Descartes Reasons For Believing In Substance Dualism

Descartes’ reasons for believing in substance dualism relies on several arguments including his argument for certainty or knowledge. The argument relies on the idea that I can be certain of my mind but not my body or any other physical thing, so my mind is not a physical thing. In this paper, I will argue that Descartes’ assessment of the mind-body connection makes a jump in its logic by declaring that the mind cannot be physical, even though his certainty argument does not take into account that just because someone does not know something does not mean it is not true. Descartes’ certainty argument argues that the mind and body are not the same substance because Descartes cannot be certain of other physical things. He starts by claiming
Let’s go back to the arena analogy that I explained earlier. I am uncertain that there are 2000 people in the arena, so I come to the conclusion, based on Descartes’ argument, that there cannot be 2000 people there. However, there could be 2000 people there, I may just not have the knowledge to know that. Just as the mind and body can be the same substance, but Descartes may not have the current knowledge to understand that. It is plausible to assume, that one day there could be a scientific discovery which allows us to understand certainty of other physical objects, meaning that his conclusion would not hold. Therefore, Descartes’ certainty argument fails, because It requires that anything someone is not certain of automatically be incorrect, like the number of people in an
Therefore, the certainty argument could still work when applied to concepts like substance dualism rather than a countable number of people. My response to this objection would be that, even though these two examples are very different in the subject matter, the jump in the logic that is made by the certainty argument still holds. Descartes tries to say that as long as he is uncertain of something he cannot see it as existing like being uncertain of physical objects therefore not identifying the mind as physical. However, this does not really hold since it plausible that a mind could be physical and that it is Descartes who just lacks the understanding, or the knowledge regarding this subject has not been discovered empirically but can be in the