Material Falsity and Error in Descartes' Meditations by Wee Cecilia;

Author:Wee, Cecilia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Refinement to ACP

Under ACP, an idea purports to represent its existing cause. Some of these (ostensible) causes include (as discussed earlier) corporeal objects like towers, stars and the sun. Thus, for instance, the idea of the sun purports, in ACP, to represent an existing sun (which causes the thinker to have this idea). Now the sun, for Descartes, is not an individual corporeal substance, but merely a mode of extended matter. Nevertheless, my recent discussion seems to require that this idea of the sun would still differ from the idea of the size or shape of the sun. Whereas the ideas of size and shape are of immediately perceived attributes, the idea of the sun would be derivative, insofar as it is (somehow) based upon these immediate ideas of size and shape.

There are two possible ways in which the idea of the sun could relate to the ideas of the size and shape on which it is based. First, the idea of the sun could be formed through an inference, made from the immediate ideas of specific size and shape, that there is a modification of matter that has the properties of specific size and shape.7 In such a case, the inference would bear some similarity to the one made in PEWP (though it is not, of course, infallible). Second, the idea of the sun could be the collection of the various relevant ideas of size and shape. That is, the idea of the sun could be constituted by the ideas of size and shape that, when put together, are the idea of the sun. On either alternative, the idea of the sun, together with the relevant ideas of specific size and shape, are all judgementsq occurring in the third grade of sensory perception. In both cases, the idea of the sun would require an additional judgementq that is not needed in the immediate ideas of size and shape.

Neither alternative is inconsistent with what I have said in the earlier chapters. The idea of the sun, formed derivatively through such indirect means, would still purport to represent its cause – where such a cause is either the particular modification of extended matter possessing the relevant properties of size and shape, or the collection of the relevant properties of size and shape. The arguments in this section thus refine (but do not contradict) the earlier account, by allowing that some sensory ideas mentioned in the earlier chapters may be based on other ideas (such as ideas of the sun, or towers), while other sensory ideas are immediate (ideas of size and shape). Both kinds of ideas, however, would still represent their cause.

The example discussed above involves a ‘sensory’ idea, such as the idea of the sun or the stick. But note also that the arguments in this chapter would also introduce a refinement to non-sensory ideas such as the idea of the thinking self or God. These ideas must also be derivative, that is, they must be formed from an inference

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