Material Falsity and Error in Descartes’s Meditations (review)

This book aims to overturn the common view of materially false ideas (MFIs), which is that Descartes’s discussion in Meditation Three generates confusion about his views on truth and falsehood and is irrelevant to the rest of the argument in the Meditations.

After introducing MFIs and then criticizing previous interpretations, Wee provides her own account in chapter three. Since a proper understanding of why MFIs fail in their representational function allows Wee to revisit their role in the Meditations, this chapter occupies a central place in the book. She attributes to Descartes two theories of representation, the “Accurate Causal Account” (ACP) and the “Alternative Account” (AA). According to ACP, “an idea represents truly only if (1) the idea comes from the cause from which it purports to come, and (2) the idea accurately represents that cause” (39–40). According to AA, an idea is true “if it represents a thing with objective being (and contains objective reality)” (47).

Since Descartes, in Meditation Three, is “unable to determine the causes of his . . . ‘adventitious’ ideas, far less to determine whether his ideas accurately represent their causes” (40), the claim that MFIs “represent no-things as things” is to be explained in light of AA as follows: “Under AA, all ideas purport to represent a ‘real’ thing. . . . False ideas are . . . those which purport to represent a thing with objective being but really do not do so” (49). However, the problem with Wee’s account is that since AA is based on the notion of objective reality, either these ideas fail to have objective reality, and then also fail to purport to represent, or else they do exhibit objective reality, and therefore represent something real. In either case, no account is provided of how MFIs purport to represent what they do not.

After the proof of a benevolent God, ACP can be reinstated to explain MFIs in Meditation Six and the Fourth Replies. On ACP, MFIs are ideas that represent correctly what their causes are but “mis-represent them” (52). For example, “the idea of the sun as very small is false because, although it represents correctly what its cause is—the sun—it does not accurately portray that cause” (51). There are, however, problems with this explanation. If the idea represents its correct object in virtue of “coming from” it (as ACP suggests), how can it also misrepresent it? Matters are complicated by how ACP is said to account for MFIs in the Fourth Replies. There, the idea of cold is materially false because it refers cold to the external world while, in fact, it is the idea of the sensation of cold. But if the idea of cold is the idea of a sensation, why does it refer cold to an external world? Saying that cold is mistakenly referred to an external world because the idea is obscure and confused (55) does not answer the original question.

In chapter four, Wee argues that MFIs are crucial to the arguments of Meditations Three and Six. First, she contends that the ideas of size and shape that Descartes introduces in the context of the discussion of MFIs in Meditation Three are clear and distinct sensory ideas (CDSIs), and since the proof of the existence of material things in Meditation Six is based on CDSIs, the discussion of MFIs is crucial to the argument of Meditation Six (81–94). Second, she interprets Descartes’s claim that MFIs “arise from nothing—that is, they are in me only because of a deficiency and lack of perfection in my nature” (30)—as saying that MFIs are due to the lack of perfection of always having ideas that accurately represent states of affairs. Understanding deficiency as a lack of perfection allows Descartes “to argue from his own recognized imperfection to the existence of a completely perfect God” (108).

Wee’s discussion of CDSIs is very interesting but it obscures her account of the mechanism...