Ep. 229: Descartes’s Rules for Thinking (Part Two)

0:00 Dylan: In order to make our knowledge complete, every single thing relating to our undertaking must be surveyed in a continuous and wholly uninterrupted sweep of thought and be included in a sufficient and well ordered enumeration. So this is sort of an expansion of the chain of reasoning, the chain of truth that we've been talking about earlier, though adding in this notion of enumeration.

0:26 Mark: Yeah, which he says is the same as induction, a review or inventory of all those matters that have a bearing on the problem raised, which is so thorough and accurate that by its means we can clearly and with confidence conclude that we have admitted nothing by mistake. Wes, weren't you saying that it seems like it kind of means the same as deduction?

0:45 Wes: In my translation, it's enumeration.

0:47 Dylan: Right.

0:47 Mark: It says enumeration or induction in mind. It says specifically that these are the same thing.

0:52 Wes: Oh, it does okay.

0:53 Dylan: In this context. But yeah, anyway, yeah, I think it'll

0:56 Wes: mean different things as we go on by enumeration. So some of it is just this survey of things in an uninterrupted sweep of thought where you try to. Things can get. As we go through all the. As we detect all these inferential relationships between different things, we can create a very long chain of reasoning. And by the time we've gotten from A to Z, it's not something we can all keep in memory. So we can't intuitively grasp the relationship between A and Z in the way that we would like in the way that we could intuitively grasp at the deductive relationship between A and B.

1:32 Mark: Well, that's what I'm wondering if enumeration is the steps laid out as in a proof, or if enumeration is you've kind of compacted them in memory to give it a single sweep. That's the whole process. Getting from one to the other is that we've done everything really carefully in a step by step manner and. And now we can kind of have shorthands and even says this in later rules explicitly, like, yeah, use formulas, use letters to abstract from something that you've already figured out just to make it simpler to sweep your imagination or your actual eyes if it's on a page over the whole stream.

2:09 Dylan: He says we should note, moreover, that by sufficient enumeration or induction we just mean the kind of enumeration which renders the truth of our conclusions more certain than any other kind of proof. Simple intuition, except it allows.

2:23 Wes: Well, there's different ideas here. One is this idea of not omitting things. I guess it feels like it shifts between we're scanning over something where we've already seen all these relationships versus we're collecting data in a way and trying to be as comprehensive as possible.

2:40 Seth: The example he uses here in the first paragraph, he says, if I found out by separate mental operations what is the relationship between A and B and then between B and C and C and D, and finally between D and E, it does not entail my seeing what the relation is between A and E, nor can the truths previously learned give me a precise knowledge of it unless I recall them all. To remedy this, I would run them over from time to time, keeping the imagination moving continuously in such a way that while it is intuitively perceiving each fact, it simultaneously passes on to the next.

And this I would do until I had learned to pass from the first to the last so quickly that no stage in the process was left to the care of the memory. So I think I mentioned this earlier. I was talking about a habit of mind in my notes here on this section. I put in the quote, like exercise, right? So he's trying to get to the point where, and this comes up in several of the other rules, where your intuitive apprehension of the simple facts, whatever those are, is such a matter of habit or practice for you. It's not that you have to go, okay, I've got D to E.

Now let me go and see if I remember whether there's a chain of that links I can get from A to E. Let me see if I can go work through that chain. It's just that you attend to these things so frequently and in such detail and you've internalized them that it's just obvious. You say, oh, yeah, you know, A to E. Because of course, A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to E. You know, it becomes a force of habit. He's describing a habit of mind here. I think when he talks about enumeration, which ties into the rule about not just attending to the simplest of facts and proofs, but poring over them.

Because he's trying to tell you that your foundation of knowledge is built upon that if you're going to extend the boundaries of knowledge, you need to have internalized and understand the continuous interrelation of all the things that are known at the simplest level, and internalize that as much as is possible in order to lay the foundation for the mental habit of deducing and intuiting and using imagination to compare things and expand the knowledge.

5:06 Wes: So it sounds like in the early part of the section, it's almost, to me, sounds like checking your work. Except that, as Seth, as you just said, part of the goal is to develop a certain kind of mental habit, but part of the goal is to as much as possible try and run through things where the initial relationship between A and E that couldn't be grasped directly is, if not is either grasped more directly or as well as one could. And then he says enumeration is required in order to complete our knowledge. But at other places it seems to be about. As we go on, he talks about preventing things from escaping our notice, ranging over everything that's relevant to a question, making sure there's no omission.

And then later on in the section. So if I want to show in the same way that the rational soul is not corporeal, a complete enumeration will not be needed. It will be enough to comprise all bodies in a certain number of classes and show that the rational soul cannot be referred to any of these. So I'm not going to run through every individual thing in the universe, right? And say, hey, this corporeal thing is definitely distinct from the soul. And then go on to the next one. I'm just going to say, look, there's five types of bodies or whatever, and here's why.

The rational soul is definitely distinct from those.

6:23 Dylan: This is what he means by the sufficiency of the enumeration. So he's dwelling in this part about the qualification that the enumeration doesn't always have to be exhaustive, you don't have to count everything all the time exactly, but it has to be sufficient.

6:37 Wes: And the same thing, if you're doing geometrical proofs, right, you can basically do a schematization. You can make one triangle represent all triangles or one triangle represent all right triangles and then work on that. So I think that's what this idea of schematization might be about. When we're taking account of everything, we're not, you know, as in the case of triangles, doing a list of specific figures. What's confusing to me is I'm not making the connection between this whole. The enumeration of types of bodies, for instance, with the A to E stuff that started this section.

7:15 Mark: I think it's because some of the individual steps, it's not a single step. It's a body of knowledge. It's how do you establish. When Seth said exercise, a light went on. Because I was thinking about something like this rule that you actually do when you're exercising in order to keep physically exercising, to keep exercising. The immediate thing that I grasp intuitively is exercise hurts, so therefore I want to stop. But you also intuitively, like, there's another step in there that a certain amount of hurting, whatever doesn't hurt me makes me stronger.

In other words, that, like, if you work the heart, then it will strengthen the heart, and so that's good for the heart. And then there's a further step of if it's good for the heart, good for the muscles, then that'll make me healthier. And I want that. If you repeat the three or four steps of that argument, of that chain of reasoning, it's hard to keep all those in mind. When you're in the middle of your thousandth jumping jack, you know, you're in the plank position. This is what he's gonna have to do if he wants to establish applicable laws.

Somehow he thinks that all the individual steps are things, that they're simple. You can just use reason to look at them. And maybe, like, being healthy is good, or exercise involves hurting, like those two ends of there, those were that simple. But the intermediate step of making the heart hurt a little bit will make it stronger. That's something that needs to be established in some way. And so that would require, like, can you really get at that? You know, this is something he's going to have to deal with in the second half of this treatise here.

Can you figure out scientific questions by merely contemplating the nature of the health of an organ or something like that? You know, Something semi definitional about it, because that is. Remember with Bacon, he wants to get at the form of the object, right? The nature of the object. And what that actually means is something like its adequate causal basis, something on which you could predict that it's going to react in certain ways. So you want to gain that sort of knowledge of the human heart. To do that you would have to collect data, you'd have to consider all the relevant cases.

Do you have to look at every heart in the universe? No, you probably just have to look at enough hearts to figure out what a heart essentially is and that this is true of it.

9:31 Dylan: I think it'll become more clear later on. I think you're right, Mark, that you want to be able to apply the method and the enumeration to other things. The key is going to be in the terms under which you do that. So we already saw this sort of example of universal mathematics. By the time we get to the end, we're going to make those terms under things like extension, essentially a kind of quantifiability that allow you to do that. You'll have a way of talking about all the hearts being of the same sort, the terms under which they're performing the same function.

10:06 Seth: The only other thing I had recorded for Seven is he does suggest a hierarchy of knowledge here where he says intuition is greater than deduction, which in turn is greater than induction. I don't know if that matters. But all of these are functions of the understanding. Yeah.

10:23 Mark: If you take deduction as deducing just one step, and intuition being this enumeration of a bunch of steps, sure. Am I understanding that right?

10:32 Seth: Well, I think he's saying that in terms of the surety and completeness of the indubitability of the knowledge, that intuition, if it's done of unclattered and attentive mind, you really can't be wrong. There's a truth condition. You can't be wrong. Deduction introduces the possibility of error more so than intuition, and then an induction even more so. On top of that. I think that's what he's trying to say.

11:00 Mark: I found one more thing related to seven in this other translation. In the Essential Descartes. There's a footnote by this passage. If finally I wish to show by enumeration that the area of a circle is greater than the area of all other figures whose perimeter is equal, there's no need for me to call and review all other figures, is enough to demonstrate this of certain others in particular, in order to get thence by Induction, the same conclusion about all the others. So I think Wes read a version of that, but there's a footnote here. The translator. This seems to be a different sense of the word induction from that above. So maybe we're. It's not that we're not understanding something, but there's something that is acknowledged as an inconsistency in the use here. All right, somebody Want to read 8?

11:40 Dylan: If in the series of things to be examined, we come across something which our intellect is unable to intuit sufficiently, well, we must stop at that point and refrain from the superfluous task of examining the remaining items. This section, at the beginning, he's pointing out, you know, starting to talk more about how this is a kind of recapitulation of Rule 2. And, you know, we're really talking about the need to have order and about what we do. But in this section, he begins to break up what it means to know something. So you need to be able to identify that you don't know something well enough.

So there's this conundrum you have, well, how do I know that I can move on, and how do I know that I have to stop? And I really don't know what I'm talking about? So he gives some examples, but then he moves on to this distinction of different ways of knowing, in particular, imagination and sense perception. So there's three things. Once one is surveyed, everything that follows immediately upon knowledge of the pure intellect. Among what remains, he will enumerate whatever instruments of knowledge we possess in addition to that of the intellect.

There are only two of imagination and sense perception. So he has sort of three ways of knowing. Knowing via intellect, knowing via imagination, and knowing via sense perception.

12:56 Seth: This confused me tremendously. Are you sure, Dylan, that he's saying there's knowledge by imagination and sense perception? I didn't get any clarity on that until a few rules later.

13:08 Wes: Well, he says, while it is the understanding alone that is capable of knowing, yet is either helped or hindered by three other faculties, so, namely imagination, sense, and memory.

13:19 Seth: So understanding is the only thing that can know. It can be helped or hindered by imagination, sense, and memory, but those are not other modalities of knowing.

13:28 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right about that.

13:30 Dylan: So the part that I was calling modes of knowing is if one sets himself the problem of investigating every truth for the knowledge of which human reason is adequate. And this, I think, is something everyone who earnestly strives after good sense should do once in his life, sure, at least once, he will indeed discover by Means of the rules. We have proposed that nothing can be known prior to the intellect, since knowledge of everything else depends on the intellect and not vice versa. Once he has surveyed everything that follows immediately upon knowledge of the pure intellectual, then I'm back to where I said alone among what remains, he will enumerate whatever instruments of knowledge we possess.

In addition, I made my note to myself that there were three ways of knowing. In fact, he does say he will therefore devote all his energies to distinguishing and examining these three modes of knowing. And those three are intellect, imagination, sense perception.

14:20 Mark: There are modes of knowing, but they're not certain knowledge. So they're not technically knowledge at all. Right. They're liable to error, but certainly you need them. This is why I'm saying he's not fundamentally opposed to Bacon. You absolutely need experimental, you need experiential knowledge. Otherwise that's where my intro was. He had in here the image of truth growing from your brain, just like Athena from Zeus. Like that's what being an armchair philosopher would be. And like he is not for that. It's just that you have to be able to interpret experience effectively. And so it's the understanding is the thing that is required for that.

14:57 Seth: I was under the impression that he had a very strict taxonomy where understanding has these modalities of intuition, deduction and induction. And they have different degrees of certainty or fallibility, if you will. But I thought the purpose of imagination in Descartes view was when the understanding was trying to exercise itself. So if you were trying to say like compare one thing to another or imagine to hypothesize a circumstance in order to be able to transpose known rules against an unknown situation. You cannot know anything through the imagination. It's simply that the imagination facilitates knowledge in the understanding by virtue of its ability to create comparisons or to do other sorts of functions.

15:50 Wes: Yeah, this might become more clear in Rule 12, right, where he's going to give us all these faculties and he's going to say there's a power of cognition which when it's just operating in a free floating way, it's the understanding. But other times it's receiving images from common sensibility, or could be applying itself to images and memory, or creating new ones in the imagination. Sometimes it's passive, sometimes it's active, sometimes it's the seal, sometimes it's the wax. All of that is working together in a way. So I think what Mark said about.

It's kind of like Kant's thing, you know, concepts without intuitions are blind intuitions without concepts are empty or something like that, it might be the other way around. In practice, the understanding has to be working with some material. I think ultimately we can know things about the empirical world, even if we're relying on these other faculties, as long as it's the understanding that's doing the primary work.

16:50 Mark: This rule was all about where to stop. Stop when you have a gap like it's unable to intuit sufficiently well. So that could be just because we're getting speculative, or it could be just because we hit an empirical point and we don't feel like the evidence to support the empirical point is strong enough. And it's unclear how it could ever be strong enough, at least without bringing in the reasoning in the meditations. Whether or not he had thought his outline of the meditations as well, I've got to think just based on the context here, that he has an idea that there are empirical scientific matters that we really can know with certainty, that we've done enough experiments, we've observed enough stuff.

There is a sense of induction in the ordinary sense, as opposed to whatever weird thing Descartes might mean from it most of the time here, that if we want to use all swans are white in our deductive chain of reasoning, somehow there must be a way that, oh, I've now observed enough swans that have grasped the essence of swan. And just considering swan, I see that the whiteness is an essential part of it. And so therefore I can include that piece of scientific knowledge in my chain of reasoning, because otherwise how could you know anything about anything that's not math?

I mean, it's got to have something like this at work.

18:10 Wes: There might be better examples than this one, just laws of physics. Or his work in optics where he's discovering the way refraction works. Movement of light from material of one density to another, where Descartes another area where he made real contributions and then related that to the biology of the eye. But you can set up equations to show. Maybe this was in that article you recommended, Mark, that IEP article on his scientific methodology.

18:40 Dylan: It had a lot of stuff on the optics in it.

18:42 Wes: Scientific laws and generalities. It seems like we will be able to know with certainty. It's not like a. Well, I don't know. I was going to say it's not like the gravitational laws could fail somewhere, but maybe they are local, who knows?

18:57 Mark: Well, that's why I got to feel like maybe that the way that Descartes would phrase what the law is would be specific to the local situation. So that therefore he can't be wrong. In other words, if he's going to claim that I know with certainty that all swans are white, then he is basically defining whiteness as part of the essence of the swan. And so based on that, grasping that if he sees the thing that otherwise looks like a swan but it's black, that would by definition be a different thing. And so maybe gravity would be treated in a different way, that in this plane of existence, or, you know, on the human scale, gravity is operational. But he's not going to. He doesn't think that we are. This is getting really speculative. This is breaking Descartes laws, but doesn't think that we're warranted in using that generalization to speculate about planetary movements or.

19:49 Seth: I'm not sure.

19:49 Mark: Or certainly things moving at the speed of light.

19:52 Wes: Yeah. As we know, science is fallible and always subject to revision and refinement. So, you know, Maxwell's equations were modified. Right, Dylan? To take account of relativity, and usually that modification is meaningless. It doesn't change anything until you get near the speed of light or you

20:12 Dylan: try to build a computer. Sorry.

20:13 Wes: Oh, okay.

20:15 Dylan: Maybe that's a bad example. Relativity doesn't come into play so much. It's true.

20:20 Wes: To what extent do we have certain knowledge of scientific laws? What does that mean? It's unclear. Certainly we know something, but it doesn't mean that this thing is infallible and not subject to revision of any kind of.

20:35 Mark: I guess let's bracket that and move to Rule 9, because this is a good topic to bring up with the discourse on method. So we're on rule nine, right? Yep. Okay. We must concentrate our mind's eye totally on the most insignificant and easiest of matters and dwell on them long enough to acquire the habit of intuiting the truth distinctly and clearly. In my translation, he distinguishes two principal faculties of perspicacity, viewing single objects distinctly and sagacity, skillful deduction of certain facts by others. So those are the ways even though, like.

Yes, it's sort of democratic in that everybody can see the truth of these things? Well, no, because you have to hone your perspicacity to actually see these distinct objects as clearly distinct. And you have to learn how to focus your attention in order for these supposedly universal inborn things to actually be seen clearly and distinctly.

21:29 Dylan: But why did you preface that with no?

21:31 Wes: Mark?

21:32 Dylan: You said that we had been talking about how this is accessible to everybody and anybody can do it. But no, you were making the point that you have to hone these abilities. But I Don't think there's any no involved there in the way he's talking about it. Yes, it has to be trained and developed, but that doesn't mean it's not accessible to everybody. Right.

21:52 Mark: I just. I guess I see the room for an expertise here. Sure. Learn to use your mental intuition by comparing it to the way we use our eyes. You don't want to attend to many things through a single act of thought. Just as you can't distinctly see a lot in a single glance, you need to learn to focus. Does he talk about people looking at clockwork bits?

22:11 Dylan: Well, this very paragraph he refers to craftsmen. Yet again in the previous rule he refers to. He says our method in fact resembles the procedure and the mechanical crafts. And then in Rule 9 he says yet craftsmen who engage in delicate operations and are used to fixing their eyes on a single point acquire through practice the ability to make perfect distinctions between things, however delicate and minute.

22:34 Mark: Yes, that is exactly what I had in mind. That way of describing it doesn't make it seem like just anybody could do it. That there really might be people who are better at it than others, simply better.

22:43 Dylan: I think you're making a jump there by saying simply better. It definitely is an expertise. It may be that he thinks that in the end, amongst the people that can train themselves, which is everybody, that there could be levels of ultimate training. That some people are just better at it than others. So far I think in the things that we've read, it's all been focused on the fact that you need practice. You need to do this over and over again. He points to people who are of non elite intellect, craftsmen, and the activity of sort of everyday tradespeople, not philosophers and the elite intellects, but to people who just do things on an everyday basis, but they do it over and over and over again and make distinctions in the world and separate them out into their finest, most delicate minute bits.

And that's what he's pointing to as the standard to a process of his method to figuring out truths about the world and that is accessible to everybody by the natural light of our reason.

23:45 Wes: It's part and parcel of the breaking problems down approach. So his example with before I consider whether it's possible for natural force to pass instantaneously across space. You know, I'm not going to work on that problem by looking at magnetism, where it seems like that might be happening, or the speed of light, which perhaps might seem like that's instantaneous. I'm just going to look at stuff that's More apparent to me and more obvious of motions of bodies. He makes a point about the way that force works between bodies in a way that might seem instantaneous.

It's a good example. And the other example he uses is the. If I'm thinking about how something might have contrary effects, the same thing might produce contrary effects. I'm not going to go to a very complex example. Like the way drugs might affect one person differently or another, or the same person differently at different times. Or maybe that's not exactly what he's saying. But anyway, I'm going to look at the way. If I'm using a balance, the weight can raise one arm at the same time that depresses the other. This idea of starting with the known quantities and then moving on from there.

24:57 Dylan: One of the things I love about the example about instantaneous motion, which basically says, if I'm trying to think about instantaneous motion and wonder whether things can travel instantaneously, let's not think about things like magnetic force or speed of light and stuff like that. Let's just talk about a stone. And that a stone cannot pass instantaneously from one place to another, since it's a body. But if I move one end of a stick, however long it may be, I can easily conceive that the power which moves that part of the stick. Necessarily moves every other part of it instantaneously.

Because it has the bare power which is transmitted at the moment. And not the power that exists in some body, such as a stone, which carries it along. So what I love about this is that he's wrong about the way he's thinking about it. His deduction is right. He's thinking about, okay, so I have a stick, and I move it from one end to the other. And instantaneously, the other end of that stick moves. Because the bare power is transmitted through it all in the same moment. And he's wrong because he's not thinking about pushing the stick as being something that happens in time along the stick.

He's assuming that the stick is inherently 100% rigid, which is not. And so the next step of his thinking should be to be thinking about how a stick is just a stiffer version than a sponge. And so the fact that you can depress the sponge and have it spring back and that motion travels through it. He has to think more about it,

26:30 Wes: but it's a better place to start.

26:31 Dylan: Yes. He's trying to think about, well, how can I think about instantaneous motion? Let's think about something actually in the world that I can really grab a hold of in my imagination and work on. He comes up with the wrong conclusion. But.

26:42 Mark: But I like the idea in this that this is a common failing of mortals to deem the more difficult, the fairer. They often think they have learned nothing when they see a very clear and simple cause for fact, while at the same time they are lost in admiration of certain sublime and profound philosophical explanations, even though these, for the most part, are based on foundations which no one had adequately surveyed. A mental disorder which prizes the darkness higher than the light. I love that. So all these rules are more appealing in the abstract than they are when you actually apply them.

27:13 Wes: But think for yourself, that's still not nothing.

27:17 Mark: Rule 10. Seth, what's your Rule 10?

27:21 Seth: In order that it may acquire sagacity, the mind should be exercised in pursuing just those inquiries of which the solution has already been found by others. And it ought to traverse in a systematic way even the most trifling of men's inventions, though those ought to be preferred, in which order is explained or implied.

27:41 Dylan: Oh, my God.

27:44 Seth: Sagacity, reacting to the translation. Rote repetition.

27:52 Wes: Now.

27:52 Mark: Well, sagacity was the ability, skillful deduction of certain facts by others according to this translation. That's the breakdown. Perspicacity versus sagacity.

28:00 Dylan: Discernment.

28:01 Seth: Yes, sagacity is not a good translation, I would say, because discernment, if that's

28:06 Mark: what the translation is for, sagacity here, what's the translation for perspicacity.

28:10 Dylan: But discernment is the translation that yours has for sagacity.

28:14 Mark: Perspicacity.

28:15 Wes: We're trying to develop the habit of thinking for ourselves, even if it means that when we are given a treatise on maybe the workings of the heart, we try and work ahead a little bit. We're not just passively absorbing it so that we get some exercise of our mind. And there's a huge difference between the stuff that we've been passively inculcated with and what we do when we try and make it ours and make it an object of our own investigation. By doing the investigation for ourselves, we can sort of internalize the knowledge in a different way and make it more useful in the future. So the sagacity, or the discernment just becomes a procedural knowledge that can be used in solving problems in the future. But if we're completely passive, it's not that way.

29:01 Dylan: He's pointing to the joy of figuring things out as opposed to the joy of knowing.

29:08 Wes: Right. Also developing that you strengthen your mind in certain ways. And you do develop. I mean, all of us have probably experienced this over 10 years. Much different ways of thinking and maybe the speed at which we think about a text like this or anything we're reading at the speed and the depth. It's informed by all the stuff that's come before and the fact that we've grappled with it. It's not that we just learned how to recite what's in Descartes Meditations. We thought about it enough that when we come to some other text, that pays off in certain ways.

29:41 Mark: I had to do a quick Google search of the Joy of Knowing and I see all of the results to see whether there's a book called that and they're all religious. The Joy of knowing. Billy Graham Daily Devotion. The Joy of knowing God. The Joy of knowing Christ.

29:55 Wes: Yeah, Joy of knowing your spouse.

29:57 Mark: I don't see that one, but I'm

29:59 Wes: just thinking of knowing biblically Adam and Eve.

30:02 Mark: Sorry.

30:03 Dylan: Sure.

30:04 Wes: Joy of carnal knowledge.

30:07 Dylan: At the end of this, he's again lambasting the scholastics in their way of thinking, and he basically thinks that when you engage in that kind of work, you develop a weak mind. And he says, our principal concern here is thus to guard against our reasons taking a holiday while we are investigating the truth about some issues. So we reject the forms of reasoning just described as being inimical to our project. Instead, we search carefully for everything which may help our mind stay alert, as we show below. But to make it even clearer, as the aforementioned art of reasoning contributes nothing whatever to the knowledge of truth, we should realize that on the basis of their method, dialecticians are unable to formulate a syllogism with a true conclusion unless they already are in possession of the substance of the conclusion.

That is, unless they have previous knowledge of the very truth deduced in the syllogism. It is obvious therefore, that they themselves can learn nothing new from such forms of reasoning, and hence that ordinary dialectic is of no use whatever to those who wish to investigate the truth of things. Its sole advantage is that it sometimes enables us to explain others arguments which are already known. It should therefore be transferred from philosophy to rhetoric.

31:25 Seth: The worst thing?

31:26 Wes: Academia is rife with just what he's talking about.

31:30 Mark: Yeah, no, I've often felt like that with formal logic that if you really want to demonstrate like an argument that you've already figured out, putting it in formal logic is great, but actually using the formal logic to prove it to your own satisfaction. When have you ever done that? Ever?

31:46 Unknown speaker: 11.

31:47 Mark: If, after intuiting a number of simple propositions, we deduce something else from them, it is useful to run through them in a continuous and completely uninterrupted train of thought, to reflect on their relations to one another, and to form a distinct and far as possible simultaneous conception of several of them. For in this way our knowledge becomes much more certain and our mental capacity is enormously increased. So this seems pretty much redundant.

32:10 Dylan: Though he brings up memory to me more explicitly here than he has in the past.

32:14 Mark: This is a more how to version.

32:16 Wes: One thing that he does say here, this is where he gets into the fact that intuition has been contrasted with both simple deduction, which is that intuitive direct inference from one thing to another, and enumeration, which here he talks about as inference from many separate data all at once. So this is another use of enumeration. He's going to give us a distinction between deduction as it happens as a mental operation, and then the results of induction. And this is actually really fascinating because what he's going to say is that the deduction is not an intuition as a mental operation, because it's not a simultaneous grasping of a whole. It happens over time. But the result, once we've engaged in that movement, we can somehow look back and see something that is simple and clear and a whole. Intuitively. That's a really fascinating distinction.

33:10 Mark: I like that clarification of enumeration a lot because it makes it kind of a different dimension that if you picture links in a chain, each link is a deductive link, so the whole chain is a deduction. Each individual link you can grasp by intuition. And you can grasp the truth of the most basic, the most absolute universal proposition that's at the top, also by intuition. But then to get the whole thing into your head, to make the whole chain spring off the page into your head, that's the process of enumeration. So enumeration is kind of both the actual writing down of all the steps, like it's a mental operation rather than a logical operation, if that makes sense.

33:49 Wes: But also, you know, it's an inference that can come from many different separate chains of reasoning.

33:55 Mark: Wouldn't those just become kind of part of one giant multifaceted chain?

34:00 Wes: What I think of here. And so I'm not claiming Descartes as saying this, but what occurs to me with this description of enumeration is actually model building or theory making or hypothesizing. You have a whole bunch of things you already know, and it occurs to you that there's some model or theory which has explanatory value, which you can postulate and then make predictions, you know, and then do some experiments to see if that holds up.

34:27 Dylan: It sounds like in thinking about hypotheses, you're thinking about the activity of figuring something out as having individual links in a chain that you'd be enumerating and trying to put together to form a whole. And that you in fact might end up failing, in fact of making that sequence a whole. But that would be part of the method, right? You in fact realize, oh well, you know what, actually I can't do it. I would fail in joining my enumerated links into a whole chain. And that's okay, that's part of the working of my method. Because we've been focusing, in fact on the cases where you end up coming to the right conclusion. But both of them work in this way of enumerating the pieces of the argument. The process of you're trying to figure it out. That activity of enumeration is working as your tool, your method of figuring things out, or part of it at least.

35:21 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of. Again, this is confusing because, you know, on the one hand it's the enumeration seems to be sort of trying to grasp the chain from A to E in one nice sweep. But on the other hand I'm thinking about him distinguishing the body from the soul and saying, you do that by saying there's five types of. This is my example, but you come up with different categories of body and say the soul doesn't belong to any of those. And enumeration also, in the sense of just. You're looking at the lay of the land, all the stuff that you currently seem to know, or current data, and looking at the relationships between all that stuff and ultimately that stuff with the body and the soul.

At that point you're looking at a bunch of data and you're coming up with a theory. This is very speculative on my part. If that's not it, then it's kind of odd to me that that's not part of this.

36:13 Mark: So Rule 12 starts with finally

36:18 Seth: it

36:18 Mark: is the end of a section because the rules after that have to do with questions. We've been dealing with propositions, I guess, to this point, knowing things. The rest of it is going to be kind of how to ask a question which really does get to this philosophy of science stuff, which is what I think discourse on method should tell us more about and what we can have a high level science discussion involving the relevant parts from the end of this book as well. So this is the long one rule 12. Finally, we must make use of all the aids which intellect, imagination, sense perception and memory afford us in order, firstly, to intuit simple propositions distinctly.

Secondly, to combine correctly the matters under investigation with what we already know. So that they too may be known. And thirdly, to find out what things should be compared with each other. So that we may make the most thorough use of all of our human powers. This is really summarizing the whole book up to this place. We've got the knower things about the human being. Our understanding, our imagination, our sense, our memory and the known. Which he says, that which presents itself spontaneously. How we learn one thing by means of another. And what truths are deduced from what the next pages, he's going through this kind of taxonomy of epistemological psychology, I guess, or epistemological phenomenology.

Something like what elements are involved in knowing something. Both on the perceiver side and on the object side. And how they can introduce error.

37:42 Wes: So on the side of the subject, he starts with the idea that sensation is passive. So it's like getting a seal stamped on wax. He seems to argue. Since shape is involved in every sensible object, we can kind of use Occam's razor and reduce other. It's a primary qualities, secondary qualities distinction. Where something like color is extended and therefore has shape. And so there's no need to postulate a new entity, color. We can assume the differences in color can be accounted for by differences in shape of something. You know, maybe it's particles. So this is really reminiscent of Lucretius. Who, of course, has had an enormous influence on all these people. That's a really important idea for modern science. This idea that our perception of color is not caused by color entities, but it's caused by spatio. Temporal matter in motion, basically.

38:39 Dylan: And also our way of talking about it can be abstracted into shape in general. It further abstracts us into extension.

38:49 Mark: I'm trying to see what the other translation is of the fancy in my version, the fantasy.

38:54 Wes: So the fantasy or the imagination, which. They seem to be synonymous. I mean, I think a fantasy is just a specific imagining. So we have this, what he calls the common sensibility. You know, you have all the different sense organs that can receive impressions from the outside world. And then there's a transmission to the common sensibility, which is instantaneous. There's no traveling. It's like the relationship between the movement of the tip of the pen and the top of the pen when you're writing just all happens together. And then this common sensibility it takes that information and then stamps it on the imagination.

The specific fantasy is the wax. And the common sensibility takes that data, let's say, from the sense organs. And then it stamps it and it can make an idea which can become a memory in the other direction. The imagination can move the body. This is really interesting idea here, is that the images that the specific fantasies that lead to bodily movements are not necessarily images of bodily movements. And he needs that to be true because we move a lot unconsciously and he doesn't want animals to have to be conscious in the sense of imagining the movement of a limb and then moving the limb.

So whatever images that we're thinking of, it's not that literal in the case of movement. And then we end up with the recalls in my translation. The power of cognition. So my fifth and last supposition is that the power of cognition, properly so called, it's purely spiritual and is just as distinct from the body as a whole as blood is from bone or a hand from an eye. And that it is a single power. That's where I kind of summarized this earlier, this power of cognition. He's trying to say that all these different faculties in a way are one thing.

The power of cognition can receive images from the common sensibility in the same way that the common sensibility that the imagination can receive images from the senses. The power of cognition can. It's something that can apply itself to images and memory. It's something else that can make new images imaginatively. It can be active, it can be passive, it can be the seal, it can be the wax. It sounds like this unifying power for all the different faculties. And it becomes on its own when left to its own devices, it becomes the understanding.

41:10 Mark: Yeah. So clearly this section is doing more than just summarizing what came before. It's bringing in this whole pre existent model of how perception works to try to make concrete what he's been describing earlier in the text. Here's how it actually works in a human being. I'm going to say pseudophysiologically. Yeah. I mean, what did you think? It seems like this is a. Even though he might use terms like fancy or the common sense, he's still kind of describing something that is pretty much what we understand, that there's nerves running through the brain. Right. Or was I being too glib in reading a modern physiological take into this?

41:48 Wes: The power of cognition. Sounds to me like what cognitive neuroscientists today would just talk about is consciousness. Right. A lot of these faculties that he's already described a lot of that can happen unconsciously. You might even think of it as sort of like a central processing center.

42:06 Dylan: He says these functions of the cognitive power in all these functions. So I should say what all these functions are. So it is one single power, whether it receives figures from the common sense at the same time as does the corporeal imagination, or applies it to those which are preserved in the memory or forms new ones which so preoccupy the imagination that it is often in no position to receive ideas from the common sense at the same time, or to transmit them to the power responsible for motion in accordance with a purely corporeal mode of operation.

In all of these functions, the cognitive power is sometimes passive, sometimes active, sometimes resembling the seal, sometimes the wax. But this should be understood merely as an analogy, for nothing quite like this power is to be found in corporeal things. It is one and the same power when applying itself along with imagination to the common sense, as it is said to see, touch, etc. When addressing itself to the imagination alone, it is insofar as the latter is invested with various figures. It is said to remember when applying itself to the imagination in order to form new figures, it is said to imagine or conceive.

And lastly, when it acts on its own, it is said to understand. In that way it sounds like the mind or consciousness, like what Wes was talking about.

43:31 Wes: The way this particular section on the power of cognition ends up is interesting because he talks about when it's occupied with non empirical objects. Basically you want it to not be hindered by all the other faculties. And there are little hints of Kant here again, I think, where the idea is that if you're trying to imply empirical categories to non empirical things, you get yourself in trouble. And then he talks about when the understanding is applied to empirical objects. Then you need to do this thing that I've called schematization, which is you need diagrams. And that's really interesting. Right. So if I'm. I was going to use a triangle, but I guess a triangle doesn't really count as an empirical object.

44:15 Mark: Can we use the diagrams they use in the book here? Is that what you're talking about?

44:20 Dylan: There is in the previous section where he's talking about different kinds of colors. You could just use these three different figures of different sorts of arrangements of lines and categorize them as white, blue and red.

44:32 Wes: I see.

44:32 Dylan: That is just different shapes.

44:34 Wes: Yeah, I confuse myself. I'm not sure if that's right.

44:38 Mark: I was interpreting that as another form of quantification. Right. That you think that white and blue and red are just qualitatively distinctive things. But no, we can translate these into something that is basically quantitative and thereby process it better.

44:52 Dylan: It's a mode of making the distinctions available to the senses.

44:56 Wes: That sounds plausible.

44:57 Mark: Yeah, so it's on that page. So thirdly, this is where the fancy comes. We must believe that the common sense has a function like that of a seal, as you read that bit before impresses on the fancy or imagination. I don't think it's saying the fancy and imagination are the same thing, because it goes on to use fancy more. But this fancy is a genuine part of the body of sufficient size to allow its different parts to assume various figures and distinctness from each other, and to let those parts acquire the practice of retaining the impressions for some time. In the latter case, we give the faculty the name of memory.

45:28 Wes: Yeah, we were just doing five.

45:30 Mark: Okay, I'm sorry, number five.

45:32 Wes: So you're back to three. Which is the organ of common sensibility in my translation.

45:37 Mark: Okay, which.

45:37 Wes: Your fancy is my common sensibility.

45:40 Mark: All right. I just wanted to get clear about that. It was so weird.

45:43 Dylan: And in my translation, it's fantasy or imagination. And then there's a footnote that the term fantasy is from the Latin fantasia, a term which for Descartes frequently means the same as imaginatio, though it is the term he prefers to use when speaking of the part of the brain in which the physical processes associated with imagining take place. When the latter use is clearly intended, the translation corporeal imagination is adopted below.

46:11 Mark: Ah, okay. That helps a lot. Corporeal imagination.

46:15 Wes: All right, so that was the subject side of knowledge. We're ready to go to the object side.

46:21 Mark: What's the quote where the object side starts after?

46:24 Dylan: Fifthly, there's a paragraph about separating things into individual and deducing the single thing from a collection and being clear about those distinctions. And then he ends that, and he says, let us now take up the second factor. Our aim here is to distinguish carefully the notions of simple things from those which are composed of them, and in both cases, try to see where the falsity can come in.

46:50 Wes: In the first place, we think differently when we regard things from the point of view of our knowledge and when we are talking about them as they are in reality.

46:59 Dylan: One might ask why, in transitioning to the second factor, the objects of knowledge, is he starting with finding falsity, basically trying to see what's true about the objects in the world? So before this he's been talking about what our capacities for knowing are, and that, as Mark said, sort of the mental cognitive psychology. But now we are moving to the objects themselves and how we characterize them and understand them, and then we can distinguish things that are true and false.

47:29 Wes: Yeah, so he's very focused on the simplicity and complexity. Right. Or the simple and the compound.

47:35 Dylan: And what kinds of natures are simple.

47:37 Wes: Yeah, because the simple will be the clear stuff, and that will be the grounding for our knowledge of things.

47:45 Dylan: We term simple only those things which we know so clearly and distinctly that they cannot be divided by the mind into others which are more distinctly known.

47:53 Wes: So as examples are shape and extension, motion.

47:56 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

47:57 Mark: This is where I was saying that he is distinguishing between metaphysical simplicity and epistemological simplicity. Thus, for example, if we consider a body as having extension and figure, we shall indeed admit that from the point of view of the thing itself, it is one and simple. For we cannot, from that point of view regard it as compounded of corporeal nature, extension, and figure, since those elements have never existed in isolation from one another, but relatively to our understanding. In other words, epistemologically, we call it a compound constructed out of these three natures because we have thought of them separately before, we are able to judge that all three of them were found in one and the same subject.

Hence, we shall treat of things only in relation to our understanding's awareness of them and. And shall call those only simple, the cognition of which is so clear and distinct. Yes, as you read.

48:42 Wes: So simplicity is not to be confused with ontological simplicity. Simplicity from the standpoint of the understanding.

48:49 Seth: Yep.

48:50 Mark: So this is where I saw it as, like, why this doesn't work to describe the Tractatus, because that is specifically giving us an ontological simple, the fact, and then building all this stuff out of it. Whereas if facts were epistemologically simple, then we would know what the fuck he's talking about. But we don't. Right. It should be something that is so simple that, like, as soon as you think of it, you know everything about it. And that is obviously not the case, unless we just do not understand what Wittgenstein was talking about at the beginning of the Tractatus. Maybe our sagacity is not our perspicacity.

49:25 Dylan: Maybe it's just a fantasy.

49:28 Wes: So in the second point, he talks about things that are simple to our understanding. Knowledge, doubt, ignorance, will. So that's intellectual simplicity, material simplicity, shape, extension, motion. And then there's a kind of simplicity that's common to both realms like existence, unity and duration.

49:51 Mark: Yep. Similarity. Things which do not bear the same relation to a third thing, having some diversity from each other, etc. These are all simples applying to both material and spiritual.

50:02 Wes: Yeah. So a self evident axiom, like, you know, things the same as a third thing are the same to each other. We're to take that as a simple. I guess it's another way of saying

50:12 Mark: it's axiomatic or that involves only simple natures. It involves reflecting. I mean there's more than one simple involved in there because there's sameness and there's thing, entity, individuality. You know, I mean, that's an interesting thing to think about. Like can you actually think of a simple or does even thinking of it, you know, that's why Wittgenstein said atomic facts. He didn't say they're atomic things because in effect is bringing together a predicate with a subject. And that sounds like you're bringing together two things. But is the idea here that a simple does have a predicated subject is just that they are necessarily bound together? In other words, the predicate defines the subject. So therefore it's not two things, it's not a subject that has a predicate. It is just the concept of the composite.

51:03 Seth: I don't know, my throat is closing so I'm kind of running down here.