Saturday, May 23, 2020

What Descartes Who When Arriving At The Wax Example

Phi of Mind - Paper One I- What Descartes Believes When Arriving at the Wax Example By the time Descartes arrives at the wax example, he has deduced his own existence as a thinking thing. How? Through a project of doubting, with the intention to find a securely provable truth by which to base all of his knowledge. (pp 1-6) He finds this in the existence of the self as a thinking thing: even if we assume that all external knowledge is inconsistent and untrustworthy, we cannot deny that we interact with this knowledge through the process of considering it. Thus, we cannot doubt that we think. From this, we know (holding all else as unproven) that we are a thing which thinks. (pp 1-10) Knowing that we think, we may then also know that we†¦show more content†¦How is it, then, that we know this wax is a single, albeit transmuted, thing? Descartes then attempts to find whatever is presented by (or contained within) the wax, to find whatever allows us to know its identity. Discarding all elements of sens e data which have been transformed during the wax s melting (such perceptions being, in essence, unreliable), he notes the persistence of the wax as an object in space which is both flexible and movable (pp 1-11). Descartes argues that these attributes alone are useless in conclusively showing something to be wax : both of these attributes admit of themselves an infinite amount of modification, and because of this, are useless for definite determinations. Put more clearly- being flexible and movable is about as useful for determining the form of an object as the attribute of color changeable is for determining it s color: these attributes apply to too many things, and do not capture whatever makes the wax understandable as wax. How, then, do we know the wax as wax? Since the object itself contains no information which can be used, the answer must be found in the internal mind, rather than external object. Thus, the wax example shows that perception of objects is based not in mere externally provided sense data, but in how these sense data are combined and are interpreted by the mind. That these aggregate judgments of sense data are

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.