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rather than the less substantial. That is how those two states of
affairs would be represented from the Enquirer s point of view; but
the complaint against Descartes is that in asserting the more sub-
stantial rather than the less, the Enquirer is claiming more than he
should about what is objectively the case, and this implies that the
difference between the two states of affairs can also be represented
from a third-personal point of view, as that between thinking is
going on and A thinks , where A is a name, which could be used
from a third-personal perspective, of whatever it is in the more
substantial state of affairs that is doing the thinking. The point
about what I am calling the third-personal perspective is not of
course that if the more substantial state of affairs obtained, there
would actually have to be another person, still less another person
who knew about it and could apply the name A . It is merely that,
invited to grasp in the abstract the supposed difference between
these two states of affairs, we grasp it in terms of there being, in the
more substantial state of affairs, a thinker who could in principle be
labelled A , while in the less substantial state of affairs there is no
such thinker.
It is not at all clear that we really can grasp this supposed differ-
ence in the abstract, but let us at least pretend that we make enough
of it to continue. Suppose, then, that the following are true:
80 cogito and sum
(T1) It is thought: P (T2) It is thought: Q
Will it follow that the following is true?
(T3) It is thought: P and Q
However slight our grasp on the impersonal formulation, we must
surely grant that T3 cannot follow: a distinct thought-content is
involved in T3, and there is nothing in the occurrence of the two
thought-events T1 and T2 to determine that that thought ever
occurred at all. The thoughts T1 and T2 could be, as we might
hopefully put it, separate . But if thoughts can be, or can fail to be,
separate in this way, then a difficulty emerges for the impersonal
formulation. It can best be illustrated if we extend the range of
possible thought-events a little, to include that class of psycho-
logical phenomena which Descartes is at present accepting as
described by the first-person forms I am doubting , I am willing
etc. While the present line of objection to Descartes will of course
reject the I from each of these, it has no reason to reject the idea
that there are corresponding differences in the states of affairs
which these forms (misleadingly) represent differences which
will have to emerge in properly impersonal representations of
those states of affairs. So we shall need a class of non-I or
impersonal formulations, which we might put as: it is willed: P , it
is doubted: Q? , etc.
We may now consider the following combination:
(T4) It is thought: it is not doubted whether Q
(T5) It is doubted: Q?
Is the thought reported at T4 true or false? Unless more is put in,
nothing prevents its being straightforwardly made false, by the
state of affairs T5. But granted what has just been said about T1, T2
and T3, it cannot be the case that the thought in T4 should have to
be false just because of T5: we must want it to be possible that T5 be
as separate from T4 as T2 can be from T1. T5 can falsify T4, we
will want to say, only if the doubt-event T5 is not separate from
cogito and sum 81
the thought-event T4, or, one might say, if they both occur in the
same thought-world (whatever that might turn out to mean).
The obvious reaction to this problem is to relativize the content
of T4 so that it refers only to its own thought-world; to make it say,
in effect
(T6) It is thought: it is not doubted here whether Q.
But the here of T6 is of course totally figurative nothing in the
construction has given us places for these disembodied thoughts to
occur at, let alone to serve as a basis for linking them up. So what
might do better than here ? Further reflection suggests very
strongly that, if the job can be done at all, there could be no better
candidate for doing it than the Cartesian I . The content of the
impersonally occurrent thought needs, it seems, to be relativized
somehow; and there is no better way of relativizing it than the use
of the first person. So the objector assuming all the time that we
can follow him at all seems to have been wrong in saying that the
content of the Cartesian thought should be impersonal rather than
first-personal. However, this does not eliminate the possibility (if,
again, we can understand it at all) that what is objectively happen-
ing is impersonal rather than substantial. That is to say, we have a
reason now for preferring
(T7) It is thought: I am thinking
to
(T8) It is thought: thinking is going on;
but no reason so far for rejecting T7 in favour of
(T9) A thinks: I am thinking.
If the position we have now reached were the final one, the
situation would be very odd. The objector would be wrong, it
seems, about the required content of the Cartesian thought, but
82 cogito and sum
right about the state of affairs (or at least, the minimal state of
affairs) involved in its being thought. It would follow from this that
the first-personal content, even though it was correct and indeed
requisite, might well represent a state of affairs which could not be
described from the third-personal point of view as A is thinking .
It would follow that Descartes could not make an inference from I
am thinking to I exist , if that, in its turn, were taken to represent
(as Descartes takes it to represent) a state of affairs which could be
third-personally represented as A exists ( there is such a thing as
A ). It might then be unclear whether there was any sense at all in
which I exist could be got from I am thinking , but at any rate it
would not express any substantial truth expressible in a third-
personal form. The objection to Descartes seems to have failed at
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