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Teaching Descartes in Dakar with Peirce in my pocket: should doubt need a reason?

Khady Faye Fellow
· 6 replies · 186 views
SkepticismAmericanIslamicModern EuropeanPragmatismRationalismAl-GhazaliC. S. PeirceIbn TufaylRené Descartes#fallibilism#inquiry#methodical-doubt#teaching-philosophy
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Every year my terminale students meet Descartes's methodical doubt. He resolves to treat as false anything he can find the slightest reason to doubt: the senses deceive, I might be dreaming, an evil genius might be fooling me. Then he finds the one thing he can't doubt, and builds from there.

The students do the exercise dutifully. Then, every year, one of them says: "Madame, but nobody really doubts that the classroom exists." And every year I give a careful answer about method, and every year I'm less convinced by it.

This year I found an ally. Peirce, in an 1868 essay, wrote: "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." In a later essay he describes real doubt as an irritation that comes from somewhere: a surprise, a failed expectation, a conflict between beliefs. Doubt needs a reason, not a method. You can't doubt everything at once; you doubt this belief because of that one, and inquiry is the effort to settle it.

I find this liberating as a teacher. But I also wonder whether it lets students off too easily. Descartes was trying to find out what knowledge rests on. If we only doubt what life forces us to doubt, we may never examine foundations at all.

I'd like to hear from others who teach, and from anyone who knows other traditions of doubt. Is methodical doubt a useful fiction, a pretence, or something else?

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  1. Dana Whitfield

    Fellow

    Dewey, who built on Peirce, would say inquiry starts from a situation that has become unsettled, a real problem, not from a decision to doubt. In my old classroom on the South Side, the most philosophical moments always came from real problems: why the school was closing, whether a rule was fair. The students doubted then, really doubted, and they reasoned harder than any exercise ever made them. So I'm on Peirce's side, but I'd add that the teacher's job is to find the real doubts, not invent fake ones.

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  2. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    In formal verification we live between the two. We don't doubt everything: the hardware, the logic, the compiler are assumed. But we list those assumptions explicitly and sometimes doubt one of them because a proof fails in a strange way. That's Peirce's doubt with a reason. Descartes's ambition, a single foundation for everything, would never get any chip shipped.

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  3. Hessa Al Mazrouei

    Fellow

    Al-Ghazālī is the interesting third case. In his autobiography he describes a crisis of doubt that was not methodical at all: it came over him, lasted about two months, and he says he was a sceptic in fact though not in speech. It was cured, he says, not by an argument but by a light God cast into his heart. Later, a second crisis about his career made him literally unable to speak in his lectures. So his doubt had reasons, Peirce would be satisfied, but they were not the reasons of a seminar.

    And Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy, alone on his island, reasons his way from observation to metaphysics without ever pretending to doubt anything. He simply asks questions as they arise. That's another model for students.

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  4. Rowena Abellana

    Fellow

    Teenagers can tell fake doubt from real doubt instantly; that's their great philosophical talent. With sixteen-year-olds I've had more success starting from a real doubt they already have, about friends, faith, the future, and then showing them that Descartes was asking a version of the same question with higher stakes. The method makes sense once they see the worry behind it.

  5. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Let me defend Descartes a little. The Meditations are not a recommendation for everyday life. Descartes says himself that the doubt is to be undertaken once in a lifetime, for a specific purpose: to test whether anything at all can serve as a foundation. Peirce's objection is a good one against pretending, but Descartes is not pretending. He is running a test. Kant, who disagreed with both of them in other ways, also thought one had to ask what makes knowledge possible before trusting it.

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  6. Khady Faye

    Fellow

    Thank you. I think I'll teach it this way next year: Peirce's real doubt as the starting point, Ghazālī as a case where real doubt went all the way down, and Descartes, as Henrike says, as a test run once to see whether the building has foundations. My student's objection will become the first page of the lesson instead of the last.

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