So regarding the question I asked today in class about the existence of the dog that I see in front of me (assuming I'm delusional), I wanted to further examine it.
So let's assume I'm sitting here, and I look over and see this dog. It is clearly standing there, wagging its tail and all, and I know this through my sense perception. To then confirm that it actually does exist, or to quantify it, I then get out my yardstick, and measure it. Well sure enough, that dog measures out to be two feet long. I have therefore qualified its existence. At least to myself. If you look over, and see nothing (because of course I'm delusional), you would say "I see no dog, I cannot measure it" or such. In this case, there is no reality of the dog for you, but there still is for me.
Thinking then on that, it seems to me that reality becomes a purely subjective and individual practice. Either that or reality is something that we ourselves may measure and qualify, but to have true proof of existence, we need a consensus for. The reality of objects is either subjective or dependent on the multitude.
Professor Grady went on to explain that I may see this dog through some mistake, because God is not systematically deceiving me, and therefore I cannot systematically be wrong all of the time. I understand that this is what Descartes is arguing, but I'm not buying it. I feel like there's some sort of problem here. I don't see how, if I can see and measure this dog, and you can't, therefore leaving the object to be both real and not, reality is not objective. Or is this something that can be explained only in the case of totally rational and sane beings?
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Thanks for the good follow-up question, Hannah. I think you're right about the impossibility of avoiding skepticism concerning the information supplied by sense perception; but it is an important facet of Descartes's argument that he does not believe this possibility can ever be completely eliminated. Rather he wants only to discover a means for judging those objects that we become aware of through sense perception according to a standard that is not dependent upon those objects' perceptible qualities, susceptible as those will always be to confusion, instability, and intersubjective variation (i.e., what and how I perceive may not be the same as what and how you perceive). In other words, he does not intend to show that we cannot be wrong about the objects of sensation, but only that there is some possibility of being right, and to identify what this possibility depends on.
ReplyDeleteThis is precisely what the appeal to quantifiable measure is intended to accomplish. A material object is susceptible to various kinds of measurement, independent of how (or whether) it is perceived by me. In fact (as with the thermometer), these measurements are capable of arbitrating disputes about the sensible properties of things just because they do not depend on and are not affected by them. In the case of the two-foot-long phantom dog, then, the Cartesian response would be that you have not at all obtained an objective measurement of it. We know that for exactly the same reason that you cite as reason to doubt Descartes’s argument, namely, that no one else could repeat your phantom measurement. It is, therefore, not an objective property of a material body.
Maybe it would be useful to distinguish the measurable (and measured) quantity of the object from our (possibly confused) perception of that measurement. Imagine that, absent an observer, your dog is simply standing in a measurable space. The dog occupies a certain amount and location of that space, and the particular amount and location can be confirmed with an instrument like a yardstick. Imagine that—still without anyone observing it—the yardstick is now held up to the dog. Is the dog’s length actually equal to some quantifiable portion of the yardstick’s length? Descartes says “yes.” This fact is the standard according to which my perception must be measured, and not the reverse. If I misread the yardstick (always a possibility, given the fallibility of the senses) then this certainly affects my judgment about what I have understood clearly and distinctly in the dog, but it does not change what I have in fact understood clearly and distinctly in the dog. This is why it’s important not to conflate the sense perception through which I read the quantifiable measure of an object with the quantifiable measure itself. It also explains why, although measure does give us a standard for objectivity with respect to material objects, it is always possible that we (as beings capable of making false judgments about our perceptions) we will be mistaken about the results of any particular measure.
In practice, however, these kinds of problems are rather uncommon, and they do not seem to undermine our common sense attitude about correctness in knowledge. Though we might all, in trying to measure a very slight quantity with a great degree of precision, read the fractions of an inch indicated on a ruler slightly differently, none of us doubts (right?) that the ruler itself is capable of accurately reflecting the true size of the object. The problems, again, arise from the senses (which may not be sensitive enough to see fine differences) and from the will (which says, “good enough already, I don’t really care whether it’s 1/256th of an inch or 3/512ths, so I’ll just go ahead and make a judgment”). Does that help to assuage some of your concern?
That actually helps a lot, thanks. I guess I wasn't separating sense perception from the quantifiable measure of the object, and that makes much more sense when looked at that way.
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