Descartes: Ideas and the Mark of the Mental (original) (raw)

Although Cartesian scholars rarely agree on even the most fundamental aspects of Descartes' theory of ideas-e. g., what ideas are, how they represent, what clarity or material falsity are-almost all of them agree that Descartes creates a novel manner of understanding the mental in terms of cognitive transparency. 1 This is an interpretation of Descartes' view of the mind according to which I cannot fail to know with certainty that I am thinking and what it is that I am thinking while I am thinking about it. In the case of ideas, this interpretation says that we always have an immediate and infallible access to the object represented by an idea, and that this is the mark of the mental-to use Rorty's phrase 2-i.e., that this is one certain mark by means of which we can tell that a particular representation is a mental operation. Here I shall put forward some compelling reasons to reject this manner of understanding ideas-and thus the realm of the mental-in Descartes and shall defend an alternative interpretation according to which there is a distinction in Descartes between what an idea appears to represent and what it 1 Some of the materials in this paper also appear in my "Transparency and Falsity in Descartes' Theory of Ideas," The International Journal of Philosophical Studies 7 (1999): 349-372. Also, the fundamental thesis underlying the interpretation I here defend first appeared in my Ph.D. dissertation (University of Southern California, 1989). Note that interpreting the Cartesian theory of ideas is particularly difficult because, as we shall see, Descartes is creating a whole new set of related concepts in the areas of cognition and representation using both some of the terminology and some of the philosophical intuitions of rival schools of thought, without indicating clearly where their influences end and his own contribution begins. I shall be using the following abbreviations of the editions of the works of Descartes and other authors: AT OEuvres de Descartes.