Abstract
Descartes appears to have more than one conception of science. First, there is the relatively exacting conception that he associates with scientia. This is the conception that comes into play in a well-known passage from the Replies in which he explains how an atheist can and can’t know that the angles of a triangle add up to two right angles: the atheist cannot know in the sense of having an unshakeable conviction that the two angles add up to two right angles, but the atheist can know—grasp for as long as no searching doubt is conjured up—the truth that the two angles add up to two right angles. So, exactingly conceived, science is the ultra-stable grasp of truth, ultra-stable because supported by general reasons for confidence in the methodically applied human intellect. Less exactingly conceived, science is successful problem-solving or explanation in terms of a small number of widely applicable “simple” notions—shape, size, number position or motion in the case of physics.
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Notes
- 1.
For more on the distinction between scientia and intuition (crucial to the issue over the Cartesian Circle) see A Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1968), ch.8, and J Tlumak, “Certainty and Cartesian Method” in M Hooker, ed. Descartes: Critical and Interpretive Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) pp. 40–73.
- 2.
It is true that in the passages just quoted, as at the very end of Meditation 5, Descartes is under the influence of the Platonic idea that while true beliefs can come and go, knowledge has got to be stable and fixed, tied down by the reasons for it. The idea is given a distinctively Cartesian gloss when stability is understood in terms of immutability of mind, and where the ideal mind is the immutable mind par excellence—God’s. To the extent that Descartes’s scientific practice requires a less metaphysically grounded philosophy of science than he constructed to please the theologians—to that extent—and I would say it is a considerable extent, Descartes can be said to have failed to make Cartesianism a better ally of Catholicism than Thomism.
- 3.
And I have called them “suppositions” simply to make it known that I think I can deduce them from the primary truths [first deduced from considerations about God alone] I have expounded above [i.e. at AT VI 64]; but I have deliberately avoided carrying out these deductions in order to prevent certain ingenious persons from taking the opportunity to construct, on what they believe to be my principles, some extravagant philosophy for which I will be blamed (ATVI 76; CSM I 150).
- 4.
Now it may also be true that the Principles preserves a version of what is claimed in the Discours—that for effects to be comprehended by principles, especially unexpectedly, is for the principles to be proved. But for someone to see only that principles are proved in this way is not to have scientia about the effects. I will return to this point.
- 5.
“I divided the book into four parts. The first contains …what may be called “first philosophy” or “metaphysics” …. The other three parts contain all that is most general in physics”. Preface to the French edition of the Principles (1647) (AT IXB 16; CSM I 187).
- 6.
For extended discussions of the difference between Descartes’s official method and the scientific practice that is supposed to apply it, see Doren Recker, “Mathematical Demonstration and Deduction in Descartes’s Early Methodological and Scientific Writings”, reprinted in T. Sorell, ed. Descartes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 3–24, and, in the same volume, William R. Shea, “Descartes: Methodological Ideal and Actual Procedure”, pp. 25–37.
- 7.
It is possible that the insistence on intuition of simples and deduction from simples is the most enduring of the metascientific claims in the Cartesian corpus. Seeing this has been made harder by misinterpretations of the Regulae.
- 8.
A parallel passage is to be found in The Conversation with Burman, J. Cottingham, ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 30.
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Sorell, T. (2010). Scientia and the Sciences in Descartes. In: Sorell, T., Rogers, G., Kraye, J. (eds) Scientia in Early Modern Philosophy. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3077-1_5
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