Maybe one way of putting this dispute is over the superficiality of
doubt. On Certainty and Peirce and Descartes all know that doubt needs
grounds. So doubts always presuppose something, the comfortableness of
doubt. Descartres never questions his judgemtnes that this is a relevant
reason for doubting/believing that.
DEscartes introduces madness as a way of doubting wheterh he is a pumpking
and throws out the possibility, but of course once dreaming is in on the
table he can doubt that very propositons. So the Foucault objection
can't be that some propositions are not doubted, they all are. It must
be a methodological objection...by assuming he isn't mad, descartes
hasn't guarranteed that his project (grounidng reason) will succeed, it
still mightfail if there were no proof of god's existence. But he has
guarrteed that it MIGHT succeed. if he were mad, if he didn't count on
judgemtns that this is a reason for (believing/doubting) that, the whole
project would disappear. And there can--in the nature o things be no
place outside the practice of giving reasons to give us reason to believ
that THIS is a reason for (doubting/believing) THAT. That is why reason
is held in place, and must be,by a strange act of fource.
in PI and OC when wittgensetin finds reason coming to an end in our
judgemtns that THIS is a good reason for that, and these judgemtnes being
gourndless, that is a place where Wittgenstein, like foucault, and like
the author of Being and Time, is digging deeper than doubt, to something
more like anxiety.
Gordon
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