Positivistic Criticism of Cogito I

Abstract

Rene Descartes thought that the insight “I think, therefore I am” underlies the justification of our own human knowledge. This insight is acquirable to “anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way”. Three hundred years later logical positivists defended diametrically opposed view: knowledge cannot serve to justify anything at all. Positivistic criticism of Descartes’s “the first and most certain” of all insights is probably the most detailed criticism of Cogito in the history of philosophy. Positivists strove to discredit Descartes’s philosophy because Descartes’s view was the paradigm of racionalistic position in philosophy, that is, the position of acquiring a knowledge about the world only through the thought itself. They advocated the opposed philosophical view - empiricism. They believed in a experience as a only source of the knowledge about the world. Through the criticism of Descartes’s racionalistic philosophy they, in fact, paved the way to their radical empiricism. In this article I will present and try to evaluate the arguments which were used by positivist to undermine Cogito - the essence of Descartes’s philosophy.