The Three Types Of Beliefs, By Descartes

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Descartes first meditation talks about him having skeptical doubts in his mind. He tries to doubt his beliefs so that he can differentiate between what he is certain about and what he is not. He follows this up by using couple of hypothesis such as dream hypothesis, lunatic hypothesis and the evil genius hypothesis. There are also three types of doubts that he has which include systematic doubts, real doubts and hypothetical or metaphysical doubts. To start, Descartes doubts his beliefs in order to find out what is certain and what is not. Anything that he doubts will come off as being uncertain and this will help Descartes in identifying what is certain and what is not. Systematic doubt or common sense realism refers to using the senses …show more content…

Here he states that sometimes when we are dreaming we cannot distinguish between being awake and being in a dream because the dream is really engaging. He however dismisses this hypothesis due to the greater coherence in our perception when we are awake. This shows that we cannot trust our senses because they sometimes cannot tell us if we are in a dream or not and there is no criterion. Descartes then moves onto the lunatic hypothesis where when the internal conditions are not ideal then one cannot trust themselves in their own vicinity. However, Descartes dismisses this theory as well because Descartes knows what is right and wrong and can reason which is something a lunatic cannot do. So then Descartes moves onto God deceiving us, where there is an all-powerful God who can easily deceive us such as making the concept of mathematics false. However, since God is all perfect, he would not try to deceive us of basic concepts or deceive us at all. Now let us suppose there was no God, then there is something else instead. Descartes classified this as the evil genius hypothesis where there is some kind of demon that has made him to believe everything that he knows is false and is deceiving us. This means that all beliefs about the external world are thrown into doubt and everything he knows and thinks is controlled by the evil demon. When looking in later meditations, it is known that God is not a deceiver and that there is no

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