Text published in the journal Ratio 14, 2001. A revised version of this text will be published in the book Lines of Thought: Rethinking Philosophical Assumptions (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
–
11 –
‘I
AM THINKING’
My first purpose in this paper is to examine what people might mean
when judging or saying that they are thinking. This examination will reveal
some unexpected features of this kind of judgment that have destructive
consequences for our evaluation of the supposedly self-verifying character of
the statement ‘I’m thinking’ and, further, for our standard analysis of the
claims of certainty for the Cartesian cogito. I begin by considering
some concrete situations in which one could say ‘I’m thinking’.
I. An ordinary
language approach to ‘I’m Thinking’
Consider the
following dialogues:
(i)
Meg and her husband Carl are
planning to take a short bicycle trip. As Meg prepares to go outside, Carl
leans out of the window and lingers there. Seeing her husband’s passivity, Meg
asks him, somewhat bored: ‘What are you doing now?’ His answer is, ‘I’m
thinking...’. Hearing this, Meg asks: ‘And what are you thinking about?’ He
replies: ‘I’ve been thinking that it would be better to go by car, since it
seems that the weather will change’.
(ii)
A theoretical physicist
presents a problem to a colleague. At first, his colleague says nothing, his
head bowed, visibly thinking about the problem. After some moments, as if to
justify his silence, he says: ‘I’m thinking… I believe I can find the right
answer’. After a while, he smiles and gives his colleague the solution he was
seeking.
Examples in which a person says to herself that she is thinking are less
common, but there are situations in which this occurs. Consider the following:
(iii)
Mary is a student preparing an
oral presentation on medieval arguments for the existence of God. She is
pondering Gaunilon’s first objection to Anselm’s argument, when she is
distracted by the sound of a telephone ringing in her neighbor’s room. Then,
trying to recover the threads of her thoughts, she asks herself, ‘Now, what was
I just thinking about?’ When she at last remembers, she says to herself, ‘Yes,
I was thinking that…’ and takes up her mental argument where she left off.
What I wish to point out is that these three examples, along with other
concrete examples of the self-attribution of thinking, generally share a common
pattern, which requires closer examination.
The first thing to be
noted is that when a person thinks that she is thinking, she can always ask,
‘What am I thinking about?’ and, in principle and more reasonably,
another person would also be entitled to ask her, ‘What are you thinking about?’
In the first of our examples, this question was posed by Meg, and in the third,
Mary asked herself the question; in the second example, the question was not
asked, but obviously could have been asked. Also noteworthy is the kinds
of answers we give to such questions. In the first example, the answer
consisted in pointing to a thought that Carl had been thinking a moment
before, namely, that the weather could change. In the second example, if the
first physicist had asked his colleague, ‘What are you thinking about?’, he
would probably have answered: ‘Wait a moment; let me finish my reasoning…’, And
later he could have said: ‘I was thinking that…’, followed by a description of
his thoughts. In the third case, a more detailed answer would be, ‘I’m thinking
that… and I am trying to come to the conclusion that…’. In what follows, I will
analyze the common pattern in the self-attribution of thinking, using such
answers as heuristic clues.
Considering such answers, I will argue that
the thought ‘I’m thinking’ can usually be restated as ‘I was thinking that p’,
a point that for expositive reasons I subdivide into the two following claims:
(a)
‘I’m thinking’ generally means
‘I’m thinking that p,
and
(b)
‘I’m thinking that p’
generally means ‘I was thinking that p’.
Let us begin with (a). At least in standard cases (since we will later
see that there is a conceivable exception), the question of what a person is
thinking leads, when completely answered, to the presentation of another
thought or thoughts, which may complete the occurrence of ‘I’m thinking’ by
describing what the person is thinking. In other words, in concrete
situations, with the question ‘What are you (or what am I) thinking?,’ the
answers usually have the form ‘I’m thinking that p’, where p
stands for one or more thought-contents (or propositions) that the person is
thinking. In some cases, p stands for only one thought. An example would
be if Carl had said, ‘I’m thinking that the garden needs to be watered’. But p
often stands for a complete chain of thought. Thus, if the physicist in the
second example were later asked to state what he was thinking, he would say
something in the form: ‘I was thinking that p1, p2, p3… which has led me to the conclusion pn’.
It appears necessary that what is thought must at least be a complete
thought-content: It makes no sense to say that one thinks parts of a
thought or a mental event that is not a thought. Certainly, I can say, for
example, that I was thinking about the Golden Gate Bridge
Now suppose that when Meg
asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’, Carl had answered, ‘I’m thinking about
nothing’ or ‘I’m thinking about this thought’. In such cases, Meg, being no
philosopher, would have good reason to be angry, since these answers are devoid
of sense. One cannot meaningfully say ‘I’m thinking’ without assuming that this
expression can be complemented by a thought-content. If I say to myself, ‘I’m
thinking’, without reference to a thought-content, then I’ve not thought, but
only spelt these words in my mind. I’m not proposing that in such cases there
is no mental occurrence, or that I’m not conscious of one, but rather that it
is not the real experience of a thought. When I silently spell out in my mind
the combination of words ‘I-am-thinking’, I’m not having an awareness of
thinking, but only an awareness of what we could call a syntactic
occurrence in my mind, namely, of my inwardly spelling ‘I-am-thinking’,
recognizable as a linguistically correct sentence, etc. This syntactic
occurrence is semantically empty, since it is devoid of content, expressing an
impossible thought like ‘This square is round’. In sum: it is not possible to
judge that I am thinking without being able to refer to a complementary
thought-content that provides a basis for this judgment.
This point becomes more compelling when we
compare ‘I’m thinking’ with other phrases including verbs of propositional
attitudes, such as ‘I hope’, ‘I wish’, ‘I believe’ or ‘I doubt’. They can’t
really express wishes, hopes, beliefs or doubts without their objects. If, for
example, I say to myself ‘I’m hoping’ without having something to hope, it is
not true that I am hoping. These are mere mental occurrences of symbols, and I
am obviously aware of them, but they are not accompanied by a real occurrence
of hoping, etc. And the same applies when I say to myself, ‘I’m thinking’
without intending a certain thought. Or suppose that Carl says to Meg, ‘I
promise you...’, and when Meg asks, ‘Well, what are you promising?’, Carl
answers, ‘I promise you, and that is all’. In this case, Carl’s utterance fails
to make sense, since it does not refer to the propositional content of a
promise and thus is a void speech-act and not really a promise. Something
similar can be said of ‘I’m thinking’. Just as saying ‘I’m promising’ without
referring to the content of the promise does not amount to a real promise, ‘I’m
thinking’ without reference to a thought-content does not amount to a real
thought.
Suppose now that Meg asks
Carl, ‘What are you thinking about?’, and Carl responds, ‘I’m thinking that I’m
thinking, and that’s all’, or ‘I’m thinking my own thought that I’m thinking’.
Does this make any sense? Suppose that Carl says to Meg, ‘I promise that I
promise and that’s all’, or ‘I promise my own act of promising’, or that he
says to himself ‘I hope my own hope’ without intending to hope anything.
Clearly, just as no promise is made and no hope is hoped, no thought is
thought. This shows that in ‘I’m thinking that p’, p can’t
be replaced by ‘I’m thinking’ to complement the sentence. Expressing this in a
more general form: It is not possible to judge ‘I am thinking that p’,
where p is constituted only by ‘I am thinking’ or by iterations
of ‘I’m thinking’. (The adverb ‘only’ is important here, since if p
were replaced by some other thought containing ‘I’m thinking’, the whole answer
would acquire a sense. If Carl had answered, ‘I’m thinking that I’m thinking
that the weather will change...’, the whole sentence would not be meaningless.)
Now we turn to the next
claim: (b) What we mean by ‘I’m thinking that p’ can generally be
restated as ‘I was thinking that p’, because whenever a person thinks ‘I’m
thinking that p’, what she really means is ‘I was thinking that p’.
Consider our examples again. Carl says to Meg: ‘I’m thinking that the weather
will change and that it would be better to go by car’. But what Carl really
means is not that he is thinking those things at the same time that he is
answering Meg’s question, as the present-tense of the verb ‘to think’
misleadingly suggests. What he means is, more precisely stated, ‘I was thinking
that the weather would be bad and…’. Again, when the physicist says, ‘I’m
thinking… I believe I can find the right answer’, he doesn’t mean that the
contents of his thoughts are occurring in his mind at the exact same time that
he is uttering this sentence. What he means, more precisely stated, is ‘I have
been thinking some thoughts..., and I expect that once I have completed
thinking my thoughts, I will have the solution’. Finally, when Mary says to
herself ‘Yes, I’m thinking that...’, what she means is ‘Yes, I have been
thinking that...’. Therefore, it is clear that in the usual cases, ‘I’m
thinking…’ is an imprecise way to say ‘I just thought…’ or ‘I was just
thinking…’. Indeed, the thought or thoughts referred to by ‘I’m thinking’
usually occurred in the past. If someone makes references in a referred-to
chain of thoughts to future thoughts, to the conclusions of a process of
reasoning, his intended thoughts were in fact already thought in the past. It
is because those thoughts were thought in a very recent past that
language misleadingly allows us to say ‘I am thinking’, instead of ‘I
just thought’ or ‘I was just thinking’. Were ordinary language fastidiously
accurate, we would not say ‘I’m thinking’. I conclude, therefore, that the most
precise restatement of ‘I’m thinking’ is typically ‘I just thought (I was just
thinking) that p’.
One could ask: ‘Why
should this be the case?’ The answer is easy to find: our consciousness is
incapable of entertaining or focusing on more than one cognitive event at the
same time. I can’t consciously think a thought at the same time that I
consciously think that I’m thinking that thought. I must first finish the
thought I’m thinking in order to think that I have thought this thought, which
demands that this thinking must necessarily refer to a thought already
focused on in my consciousness. One could object that it is possible for a
person to say to himself, ‘I’m thinking that 12 x 12 = 144’ , without reference to the
past thought that 12 x 12 = 144, simply by thinking this. This sounds
linguistically awkward, different from the usual cases we have considered, but
it becomes meaningful when paraphrased by the statement, ‘Now, I will think
something; here it is: 12 x 12 = 144’ .
However, this shows again that the two occurrences – the thought and the
awareness that it will be thought – are not simultaneous, but only in reverse
order.
Contrary to the claim
that the two mental occurrences – ‘I think’, as an awareness of a thought, and
the thought that is the object of that awareness – can’t be focused on
simultaneously in consciousness, one could reply that in some cases one can
indeed think the thought ‘I’m thinking p’, while still maintaining
the thought of p in one’s consciousness. However, this is somewhat
misleading. It leaves out the difference between focus and fringes
in the diachronic (temporal) unity of consciousness.[1] To
think 370 + 510, a
person could think 300 + 500,
in order to reach 800, and then add 70 plus 10 to 800
and thus obtain 880. When a person is thinking the thought that 70 + 10 = 80,
she retains in her short-term memory the result 80 and how she achieved it.
This does not, however, mean that the two mental acts are being jointly focused
on in her consciousness, or that they can be thought at the same time. While a
person’s consciousness is focusing on its present thought, it retains in
short-term memory a thought that was already finished, in order to bind the
process of thought into a continuous unity. What is not being focused on is not
in our consciousness in a relevant way, and is likewise by no means certain, as
our frequent arithmetic mistakes make clear.
We should also consider
the possibility that the thought of p is simultaneously accompanied by a
nearly conscious, pre-conscious or unconscious (higher-order) thought that one
is thinking p in the synchronic (contemporaneous) unity of
consciousness, and even by other non-conscious thought processes. I believe
that this can be actually the case, but since the prior thought is not being
focused on or entertained in consciousness, it is not the kind of thing we are
considering here and thus has no relevance for our conclusions.[2]
Some might still object
that, independently of this, we still have a self-reflexive consciousness
that we are thinking. This suggests something like: (i) when I think p,
I simultaneously have an equally conscious second-order thought about it,
namely, ‘I’m thinking p’, or (ii) when I think p, p always
appears as part of the thought ‘I’m thinking that p’. However, our
analysis rejects (i), and (ii) not only lacks sufficient intuitive evidence, it
is refuted by the existence of unconscious thoughts.
Nevertheless, there is an
obvious way in which it is plainly possible to have second-order thoughts and
to think that we are thinking, namely by retrospection. I can think that
I thought p in the same sense that Carl thinks he was thinking that the
weather would change. ‘I’m thinking’ can occur as part of p in
‘I’m thinking that p’, and in this way I really can have thoughts about
past occurrences of thinking: by remembering that a process of thinking
something occurred, that it went on in my mind.
Until now, we have analyzed the standard
case of ‘I’m thinking’. However, there is at least one conceivable non-standard
case that deserves consideration:
(iv)
During a conversation with some
friends, it occurs to Mary to add a new idea to a paper she is writing. At this
moment, someone interrupts her thoughts with a question. After she answers the
question, Mary asks herself: ‘What was I just thinking about?’, but no answer
occurs to her. She knows that she had a new idea for the paper, but she is
unable to remember it. She can only say to herself, ‘I was thinking about
something, but I don’t know what’.
This is a rather common experience: often one can remember that
one was thinking, but not what one was thinking. However, this kind of
episode is ordinarily verbalized as ‘I was thinking’, and not as ‘I am
thinking’. The explicit use of ‘was’ in this example shows that it concerns
thoughts that were thought shortly before, rather than thoughts we have just
finished thinking before we say this. A delay results from something external
or internal that distracts us from our own chain of thought. Nevertheless,
since I don’t wish to discard any reasonable possibility, I will also accept this
case as a conceivable analysis of a (linguistically awkward) use of ‘I’m
thinking’. In this case, the form of ‘I’m thinking’ will be not the usual ‘I
was thinking p’, but rather ‘I was thinking something (a thought or
thoughts), although I don’t remember what’. More concisely, ‘I was thinking x’, where x doesn’t mean a
particular thought like p, but refers to some proposition in an
indeterminate manner.
It is worthwhile to remark that this is a derivative case, dependent on
the standard one. If Mary answers her question in the form ‘I was thinking x’, one is still
entitled to ask: ‘Why are you so sure that you really were thinking any
thoughts, if you can’t remember them? How do you know that it was not an
illusion?’ A natural answer could be, ‘Because I have had other experiences
like this and later remembered what I had been thinking’. If she could never
remember the thought that she has the impression of having been thinking, she
couldn’t be sure that she had really been thinking some thought, instead of
having the mere illusory impression of having been thinking one.
Now I believe that we have learned enough
about the phenomenological grammar of ‘I am thinking’ to consider how it has
been misunderstood in philosophy.
II. Some Philosophical
Consequences of
the Proposed Analysis
The first consequence of our conclusions is that ‘I am thinking’ is
no longer a self-verifying judgment that cannot be denied without
inconsistency. Turning now to the Cartesian cogito, there is general
agreement that ‘I am’ or ‘I exist’ is a self-verifying, certain, incorrigible
judgment, since one must exist in order to be conscious of one’s existence.
This is shown by the fact that the negative of ‘I exist’ – ‘I don’t exist’ –
is, if not senseless, at least a necessarily false judgment. And authors
like A. J. Ayer and Jaakko Hintikka have quite naturally extended this
conclusion to ‘I’m thinking’.[3] The
latter is also a self-verifying judgment, since its denial – ‘I’m not thinking’
– is at least a necessarily false judgment, for if I judge that I’m thinking, how
could I possibly not be thinking?[4]
I agree with the
interpretation of ‘I exist’ as a self-verifying, incorrigible judgment, since
the thought ‘I don’t exist’ (in the sense of ‘I do not presently exist’) is
unavoidably false. But the extension of this conclusion to ‘I’m thinking’ is a
mistake. Although it is a very certain judgment, what we mean by ‘I’m thinking’
is not a self-verifying, incorrigible, undeniable certainty. Since the thought
or judgment that I’m thinking really means ‘I was thinking that p’ or ‘I
was thinking x’, it is in principle possible that the
judgment that I’m thinking is mistaken.
To grasp this, suppose
that Carl is suffering from a serious kind of mental confusion, incorrectly
identifying his own memories. When Meg asks him what he is doing, he answers,
expressing the thought r, by saying that he is thinking (was thinking)
that: ‘The flowers in the garden need to be watered’. Nevertheless, it could be
the case that instead he thought s: ‘Someone should mow the lawn’. It
could even be that Carl really was not thinking anything at all: he may have
been in a state that neurologists call absence. In the first case, the
judgment ‘I am (was) thinking’, in the sense of ‘I am (was) thinking something’
or ‘I am (was) thinking x’, is true. The more determined judgment ‘I am (was) thinking that r’
is false, however, since what he was thinking was s and not r. In
the second case, not only is the whole judgment ‘I am (was) thinking that r’
is false, since r was not thought, but even the judgment ‘I am (was)
thinking something’ is false, since there was no thought at all. For the
judgment ‘I’m thinking’ to be true, a thought must be thought, even if it is
a false one. (A similar point can be made in many other cases. When I say
‘I have promised to talk’ even though I have actually promised to remain
silent, the statement ‘I have promised to talk’ is false, but not the statement
‘I have promised’. In contrast, if I say ‘I have promised to talk’, and I
really have not promised anything, both statements ‘I have promised to talk’
and ‘I have promised’, are clearly false.)
The same applies to the
adventitious case in which ‘I’m thinking’ means the same thing as ‘I was
thinking a thought (or thoughts), but I can’t remember what’ or ‘I was thinking
thought x’, where x means ‘some thought’. In this case, ‘I’m thinking’ will be true if
there is (was) a certain thought to replace x, otherwise it will be
false. Since it is possible that someone mistakenly thinks that he was thinking
some thought, even though he or she actually wasn’t thinking anything, ‘I’m thinking’, in the sense of ‘I was thinking x’, can be false.
And this means that it, like ‘I’m thinking that p’, is not
self-verifying.
Now we will consider the
consequences of our analysis for the Cartesian cogito, the well-known
judgment usually expressed with the sentence ‘I think, therefore I am’. An
orthodox way of interpreting the cogito is by reconstructing it as a
kind of inference.[5]
Thus, if we use as a rule of inference the proposition ‘If a thing is
identified as having an attribute, then this thing exists’, we can interpret
the cogito as expressing the following immediate inference:
1. ‘I am (a thing having the
attribute
of being) thinking’ (Rule applied to 1:
if a thing is
_________________________ identified
as having an attribute,
2. ‘I am (an existing thing)’ then this thing exists.)
Assuming that the premise can’t be false,
it follows that the conclusion also can’t be false, which proves my existence
as a thinking being. A reconstruction more or less similar to this is accepted
by many interpreters as capable of producing the kind of certainty that
Descartes was seeking, and there are good reasons to believe that this is the
best way to make sense of Descartes’ own intentions, even if his texts show
that he also had other possibilities in mind.[6]
Nevertheless, if the
conclusions derived from our analysis of the real self-attribution of thinking
are correct, then all reconstructions of the cogito as an argument are,
from a heuristic, systematic point of view, doomed to fail. For ‘I’m thinking’
to be a thought of something, it must be understood as ‘I was thinking that p’
(or, derivatively, as ‘I was thinking x’). But ‘I was thinking that p’ (like
‘I was thinking x’) is a corrigible, uncertain thought, which means that it provides
an uncertain premise when included in an argument. But if the premise of
the cogito-inference is uncertain, then the conclusion of the inference
– ‘I exist’ – must be at least as uncertain as the premise. This is not
a very useful result, since the conclusion – ‘I am’ – is already known to be
certain by simple introspection.[7] Even
the reverse argument, ‘I exist, therefore I think’, would be more compelling,
since to have a conscious awareness that I exist, I must be thinking, at least
in some sense.
Descartes’ hypothesis of
the malign genie only makes things worse. Although the malign
genie can’t force me to think that I am when I am not, he can without
difficulty make me think that I was thinking p when I wasn’t, or that I
was thinking something, even if I had no thoughts at all. And this must be very
easy for him, since he is capable of misleading us in the most simple reasoning
demanding short-term memory, as in the case with the four arithmetic operations
(see our previous remarks about the focus and fringes of consciousness).
Defending the inferential
way of interpreting the cogito, one could argue that I am using the
proposition ‘I think’ in a sense that Descartes never intended. He aimed to use
this proposition in a self-reflexive, philosophical sense in which there is no
need to refer to a complementary thought-content. Consequently, the cogito must
have the form ‘I’m thinking this thought itself’.[8]
However, our more precise consideration of the structure of ‘I’m thinking’ in
the first part of this paper already ruled out this suggestion as illusory. The
reflexive use of ‘I’m thinking’ is a philosophical fancy without any intuitive
support.
Yet, one could credibly
argue that the statement ‘I’m thinking’ without a complement can be at least a
syntactic mental occurrence, and that when it happens in my mind, I am
immediately conscious of this occurrence. This is certainly true, as we have
already seen, and it is also true that I achieve consciousness of my existence
through having such experiences. But it is not enough to guarantee that I’m
thinking, since the consciousness of a syntactic occurrence is not the
consciousness of what is at stake, namely, what is to be thought by
means of the syntactic occurrence.
Finally, one could
consider what Descartes himself would probably answer when pressed by these
considerations. Perhaps he would give an answer like the one he gave to Frans
Burman’s comment that we are unable to focus our attention on more than one
thought at one time while we are reasoning. Descartes’ answer was that although
we can’t grasp very many things, we can grasp more than one: For example: ‘I
now grasp and think that I am speaking and eating simultaneously’
(my italics).[9]
Transposed to ‘I’m thinking’, this kind of answer would mean: although it
doesn’t seem to be the case, I’m really able to think ‘I’m thinking’ and the
content ‘p’ simultaneously, and this guarantees the certainty of ‘I’m
thinking’.
Our response to this is
that the distinction between the synchronic and diachronic unity of
consciousness, jointly with the distinction between its focus and fringes,
shows that in his answer to Burman, Descartes takes an equivocal view,
confounding mere awareness with conscious thought. While I’m writing these
words, for example, I’m also aware of the light from the lamp beside me, hear
the hum of the air-conditioner, feel my fingers touching the keyboard, am aware
of my body position, etc. All these things are on the fringes of the synchronic
unity of my consciousness. It is correct to say that I’m aware of
all these things, that in a certain sense I’m grasping all of them (if
the air-conditioner stops running, I will direct my attention to it). However,
it is certainly not correct to say that I’m thinking all or even
some of these things, as Descartes would be forced to suggest. The only things
I’m consciously thinking are the words I’m writing, which are passing through
the focus of my consciousness to lose themselves in the temporal extension of
its diachronic unity. Consequently, Descartes gives us a bogus example,
which would be correct only if he could show that we are in fact simultaneously
able to think more than one thought in the sense of articulating these thoughts
simultaneously in the center of our attention, when in fact we really aren’t
able to do so. But if it is so, if there should be a thought p on the
synchronic fringe of my consciousness, it could also be an illusion. As already
noted, it is plainly possible that I have unconscious or pre-conscious thoughts
accompanying the thought that is being focused on in my consciousness.
However, this would be the kind of thing within the reach of the malign
genie, for he would be able to confuse the relationship between what is
focused on in consciousness (what is clearly and distinctively experienced by
us) and what is not. What is not focused on is
only an object of secondary awareness and can always be wrongly interpreted.
In conclusion, our
analysis of ‘I’m thinking’ favors the unorthodox view of the Cartesian insight
that concentrates analysis on the role of ‘I exist’ as a self-verifying,
incorrigible, undeniable truth.[10] Even
if this view fails to give us the most adequate textual interpretation, it
reflects, I believe, the truth about the matter.
[1] Similar distinctions are made in William James, The
Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover (1890)), vol. 1, chap. 9
(distinction between focus and fringes of consciousness). See
also J. R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (New
York: Basic Books, 1998), pp. 74-5.
[2] This is, to my mind, the reason why my argument
doesn’t render vacuous the theory that identifies an important sense of the
word ‘consciousness’ with having suitable reflexive, simultaneous higher-order
beliefs or thoughts about lower-order thoughts or other mental events.
According to this view, I can still say that p is a conscious thought,
because the thought of p is accompanied by a higher-order non-conscious
thought of p. David Rosenthal, a defender of this view, also notes that a
second-order thought cannot be conscious unless when it is the object of a
third-order thought that remains unconscious… so that the thought that is on
the top remains always unconscious. See David Rosenthal: Consciousness and
Mind (Oxford
[3] See A. J. Ayer, ‘I
Think, Therefore I Am’ in, W. Doney (ed.): Descartes:
A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: Doubleday, 1967), p. 81.
[4] As A. J. Ayer writes: ‘The sense in which I cannot
doubt the statement that I think is just that my doubting it entails its truth:
and in the same sense I cannot doubt that I exist’ (op. cit., p. 81).
Though arguing for distinctions, Jaakko Hintikka also accepts a similar
identification. (See ‘Cogito ergo sum: Inference or Performance?’ in W.
Doney (ed.), op. cit., pp. 133, 139.)
[5] See A. Kenny, Descartes: A Study of his Philosophy
(South Bend , IN :
St. Augustine
[6] Descartes’ argumentative path finds its synthesis in
the formula: ‘To be doubting I must be thinking; to be thinking, I must exist’.
Still, it is difficult to see how the last and essential claim could be made
without some kind of inference. Descartes recognizes explicitly the necessity
of inference in Principia Philosophiae (cf. V. R. Miller & R.
P. Miller (eds.), Principles of Philosophy (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983),
Part I, § 10).
[7] If the ‘I’m thinking’ in the cogito is
conceived as having the form ‘I was thinking x’, being in this form derivative, it could
possibly be true only presupposing the previous truth of thoughts
of the form ‘I was thinking that p’.
[8] Claudio Costa, ‘Über den
Gewiβheitsanspruch im cartesischen cogito’,
Prima Philosophia, Nr. 4, 1999, 1-20,
p. 10.
[9] ‘Quod mens non
posit nisi unan rem simul concipere, verum non est; non potest quidem simul
multa concipere, sed potest tamen plura quam unum; e.g. jam ego concipio et
cogito simul me loqui et me adere’. Adam & Tannery (eds.), Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Vrin/CNRS,
1964-1976), V, 148-149. Cf. also J. G. Cottingham (ed.), Descartes’ Conversation with Burman (Oxford: Clarendon 1976), pp.
6-7.
[10] This view is to be found in different versions in A.
J. Ayer, see W. Doney (ed.), op. cit., pp. 80-87, Jaakko Hintikka, see
W. Doney (ed.), op. cit. pp. 108-139, and in Harry Frankfurt’s book,
Demons, Dreamers and Madmen (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 102 f .
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