Blackwell Reference Online

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In the first two sentences of the Meditations, Descartes writes that having beenstruck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them[,] I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.(2:12; AT 7:17)What are these foundations of knowledge? Well, according to Descartes, everything that I clearly perceive is true. Sometimes this is called the “truth rule.” (What he often says is that everything I clearly and distinctly perceive is true. But he also thinks that everything I clearly perceive is true, and it will simplify matters to lay aside complications introduced by distinct perception.) The truth rule represents a fact about my nature: I have been so constructed by God that everything I clearly perceive is true. So establishing the truth rule involves a certain amount of quite substantive metaphysics about me, my place in the universe, and the universe itself. I shall refer to this constellation of views — the truth rule, my nature, its origin in God — as the “metaphysical underpinnings” of cognition.Immediate questions arise about the coherence of Descartes's foundational ... log in or subscribe to read full text