Abstract

Though, in view of Descartes' challenge to the epistemological credentials of "reason" early in the Meditations, one expects him to resist the claim that the professedly invulnerable cogito argument works through the suppressed premise "Everything that thinks, exists," interpreters have been hard-pressed to convert comprendre here into pardonner. Loath to convict Descartes of confusing a psychological point about inferential process with a logical one about the conditions for validity, many are driven to implausible construals, for example, the ingenious performative construal, on which "cogito" does not express a premise. In this fast-paced study Jerrold Katz, calling on his Chomsky-inspired theorising about natural languages, offers a via media. At the core is the thesis that validity is not always a matter of logical form--hence a rejection of the view whose contemporary prestige derives from Frege. According to Katz, the validity of analytic entailments is a function not of logical form but of the senses of the contributing linguistic elements. The cogito argument, Katz maintains, falls into this class. Thus, comprendre avec pardonner: Descartes is not being evasive when he holds that there is an argumentational move from "cogito" to "sum" while denying that the argument, as presented, is enthymematic.