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A Reason to Doubt
“Since reason now convinces me that I ought to withhold my assent just as carefully from what is not obviously certain and indubitable as from what is obviously false, I can justify the rejection of all my beliefs if I can find some ground for doubt in each” (171). This passage, taken from René Descartes first meditation, “On What Can Be Called into Doubt,” indicates the method of doubt: the basis for why and how Descartes takes on his primary task of tearing down and rebuilding his belief system.
Because Descartes’ skepticism lead him to distrust the knowledge gained from his senses, he devised the method of doubt. Simply put, it states that if you can find any reason at all, no matter how weak, to doubt a belief, then you must pretend the belief is false. Rather than individually doubting every one of his present opinions, Descartes has come up with this way of saying that he can cast all his opinions into doubt if the basics upon which they are founded can be doubted. This can be clarified using the example of a basket of apples with one bad apple in it. In order to find the bad apple in the bunch, you must dump out all of the apples and place them back in the basket, one by one, until you find the bad apple. In the same way, Descartes will cast all of his beliefs into doubt, placing only the ones he proves certain “into the basket.” Because the meditations are almost a guide to the reader, Descartes proposes that we, like him, employ the method of doubt to distrust any beliefs that are subject to doubt.
In the first meditation, Descartes goes on to find greater reasons to doubt his beliefs are true. To do this, he presents three scenarios, skeptical arguments, in which the method of doubt can be applied to cast certain beliefs into doubt. From weakest to strongest, the three skeptical scenarios are sensory error (some physical object beliefs can be doubted), the dream argument (all physical object beliefs can be...