Notes on Material Falsity
Margaret Wilson, Descartes, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978, p. 112. Wilson says that Descartes' reply to Antoine Arnauld's objection to material falsehood, is a model of "confounded confusion", ibid., p. 110. Martha Bolton also considers that "it would be fatal for Descartes to hold that the cognitive content of an idea can diverge from the object of the idea"; which is a thesis that apparently underlies the concept of material falsehood. See his article "Confused and Obscure Ideas of Sense", in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1986, p. 393. In a recent article, Richard W Field also tries to show that the notion of material falsehood in Descartes is neither disastrous nor incoherent; but its interpretation suffers from certain fundamental texrual inadequacies. For example, ningtin text supports Field's aflrmaclon that Descartes uses 'materially considered idea' in two different senses; 0 his assertion that an idea formally considered is the idea as it represents an object that exists, since in none of the passages in which Descartes defines this notion refers to the existence of the objects of . the ideas. See his article "Descartes on the Material Falsity of Ideas", Philosophical Review, no. 102, 1993, pp. 309-333; and my article "Descartes on Mental Representation", manuscript, . nn. 80, 82 and 84.
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