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Pham Van Thang NGÀY

Descartes's Methodic doubt: A preliminary investigation to attain truth.

Background: In school today, it seems that students mostly agree and satisfy with whatever
their teachers give them without any doubting requiring of more concise of the truth or a
subject’s reality. That is why they could not even go further in getting into the truth in any field.
However, if they look back to history, to the time that Descartes invested into philosophical
field the method of doubting, they would get a method of how to go deeper into the truths.
Rene Descartes investigated the internal functions of the mind in comparison to the external
world and highlighted the difference between thinking and perceiving. His use of methodic
doubt is introspective, but also logical and objective and an attempt to clear away the 'clutter' of
history. He seek to discover a new kind of scientific knowledge by following a straightforward
few rules, he pushes doubt as far as it can go to see if anything can survive such skeptical doubt.
In the first Meditation, Descartes begins to consider what he can possibly know. From this it is
clear that Descartes' methodic doubt has two stages: firstly, doubt everything that can be
doubted and secondly, do not accept anything as truth unless it can be established with certainty.
With the purpose of doubting for introspecting, Descartes did not mean to reject the claimed
truth but to go deeper into its reality by its different aspects. As he meant, the students should
not accept any truth easily but having questioning on those truths, because this way will allow
them to develop a sympathetic appreciation to any claimed truth later when they come to know
it clearly. As he said that in the subject that one proposes to investigate, his inquiries should be
directed, not to what others have thought, nor to what we ourselves conjecture, but to what we
can and perspicuously behold and with certainty deduce; for knowledge is not won in any other
way. 1

Pros position:
1
Philosophical works of Descartes, volume one, first edition 1931, p5
Janet Broughton:

Descartes’s method of doubt is about his rationale for using it and the way he thought it worked.
Radical doubts surface in the Discourse on the Method and the Principles of Philosophy, and the
method of doubt guides the fragment of the Search for Truth that has come down to us.
We could imagine that for Descartes, the “method of universal doubt” concerns nothing more
than this. Such a method would greatly widen the scope of doubt from its everyday limits, and it
would require us to suspend judgment about everything that falls within that widened scope. It
would not, however, be constructive: it would not point us toward propositions to which we
could assent, nor would it help us to answer the question how there could be any propositions to
which we could assent, or the question how we could hope to discover them. These are urgent
questions if the point of the First Meditation is to guide our assent so that we can reach lasting
results in the sciences.2

Cons position:
Moore's:
“And what I can't help asking myself is this: Is it, in fact, as certain that all four of these
assumptions are true, as that I do know that this is a pencil or that you are conscious? I
cannot help answering: It seems to me more certain that I do know that this is a pencil
and that you are conscious, than that any single one of these four assumptions are true,
let alone all four. That is to say, though, as I have said, I agree with Russell that (1), (2),
and (3) are true; yet of no one even of these three do I feel as certain as that I do know
for certain that this is a pencil. Nay more: I do not think it is rational to be as certain of
any one of these four propositions, as of the proposition that I do know that this is a
pencil. (Moore 1959, p. 226)”
Rather than having to identify one of the premises of the skeptical argument as positively
implausible, one can, like Moore, make the more modest and more reasonable claim that
however plausible those premises may be, they are not as certain or as plausible as is the
thought that we do know the things in question, and thus those premises don't have enough
power to overturn that thought. And he proposes the anti-skeptical argument:
Moore thinks that he can prove that the skeptic about the external world is wrong. His simple
proof is as follows:
P1. Here (holding up one’s left hand) is one hand.
P2. Here (holding up one’s right hand) is another.
C1. Therefore, there are at least two hands.
C2. Therefore, there are at least two things to be met with in space.3

2
Janet Broughton, Descartes’s Method of Doubt, (the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2002),
p97
3
http://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/mcgill/370/Moore-skepticism.pdf
Articulation: As Aristotle said, “man by nature desires to know”, it is true that everyone
desires to know and it is innate in his nature. From this natural desire everyone has his own
way to search for truth which is different from others since knowledge is not already there and
easy for him to perceive. The different ways of reaching truth make this field colorful. This is
what Descartes values most, that the field of knowledge must be contributed by the various
colors which are from individuals a truth will be enriched if it is in combination. But how one
can achieve the truth is a problem according to Descartes. That is why he proposes different
rules for the direction of the mind which is necessary for student today when they are living in a
world of media; everything is just easy and fast as fast to come and fast to go. If the student
doesn’t have a certain way to seek for what he is seeking he might be lost on the way. So blind
is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along
unexpected routes, having no reason to hope for success but merely willing to risk the
experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there. In or der to find a way, Descartes
said that there is a need of a method for finding out the truth.4
If the student really desires to know, he might try all the possible ways to seek for what he is
curious to know as a man who is looking for the treasure then he sells all the properties that he
has to exchange for it. Doubting method can lead him to the treasure that he is looking for.
Descartes while studying in school he used different terms and languages to take notes. It is
true that sometimes the vocabularies that are used in the school are on the understanding of the
writers, of the authors or of the teachers, and of cause the meaning is expressed in the way that
the writers or the teachers’ understanding. Is it possible that two persons have the same
understanding about something is the same? Or how can this one grasps the same with what the
preacher wants to deliver? Therefore it might be hard for students to grasp exactly what teacher
is teaching. Indeed students should use the vocabularies that can describe what they understand
in their own way or foundations.
The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such;
that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing
more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to
exclude all ground of doubt. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under
examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate
solution. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with
objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it
were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain
order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of
antecedence and sequence. And the last, in every case to make enumerations so
complete, and reviews so general that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.5
As Descartes said, doubting does not mean rejecting what is claimed, but to examine, to require
the way how the truth is claimed. Be conscious of how a claim is acceptable to go to different
aspects of how it is claimed. On this way to a certain degrees of assent, critical points are
necessarily bringing out to make clear of what is not sure.
4
Philosophical works of Descartes, volume one, first edition 193, p18

5
Rene Descartes, discourse on method and Meditation, by Laurence J. Laflew, p15
It is not the right way that students always accept whatever their teachers give them. According
to Descartes, they should build their own way of understanding, their own understanding about
the truth because the given one is others’. Since it is others’, we can not be sure about it. We
cannot build our own understanding on the others’. That is why doubting is necessary required
in order to reach the truth that base on our own. If we have our own way of doubting, this will
help us to reach to particular level of understanding before reaching the truth.

Personal assessment: As the image that Descartes gives in his example, the city will be
beautiful if it is rebuilt. However, it is not easy to do it once. But house by house will be tore
down to be built again is the possible reality that can make the city more beautiful. A claimed
truth is also needed to be torn down in different parts in order when it comes to the other person,
it will not be any more of the first one who claimed it, but it is now on the understanding of the
person who perceives from the other – it is the same with the case of a teacher and the students.
It is impossible to get the truth from others as accepting immediately what they give, but on the
process of perceiving it we need to have doubt, which means that we know how to divide the
claimed truth into smaller parts so that we can understand it from different aspects in order to
arrive at the truth. When we understand already the different aspects of the claimed truth, we
can grasp the whole truth in our own way of understanding it. From there we can build up our
knowledge which is from the claimed truth of others base on our understanding through
doubting. The knowledge we have now is certain as we grasp by our own, as we reach by our
own understanding of the truth. If we just build our knowledge on the knowledge of others
without doubting, this knowledge is not ours, and it is easily forgotten along the way. But with
the process of doubting, we will really know that it is true or not, or we can arrive at the truth by
our own grasp, and so it will last. Since Descartes valued what is called unique adequacy of
each individual’s reason for the discovery of truth, he wants everyone to work for his own by
his efforts. This foundation can help us to attain the truth even we receive from others by the
methodic doubt of Descartes. From this point we can see that it is necessary for all of us in
general and every student in particular to build our own knowledge on our foundation through
doubting method.