The meditator begins Meditation 3 by realigning her thoughts with the cogito after a rousing frolic through the magical world of wax, now she is looking for certainty. Her method to gain knowledge of what she identifies as certain uses the cogito as a formula. This formula is made by stating:
1. I am a thing that thinks
2. I came up with that through clear and distinct perception
4. “whatever I perceive very clearly and distinctly is true.” (CSM 24)
Don’t worry I can count. I skipped the three because I feel like there is something missing. Hatfield states that 3 is “Clear and distinct perception would not be sufficient to yield such knowledge if it was in an way fallible” (144). But I feel that this doesn’t quite meet the criteria for truth. Descartes then brings the deceiving-god argument back into play. In the first meditation the deceiving-god hypothesis made meditator doubt simple and straightforward truths, but now Descartes states that there are three things safe from deceiving god: I am something, I exist, simple math (or arithmetic and geometry). Concerning what I called simple maths, I believe Descartes means anything simple without an inherent contradiction. But doesn’t the third point counter the idea that god can make us doubt simples? Now, math has been brought back as truth. So, my previous statement in my other blog that “we could conceivably convince ourselves that 2 + 3 = Monkey” is now false. I was reluctant before to believe that such a simple statement of fact that 2 + 3 =5 could be false, yet I doubted because that’s where the meditation led me. Now it seems I was foolish to do that. Descartes reason for this is that slight and metaphysical doubt should not stop the meditator from dwelling on deceiving god as cause for doubt and that there is no cause to think there is a deceiving god, or whether there is a god at all. Is that a kind of a copout or did I miss something? So, for now: it is the truth that 2 + 3 does = 5, but I am still not certain of this fact.
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I'm glad to read that you are not yet willing to buy into Descartes' assertion of the truth of simple math; because I also think that he made an unjustified leap. It seems that if we’re honestly considering the DGH, then we can’t simply say that I clearly and distinctly perceive the truth of simple math so it must be true. This seems contradictory to Descartes’ original method of doubt. It seems to me that Descartes hit a road block and decided that it was necessary to loosen the criteria for his method of doubt. I agree with Hatfield that math is still doubtable when considering the DGH.
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