Abstract

Why does Descartes give some propositions, most notably cogito, a privileged epistemic status? In the first part of the paper I consider, and reject, the standard account of the indubitability of cogito championed by, among others, Hintikka, Ayer, Slezak, and Frankfurt. After examining what I call the Cartesian regress, I invoke the fiction of a self-blind individual, close to the one originally introduced by Shoemaker, to give an alternative account of the indubitability of cogito. I argue that Descartes initially needs to exempt the self-attribution of thought from the scope of Cartesian doubt, because an individual who is self-blind, and, so, cannot self-attribute thoughts, cannot treat propositions about the external world as dubitable.