Descartes and content skepticism

Abstract

Obtaining clarity on what, if anything, is new in Descartes’ use of skeptical arguments is an important exercise both for revealing the nature and scope of his skepticism and for revealing something about his historical relationship to the ancient skeptical traditions. A prevailing view is that while there are no new skeptical arguments in Descartes’ corpus, his purely “methodological” interest in skepticism is new, a fact which enables him to avoid the problem of apraxia (the problem of how to live as a skeptic) which befuddled the ancient skeptics. A “methodological” approach to skepticism seems to imply that it is narrower in scope, applying only to knowledge (certainty) claims rather than to beliefs, especially those we use in everyday affairs. Others deny that there is any significant difference between the scope of ancient and modern skepticism. Some, for example, argue that both forms of skepticism extend to belief as much as to knowledge, to the practical realm as much as to the theoretical, and that both solve the apraxia problem in much the same way, namely, by accepting appearances as a criterion for action but not for truth. If “methodological” is supposed, by contrast, to pick out a difference in the nature of skeptical reasoning between the ancients and Descartes, the claim seems simply confused. The arguments and methods of reasoning seem much alike. My own view is that there is something new in Descartes’ skepticism but it isn’t (or isn’t just) that its approach is methodological. It is rather that unlike ancient skepticism, Descartes’ skepticism extends to the very content of ideas themselves. What it means to “accept appearances for the sake of action” is, therefore, a very different kind of epistemic attitude for a Cartesian than it is for an ancient skeptic. If the view to be advanced here is correct, what I am referring to as Descartes’ “content skepticism” is thus more radical in its scope than any of the preceding forms of skepticism, a fact which determines the kind of cure which is possible for the “disease” which skepticism is (7: 172, 2: 121; 7: 547, 2: 373–74). More precisely, it is crucial to recognize that once skepticism is defeated, we cannot simply go back to believing that the world is the way it appears. Appearances will not, in other words, be restored as a criterion for truth.