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Descartes (and Suarez) on the Normativity of Truth and the Will in Judgement

Jacob Sheehan (Yale)

Abstract: Although Descartes’s Fourth Meditation is titled “On Truth and Falsity,” Descartes is rarely thought of as giving a particularly interesting account of truth therein and only slightly more often seen as living up to its promise to “explain what the nature of falsity consists in” (CITE). The actual text of the Fourth Meditation centers around his conception of judgement, and in particular his account of the role of the freedom of the will in judgement. Nevertheless, I will argue in this talk that, seen in its proper context in the history of thinking about the natures of truth and falsity, Descartes’s Fourth Meditation should be seen as a revolutionary moment in the history of the normativity of truth. Truth plays the following normative role: certain kinds of thoughts—paradigmatically beliefs or judgements—are essentially such as to be correct or incorrect, depending on whether they are true. Nowadays, we often think of judgement as subject to a norm of truth because judgement is itself a commitment to something’s truth, or as holding something to be true. But for the bulk of the history of philosophy, the normativity of truth was understood in teleological terms—judgement ought to be true because truth is the proper end of the intellect.

Descartes, I will argue, plays a pivotal role in moving away from the teleological conception of the normativity of truth.We can see this by carefully distinguishing what is original in Descartes from the influential late 16th and early 17th century scholastics. The most important of these figures Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), whose direct influence on Descartes’s accounts of truth, falsity, and the will in judgement has unfortunately been virtually ignored in analyses of Descartes’s account of error. Descartes’s primary departure from Suarez, it turns out, is in re-conceiving the nature of judgement as no longer the product of a teleologically ordered intellect. Suarez and Descartes agree that the will is free, and the ultimate cause of our errors in judgement. But Suarez views the will’s role in error as turning the intellect away from its natural path, whereas Descartes sees our judgements themselves as free acts of the will. This volitional picture of judgement is a leap away from the teleological picture towards a commitment based view of the normativity of truth. Descartes does not himself endorse a commitment-based account of the normativity of truth, however. Instead, he tries to reconstrue the will as both free and essentially directed towards truth. This view, I argue, is at once appealing and philosophically unstable, pulling us in the direction of the modern view of the normativity of truth.

Like a Little Worm in the Blood: Rethinking Ontology in Spinoza

Antonieta Garcia Ruzo (visiting scholar at UC Berkeley)

Grounding in the History of Philosophy Workshop

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Warren Timothe (UC Berkeley)

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Matthew Congdon (Vanderbilt)

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Reid Kurashige (UC Berkeley)