Cogito 170 Fundamentals

[Timothee Cazares]

Theobjection to "I think, therefore I am" is that it presupposes the existence of an "I" doing the thinking. Possibly, "there are thoughts" is the true minimum statement that can be reached using Descartes' method; this does not presuppose the existence of some sort of unified consciousness having the thoughts.

This is exactly what Descartes was trying to prove. He wanted to build philosophy from the ground up based on a series of rational observations. I think he must've been quite dismayed when he realized that it is possible to take a skeptical position on almost everything.

His conclusion in his Meditations I & II was that this is the only truth, and the only thing we can know for absolute certainty. Whether this is true or not depends on how convinced you are by his Meditations.

The essence of his argument is that you can doubt almost everything about the world, but you can't doubt that you're doubting. Because if you doubt that you're doubting, you're still doubting. This is why the phrase is sometimes seen as 'I doubt, therefore I am.'

Most of the contention comes from trying to place meaning to the words 'I' and 'exist'. Perhaps it is not me who is doubting, but there is still doubt. I tend to prefer the more constrained version: 'There is doubt.' This statement avoids a lot of the semantic ambiguity, but connotes a weaker argument.

I think therefore I am is a logical conclusion, aimed at showing that something exists. It assumes that logic works and exists. How can you assume that before you even know if you or anything else exists?

One way to understand the cogito is as a way to state that it is sufficient to know one has doubts (is doubting) in order to conclude one exists. Now, while I am not certain he would claim it is "necessarily" correct, as you may know, Descartes also considers the problem of whether, essentially, there is a "glitch" in existence -- he formulates the question as that of an evil genius capable of making him believe he was experiencing a world (when in fact he wasn't); Descartes resorts ultimately to God's beneficence in order to surmount the problem, asserting essentially that God wouldn't allow such a wholesale and gross deception.

In other words, the basic metaphysical question involves whether or not the world as we experience it is "real"; one way of expressing the cogito in this context is to read Descartes suggestion as asserting that we are, at least, as real as our doubts about reality; that this much at least is sufficient to indicate proper existence. This may all seem somewhat naive to us today, so it may be helpful as I suggested above to recognize a certain degree of irony in the formulation and theoretical context of the cogito: Descartes is founding our knowledge of the reality of the world on our thoughts and in particular our doubts about the ontological status of existence.

I love a good puzzle and Descartes gave us one for the ages. The challenge is extracting meaning from "I" and "existence" from the thought experiencing it, without presuming either. So what if we define it within the problem context? With a definition, the presumption (and logic problem) could go away ..

Descartes's Cartesian Circle makes it clear that he had no issues with the irony of ambiguity and circular reasoning. But if we define key terms to establish context, can't we remove Descartes circularity and provide weight to his original claim?

The first way to get it wrong is indeed to take the Cogito as a logical argument! It is not. The Cogito is not meant for anyone to prove in a logical way the existence of their own mind to somebody else. Indeed, the fact that someone thinks is not apparent to anyone else. Someone saying "I think, therefore I am" merely shows to other people that this person speaks. This in itself could not possibly be a logical proof that the "I" of this person is thinking, let alone that it exists at all. Descartes himself didn't mean the Cogito to be used to assert to the rest of the world the existence of one's own mind.

The other way to get it wrong is to take the Cogito to be about the existence of the self. The self is this psychological phenomenon whereby a subject has a sense of their own biographical identity persisting over time, hopefully throughout life. Although Descartes' discussion of his notion of extreme doubt, leading to the Cogito, is suffused with the notion of self, the notion of self is irrelevant to the Cogito itself.

The Cogito doesn't say "The self thinks, therefore the self exists". This would be a valid argument but one whose premise couldn't be proved true. Instead, the Cogito is expressed in the first-person: I think. And Descartes took the time to explain carefully what was the subject, the "I". The I in the Cogito is the thinking thing. Not the self. Not Descartes. Not a person. Just the thinking thing. The thing doing the thinking.

The Cogito, then, is the expression of his conclusion that he cannot similarly doubt the existence of his own mind, because doubting is indeed thinking and thinking implies the existence of the thinking thing, the "I" of the Cogito.

So, as part of this reasoning, the Cogito, rather than a logical argument proving the existence of human minds to the world, is the realisation that one cannot doubt, coherently, the existence of one's own mind.

The Cogito is often misunderstood, and indeed has been often misunderstood throughout history by many philosophers only too anxious to dismiss the Cogito as what they took to be an argument about the existence of the human soul.

You cannot prove the existence of your mind to other people. Whatever you do or say, someone else can reasonably and rationally doubt the existence of your mind. The Cogito doesn't solve this question and wasn't meant to solve this question. Yet, the Cogito is the perfect expression of the fact that no one can coherently doubt the existence of his own mind.

The Cogito is thus a very peculiar kind of argument, and Descartes himself tried to preclude the argument being understood as a logical inference. Something which also explains why the argument has often been misunderstood.

Thinking the Cogito is in effect a performative argument. Any mind thinking the Cogito formally proves its existence to itself. As such it is a fact. Rather than an ordinary argument, it is the expression of a self-demonstrative performance.

I think whenever I perform the act of thinking. Thus, the premise "I think" becomes true, and can be made true, each time I perform the act of thinking. And this, in particular, whenever I think the Cogito itself. Each time I think the Cogito, the premise "I think" becomes true, and with it, the conclusion that I exist.

The success of the Cogito, possibly the most well-known philosophical argument the world over, comes from its total unassailability in the face of the routine denial of the reality of minds. You can't prove the existence of your mind to somebody else. But whatever other people may say, the Cogito is the expression of the fact that you cannot coherently doubt the existence of your own mind.

This is all that the Cogito is about. The fact that we cannot coherently doubt the existence of our own mind. This is also the force of the Cogito. Nobody would need to pay any attention to Descartes merely asserting the existence of his own mind. Yet, each human being thinking the Cogito will be ipso facto incapable of doubting coherently the existence of their own mind. The mind understood as "the thinking thing".

Below you will find my argument for this contention. It is a paper I wrote for an epistemology class in 2005, entitled "No Cogito". The entire content of the essay is fully copyright protected. Also, some of the formatting was lost copying the text from Word to Markdown, so bare with me and pretend that anything in Latin that isn't in English is in italics.

From this, one can plainly see that the existence of Self is not certain. My next step will be to offer examples in which the Self does not exist. This counterexample will further clarify that the existence of Self is not certain.

The process of providing a conceivable situation in which there is no Self requires several steps. I will begin by presenting a situation in which someone is confused about the nature of his own Self, and his Self will not in fact be his own. I will then broaden this new notion of Self to a universal, and eventually will entirely abandon the notion of Self. Once this is done, I will defend my counterexample against possible objections and it will thus be proven that the existence of Self is not certain.

As Wooble said "I" has to exist first, before it can do thinking. But I believe that this sentence means exacly that, that "I" has to exist first ... so this sentence is trying to define what thinking means (that only living beings can think).

From these You can see that if You think then You must be living being (because "can think" is only in statemens with living beings). But as soon as You can claim that some non-living beings can think Decartes statement is false.

One counter argument to the Descarte's Cogito Ergo Sum is the idea that you do not need to be a thinker to have a thought. This was inconceivable in the 1700s, and is still not wholly convincing now. It rests on the idea that something that is not conscious can exist.

Isn't the most logical conclusion that the most certain conclusion you and I can make is that questions exist? I could have made a mistake reasoning somewhere when ruling out that I don't exist and in fact my conclusion that I exist could be wrong. I don't deduce a contradiction from assuming that I don't exist but I do deduce a contradiction from assuming that questions don't exist. If questions don't exist then logic can't exist. Ergo: There are questions that exist with greater certainty than I do.

"I" and "exists", I think are words heavily loaded with baggage. In a simpler age, it wouldn't have been problematic, but in an age where there are so many abstract notions in everyday parlance, as well as due to the efforts of these crazy creatures known as professional philosophers, it's all too problematic.

3a8082e126