake experiences, then we could now be dreaming, for all we know.
The Dream Argument comes in two versions:
(i) The Universal Possibility of a Dream: it is always possible that you are dreaming. So it is
possible that you are mistaken in your belief that you are now actually sitting in front of
your computer, reading these notes.
(ii) The Possibility of a Universal Dream: it is possible that you are always dreaming. So it
is possible that waking reality does not even exist, and that physics, astronomy, medicine,
etc. are mistaken.
Note well: if you cannot come up with definitive signs by which to distinguish dream from
reality, then you cannot rule out the possibility that you are dreaming. If you cannot rule out
the possibility that you are dreaming, then you cannot rule out the possibility that (i) you
have mistaken beliefs about even the most obvious physical facts about yourself, or even (ii)
physics, astronomy, medicine, etc. are mistaken.

7. The Painting Analogy. Even if a painting is of imaginary things (e.g., fairies), the simplest
elements out of which imaginary things are made (e.g., colors) are real. Likewise, even if the
things we experiences are the stuff of mere dreams, the simplest elements of the things we
experience (e.g., the geometrical shapes of spatially extended things, their number) are real.
So the Dream Argument does not call geometry and arithmetic into doubt.

8. The Evil Genius Hypothesis. But suppose that there is an evil demon instead of God, as
powerful and wise as God, but malevolent and out to trick you into believing everything
false. You cannot prove that there is no such evil genius, so it is possible that just about all of
your beliefs, including “2 + 3 = 5” and “The three angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees”
are false. That is because the evil genius could have “given me a nature such that I might be
deceived even about matters that seemed most evident” [p.25].
The Evil Genius Hypothesis raises the possibility of systematic deception: the annoying
thing about the possibility of systematic deception is that there seems to be no way of ruling
out the possibility (however unlikely it is). There is no way of checking whether you are
actually being deceived or not, say by good detective work. Perhaps the idea of systematic
deception can be explained by giving you an example of the sort of deception that is not

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 systematic enough. Think of the movie “The Truman Show”. In that movie Truman is
actually living on the set (a gigantic dome) of a 24-hour TV show about him, but he falsely
believes that he is living in a real town called Seahaven. He eventually finds out the truth,
because the deception is not systematic enough (e.g., strange things happen when he tries to
leave town). But when one is being systematically deceived, say by an all-powerful and all-
knowing evil demon, there is in principle no empirical way of finding out that you are being
deceived.

9. Some Contemporary Variants of the Evil Genius Hypothesis:

a. Brain in a Vat: Perhaps an evil scientist or an alien has removed your brain from your
body and placed it in a vat filled with life-sustaining liquid, and has wired your brain
to a supercomputer that feeds false information into your brain. If this scenario is
true, it would make many of your particular beliefs about the external world false.
b. Bertrand Russell’s skeptical hypothesis: Perhaps the universe was really created just
five minutes ago, along with your memories that seem to extend several years back
(but in fact do not), and artifacts and geological phenomena that look very old (but in
fact are not). If this scenario is true, it would make all your beliefs about the past
(beyond five minutes ago) false.
c. The Matrix: Perhaps you are living in a virtual reality?
These possible scenarios are as hard to rule out as the Evil Genius Hypothesis. But if you
cannot rule out these possibilities of systematic deception/error, then there is a chance
however unlikely that you are mistaken.

10. In sum, the fallibility of the senses, the Dream Argument, and the Evil Demon Hypothesis
raise (actual or possible) scenarios in which both (i) and (ii) below come out true:
(i) I believe that X is the case;
(ii) X is not the case.
That is, they are scenarios in which my beliefs come out false. For instance, when our senses
deceive us, both (i) and (ii) below come out true:
(i) I believe that the straw in the glass of water is bent;
(ii) The straw in the glass of water is not bent.
On the scenario in which you are now dreaming, both (i) and (ii) below come out true:
(i) I believe that I am sitting in front of my computer, reading Phil 101 notes;
(ii) I am not sitting in front of my computer, reading Phil 101 notes.
Supposing that the Evil Genius Hypothesis is right, both (i) and (ii) below come out true:
(i) I believe that there is an external world with material objects and other minds, that
I have a body, and that 2 + 2 = 4;
(ii) It is not the case that there is an external world with material objects and other
minds, that I have a body, and that 2 + 2 = 4.
So long as these are possibilities that we cannot rule out—so long as there is a chance that
these beliefs of ours are mistaken—the Lottery Paradox shows that these beliefs do not
constitute knowledge.