I know that I am, therefore I think I know when I know

William Abraham wonders if René Descartes isn't "a kind of particularist." In an engaging classroom debate recently, Abraham offered a critique of common ways of reading Descartes (including his own) and a new and intriguing reading of the Pater Philosophiae. 

Descartes, so the common reading goes, was after a sure and certain method with which to attain all knowledge. In his discourse on Method, he outlines a rigorous multi-step process for breaking down problems of knowledge. First, and most important, he decides to doubt whatever he thinks he can possibly get away with doubting (in an earlier post, I attempted to place this aim into a suitable historical frame). Second, he tries to divide every problem possible into smaller problems. Third, he aims to let truths that are easier to know control the more difficult ones. And fourth, take good notes!

From these, Descartes goes on to try out the world. In the end, he finds he can doubt the truth of basically everything--the world, his senses, even mathematics and the existence of God. At last, however, he finds that he cannot be talked out of his belief in his own existence, since even attempting to doubt it would entail himself as the one doubting. It is therefore, he concludes, clearly and distinctly true that he exists.

Now the standard reading is that from here, Descartes goes on to build a house of knowledge, piling truth on truth, line on line, precept on precept. The only problem with this reading is that it isn't true. To be sure, Descartes has a method for knowing what can be known, and he does in fact follow it. But it is worth observing that no criterion of truth controls his first conclusion. Indeed, he gets first to what he thinks he can know, and from that knowledge constructs a criterion of knowledge that can withstand the radical methodological doubt. And the next truth that he tries to discover does not follow from the first truth which follows from a prior criterion; rather,  it follows ad-hoc in an order of questioning. And the truth of what he thinks he finds is grounded not on prior truths but on the way he thinks he knows those prior truths.

The question is whether knowledge in the first instance depends upon a criterion established before the fact or whether what he knows sets the terms. The second reading seems more plausible, and, so it seems, describes particularism. On this reading, one would have to understand his "method" to mean something like a consistent mode of inquiry rather than a strict commitment to deductive reasoning.  And his third postulate would mean not (or not necessarily) that simple truths can be used to derive harder ones, but that they can establish how we think we know, and from how we know those truths we can guess at what point we would decide harder truths had become known to us. And in this sense, he is surely a methodist, but perhaps also "a kind of particularist."