3 Ideas and Reality

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3Ideas and Reality
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• TAs office h.
• none

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• Bibliographical Resources (reminder)
• Descartes Meditations (with Critics and Replies)
  Discourse free at
• http//www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_descarte.html
• Leibnizs New Essays free at
• http//www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_leibniz.html

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• By Now you should have read Descartes
  Meditations.
• For the next 2 meetings you should read the
  preface and ch. 1 of Leibnizs New Essays
• It would also help if you can read Leibnizs
  Monadology (also on Leibnizs link)

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• Further bibliography on Descartes
• Cottingham J. (1986). Descartes. Blackwell,
  Oxford
• Further bibliography on/by Chomsky
• Chomsky N. (2000). New Horizons in the Study of
  Language and Mind. Cambridge UP Cambridge
• McGilvray J. (1999). Chomsky Language, Mind,
  and Politics. Polity Press Cambridge

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• The following can also be useful
• Antony L. M. Hornstein N. (eds.) (2003).
  Chomsky and His Critics. Blackwell Oxford
• Smith, N. (1999) Chomsky Ideas and Ideals.
  Cambridge UP Cambridge
• Wilson C. (2003). Descartess Meditations An
  Introduction. Cambridge UP Cambridge

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Perception

• Sensory Grasp
• Our perception of ordinary objects may be
  obscure and confuse (e.g. change in
  phenomenological properties).
• But objects possess all the properties which we
  clearly and distinctly understand, i.e. the
  essential, eternal and immutable properties.

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• Essential properties of material objects
• Are true of matter under each manifestation and
  all conceivable conditions they transcend the
  qualia they are senses-independent.
• These properties can be cashed out extensionally
  and, as such can be characterized in mere
  geometrical terms. (See the mathematical model of
  knowledge).

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• Res Extensa
• It is the nature or essence of corporeal things
  (substantia corporealis).
• It is a subject of predication, a bearer of
  attributes. Roughly it is something we can say
  something about.
• (see the subject/predicate distinction which
  will be central in Leibnizs metaphysics).
• It is independent and can stand on its own. It
  is independent of anything except God.

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Ideas

• Ideas
• (i) Formal Nature
• (ii) Material Nature
• (iii) Reflexivity/Self-Referentiality
• Descartes distinguishes between the material
  reality of an idea (this is the intellectual
  act/operation of the thinking) and the formal
  reality of an idea (this is the representational
  power of the idea).
• These are two aspects of the very same thing,
  the idea.

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• Idea can be taken materially, as an operation
  of the intellect, in which case it cannot be said
  to be more perfect than me. Alternatively it can
  be taken objectively, as the thing represented by
  that operation and this thing, even if it is not
  regarded as existing outside the intellect, can
  still, in virtue of its essence, be more perfect
  than myself. (Preface to Meditations CSM II 7)
• The idea of God, even if it exists only in my
  intellect is more perfect than myself because of
  its essence.

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• an idea is reflexive (self-referential)
• The holder of the idea is aware/conscious of
  this very idea in so long as s/he entertains it.
• in nostro sentendi modo cogitatio includitur
  thought is included in our mode of sensation
  (Letter to More, 5 Feb. 1649 CSMK III 365).
• This allows to block an infinite regress (cf.
  homunculus fallacy).

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• The awareness one has of the idea one entertains
  is not another idea (or meta-idea) that one
  entertains of the former.
• The reflexive consciousness of the idea is
  contained into the idea itself.
• Hence, because of this direct awareness, there
  isnt a regress of ideas of ideas.

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The Threefold Aspect of Ideas

• (i) Formal Nature (semantic property)
• (ii) Material Nature (mental act)
• (iii) Reflexivity/Self-Referentiality (direct
  awareness)
• The material nature of an idea, i.e. its being a
  mental act, may help to explain their causal
  power.
• Since an idea is an act occurring in ones mind,
  this act can trigger one to behave in a given way.

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• The formal nature of an idea should explain their
  semantics and contribute in determining the
  truth-value of a thought.
• This explains the aboutness or intentionality of
  ideas, i.e. what an idea stands for / represents.

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• The reflexivity of ideas helps explaining their
  subjective character.
• In so long as one is entertaining an idea one is
  aware of this very idea. And one cannot not be
  aware of it.
• And (because of the reflexivity) one is aware of
  an idea without having to perceive it.
• Immediate acquaintance of the idea.

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• Meta-Idea
• The reflexive character of an idea does not
  prevent one to have an idea about a given idea (a
  meta-idea).
• In that case one is aware of the meta-idea.
• This is similar to the difference between
  thinking about red and thinking about red.

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Introspection and Nativism

• Methodology Introspection
• The true understanding of reality requires the
  mind to turn on itself and make abstraction of
  all information gained from the senses.
• Innate Ideas
• The possession of an idea needs a cause. Thus
  adventitious ideas are causes by the senses,
  while an innate idea is causes by God.

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• True ideas are innate in us.
• The first, basic and more important, idea is the
  idea of God.
• Having achieved knowledge of God we can then
  proceed to the knowledge of external reality.
• The latter is gained by the grasping of (innate)
  mathematical concepts.
• The essence of reality (its being extended) can
  be expressed in geometrical terms.

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• I apply the term innate to the ideas or
  notions that are the form of those thoughts in
  order to distinguish them from others, which I
  call adventious or made up. This is the same
  sense as that in which we say that generosity is
  innate in certain families, or that certain
  diseases such as gout or stones are innate in
  others it is not so much that the babies of such
  families suffer from these diseases in their
  mothers womb, but simply that they are born with
  a faculty or tendency to contract them.
  (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet CSM I 303-4)

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• Nothing reaches our mind from the external
  objects through the sense organs except certain
  corporeal motions The idea of pain, colours,
  sounds and the like must be all the more innate
  if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions,
  our mind is to be capable of representing them to
  itself, for there is no similarity between these
  ideas and the corporeal motions. Is it possible
  to imagine anything more absurd than that all the
  common notions within our mind arise from such
  motions and cannot exist without them? I would
  like our author to tell me what the corporeal
  motion is that is capable of forming some common
  notion to the effect that things which are equal
  to a third thing are equal to each other, or any
  other he cares to take. (Comments on a Certain
  Broadsheet CSM I 304)
• In claiming that there is no similarity
  Descartes seems to suggest that ideas are like
  images

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Knowledge of ideas

• Awareness of Ideas
• A child (untrained mind) faces difficulties to
  grasp the innate true ideas because her mind is
  flooded with bodily stimulus preventing the
  inward look which ultimately allows the grasping
  of the true ideas.
• In early childhood the mind is too closely tied
  to the body.
• The body is seen as an obstruction to the mind.

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• Ideas are in the Mind
• What does it mean to say that ideas are in the
  mind?
• An idea is in the form of a thought and one is
  aware of it by immediate perception. (see
  reflexivity, self-referentiality of ideas)
• But at any given time one is only aware of a
  tiny fraction of the idea that is in ones mind.

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• Possession of Ideas
• Should be understood in a dispositional, rather
  than actual, way.
• To have an idea of X is to be disposed, by
  appropriate reflection, to recognize certain
  truths about X.

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idea

• In using the word idea Descartes means both the
  concept and the propositions one has about the
  concept.
• Thus one having an innate idea of a triangle is
  one having the concept of a triangle and the
  proposition that the sum of its angles is 180
  degrees.

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• Having an idea entails having propositional
  knowledge (e.g. I have the idea of God, so I
  know that he is all powerful )
• Cf knowing that vs. knowing how, see also
  epistemic vs. non-epistemic seeing. (savoir vs.
  connaitre)
• E.g. Knowing how to swim vs. Knowing that
  Ottawa is north of Toronto
• Seeing a chameleon vs. Seeing that the
  chameleon is on the branch

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Tree Kind of Ideas

• 1. Innate
• 2. Adventitious
• They come from an external source.
• 3. Fictional
• They are made up or invented.

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• Since sense-perception is not a matter of a
  simple reception of the mind, all ideas must, in
  a sense, be innate.
• The ideas of pain, colour, sounds, etc. must all
  be innate (sensations such as pain, colour, etc.
  are not in the objects).
• Sensory ideas should not be conceived as coming
  from the external world they depends and should
  be explained in terms of the innate structure of
  the mind.

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Ideas as Representations

• Descartes gives up the (scholastic) view that the
  mind grasps images which are transmitted from the
  objects.
• When Descartes compared ideas to images may be
  to stress that ideas, like images, are
  representatives, i.e. to underlie the
  intentionality of our thoughts.

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• Ideas may be conceived along symbols, for there
  are many way of representing an object.
• Representation need not be by images or
  resemblances.
• Cheese stands for cheese. In French we have
  fromage Yet cheese and fromage dont
  resemble cheese .
• Symbols are arbitrary.

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• Ideas as symbols
• Words, as you well know, bear no resemblance to
  the things they signify, and yet they make us
  think of these things, frequently even without
  our paying attention to the sounds of the words
  or to their syllables. Thus it may happen that we
  hear an utterance whose meaning we understand
  perfectly well, but afterward we cannot say in
  what language it was spoken. Now, if words, which
  signify nothing except by human convention,
  suffice to make us think of things to which they
  bear no resemblance, then why could nature not
  also have established some sign which would make
  us have the sensation of light, even if the sign
  contained nothing in itself which is similar to
  that sensation? (The World or Treatise on Light
  CSM I 81)

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• For Descartes clear and distinct ideas are
  conform and similar to their object.
• Yet the similarity must not be compared or
  understood in terms of the similarity that may be
  involved in a representative picture.
• If that were the case ideas would merely be a
  mental thing. (Ideas would have only their formal
  reality, i.e. their representational power).

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• We would thus reject the materiality of ideas
  (the fact that they are an intellectual act/an
  operation of our thinking activity) and the view
  that they are self-referential.
• A picture is neither an act, nor
  reflexive/self-referential.
• (cf. the (i) Formal Nature,(ii) Material Nature,
  and (iii) Reflexivity/Self-Referentiality aspect
  of ideas).

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Port Royal Logic and Grammar

• The view that ideas are not images is also
  defended by Arnauld Nicole in their Port Royal
  Logic
• Whenever we speak of ideas, then, we are not
  referring to images painted in the fantasy, but
  to anything in the mind when we can trustfully
  say that we are conceiving something, however we
  conceive it. (Arnauld Nicole 1662 26)

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Similarity Relation

• Similarity Relation The Ontological Thesis of
  the Double Existence
• The (intentional) notion of similarity involved
  must be understood against the Scholastic
  tradition.
• Descartes explains the similarity relation of
  ideas in terms of their objective reality and
  this is tantamount of the medieval notion of esse
  objectivum.

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Scholastic Tradition

• Within the medieval/scholastic tradition
  similarity is not understood along a pictorial
  resemblance, but as a kind of identity.
• Within the scholastic tradition we find the
  thesis of the double existence.
• A specific form can exist in two distinct ways
  (cf. St Thomas) either materially (de re) as a
  form of a material thing or immaterially, as a
  form informing the intellect.

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• The specis in mentis is similar to the external
  form.
• Every time one entertains a clear and distinct
  idea there is an identity relation between the
  form informing the intellect and the form
  informing the external reality.
• I.e. the very same form informs both the mind
  and reality.

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• The idea of a double existence (the esse
  objectivum) goes hand in hand with the Causal
  Adequacy Principle.
• I.e. the self-evident principle that there must
  be as much reality in the efficient and total
  cause that there is in the effect of that cause
  (ex nihilo nihil fit).

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Reification of ideas

• The Reification of Ideas Ideas qua Mental
  Objects
• Ideas are objects of our knowledge and they are
  known before the knowledge of external objects
• Cf. We had ideas during the doubt, thus before
  knowing that the external world exists.

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• The knowledge of ideas must precede the knowledge
  of the external objects.
• For it is only via that knowledge that we can
  prove the existence of the external world and,
  thus, defeat scepticism.

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• Tension between the view of ideas as (mental)
  objects and the view of ideas as mental acts
• I.e. a tension between their material nature and
  their formal nature.
• Ideas conceived as acts do not enter as
  intermediary between the mental activity and the
  objects they stand for, while ideas conceived as
  objects are intermediary between the mind and the
  world one grasp and object by grasping the
  idea that stands for that object.
• In that case an idea is an epistemic tertium
  quid between the mind and the external reality.

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Innate vs. Adventitious Ideas

• Even if all ideas are somewhat innate the
  distinction between innate and adventitious ideas
  subsists insofar as we must distinguish between
  those (innate) abstract ideas which the mind
  grasp independently of the stimuli and the ideas
  arising because triggered by external stimuli
  (e.g. perception).
• Cf. the idea of God vs. the idea one has of the
  pen one is perceiving.

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Mind/World relation

• In giving up the naïve (scholastic) view that the
  mind (via the ideas) relates to the external
  world because our ideas copy the objects they
  stand fori.e. that the intentional relationship
  is one of similarityDescartes creates a gap
  between the mind and the world.
• How does ones idea of X stand for X if the
  former is not an image of the latter?
• God, the creator, guarantees that our mind
  reflects accurately the structure of reality. The
  aboutness/intentionality is guaranteed by Good.

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• An idea is the thing which is thought of in so
  far as it has objective being in the intellect
  which is never outside the intellect, and in this
  sense objective being simply means being in the
  intellect in the way in which objects are
  normally there But if the question is what the
  idea of the sun is, and we answer that it is the
  thing which is thought of, insofar as it has
  objective being in the intellect, no one will
  take this to be the sun itself objective being
  in the intellect will not here mean the
  determination of an act of the intellect by means
  of an object, but will signify the objects
  being in the intellect in the way in which its
  objects are normally there. By this I mean that
  the idea of the sun is the sun itself existing in
  the intellectnot of course formally existing, as
  it does in the heavens, but objectively existing,
  i.e. in the way in which objects normally are in
  the intellect. Now this mode of being is of
  course much less perfect than that possessed by
  things which exist outside the intellect but, as
  I did explain, it has not therefore simply
  nothing. (First Set of Replies CSM II 74-5)

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• Aboutness
• Ideas are about object because they are
  similar to them. But similarity is not
  understood along a pictorial resemblance. It is a
  kind of identity.
• This comes from the scholastic thesis of the
  double existence.
• The aboutness/intentionality of our ideas is
  granted by God via the objective reality, i.e.
  double existence.