O.K. Bouwsma intends to examine what he calls Descartes’s boast, namely that the latter is capable of falsely believing all manner of things, including the existence of physical objects, and (at least initially) elementary truths of arithmetic. Like his hero Wittgenstein, Bouwsma is not content to make a philosophical contribution. He insists upon mocking, and trying to discredit, the entire philosophical tradition. Bouwsma does not judge that this project may be too ambitious for his limited powers. In this paper I will argue that his attempt to discredit Descartes is a complete failure.
In his annoying way, Bouwsma suggests to us that he will be focusing upon the Descartes’s use of the term ‘illusion’. He announces his intention to show that Descartes’s evil genius is the one who is confused, in this scenario. And Bouwsma assures us that if we follow his lead we will not be deceived into confusion. He essentially tries to imagine a world in which Descartes’s skeptical hypotheses would make some sense. And it turns out that, from Bouwsma’s perspective, such a world would be very different from our own.
Bouwsma is trying to give what later came to be called the ‘paradigm-case argument’. The idea, which was indeed put forward by Wittgenstein before him, is that certain sorts of mistakes only make sense against a background of successes. So as he says just over half-way through, it would make sense for Tom to believe falsely that some of the objects before him are flowers; but it does not make sense for him to believe falsely that all of the objects before him are flowers. For unless there is some standard for what counts as a flower, Tom’s ‘false belief’ makes no sense. Where none of the conditions for the correct application of a concept are satisfied, there can be no question of mistaken (or indeed correct) application of the concept. In this way Bouwsma builds up to suggesting that Descartes’s complete skepticism (what Hume called ‘antecedent skepticism’) is actually incoherent.
At the end of the story, Tom does in effect sets the evil genius straight. He explains that if the evil genius wanted to deceive someone, he must allow the someone to make sense of the possibility of deception. And this requires that there be some veridical applications of the terms in question. Trying to deceive everyone about everything all in an instant is like inviting a group of people to play a game with you, and then—before they can reply—accusing them of cheating. Games require rules, which the participants must understand if they are genuinely to play the game. From Bouwsma’s perspective, Descartes’s evil genius ran afoul of this fact. He tried to refashion the rules concerning the correct application of terms to items in the world. And since he gave his audience no opportunity to adjust to these rules, there is no real sense in which they were ever playing the game in the first place. Translated into actual philosophical language, what this means is that Bouwsma follows his master Wittgenstein in holding that where there is no veridical application of terms to objects, neither can there be any mistaken application of them. The very possibility of error presupposes that there is something to get right.
So why do I say that Bouwsma is confused? Because he takes a correct principle—that the possibility of error presupposes a background of veridical representation—and applies it in a crude and unreflective way. It is surely possible for a group of people (aborigines, or astrologists, for example) to hold mostly false beliefs. This is possible, even in the face of the fact that error presupposes a background of veridicality, because the veridicality in question need not affect the majority of the relevant groups’ beliefs. It is enough if they can correctly employ some of their terms, some of the time. In effect, Bouwsma’s error is failure to see that Wittgenstein’s equation of meaning with use is too crude. It is not only past usage, but the usage of others among one’s linguistic group—to say nothing of causal relations connecting one’s use of terms to objects in the world—that determines meaning or content.
It is astounding to think that the Philosophical Review actually published Bouwsma’s ‘article’. It would have no chance of being published today, in any reputable journal.
- Bouwsma, O. (1949). Descartes’ Evil Genius. The Philosophical Review, 58(2), p.141.
