Descartes believed that anything that can be doubted should be doubted. He wanted to develop a method to determine if something is actually true. This is called Methodological Skepticism.
A good example would be a dream. When someone is dreaming, they often do not believe they are dreaming. All of their senses tell them that what they perceive is real. But because it is not, Descartes claimed that even the senses themselves could not always perceive the truth. He concluded that one cannot rely on the senses.
The foundation of this method was "to be doubted in everything". His method has extraordinary meaning. It was only a condition to create "rules" that could guarantee the achievement of knowledge with high power of probability.
I don't think that nowadays most of us follow his method. For instance, whatever we watch and find out from TV news, we believe in that without even trying to explore it, if it is really truth?? People beleive in everything that others say. If one group of people say that Earth is a sphere, everybody else will think so.
A good example would be a dream. When someone is dreaming, they often do not believe they are dreaming. All of their senses tell them that what they perceive is real. But because it is not, Descartes claimed that even the senses themselves could not always perceive the truth. He concluded that one cannot rely on the senses.
The foundation of this method was "to be doubted in everything". His method has extraordinary meaning. It was only a condition to create "rules" that could guarantee the achievement of knowledge with high power of probability.
I don't think that nowadays most of us follow his method. For instance, whatever we watch and find out from TV news, we believe in that without even trying to explore it, if it is really truth?? People beleive in everything that others say. If one group of people say that Earth is a sphere, everybody else will think so.
1 comment:
I think you are right that we generally don't practice Descartes' method. Perhaps we are too trusting of the sources from which we receive most of our information.
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