Notes on Material Falsity

---

FOOTNOTE 3. of Claudia-Lorena Garcia "Descartes: Ideas and their Falsehood" (1994)

https://doi.org/10.22201/iifs.18704913e.1994.40.548.

Margaret Wilson, Descartes, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1978, 112.

Wilson says that Descartes's reply to Antoine Arnauld's objection to material falsehood is a model of "confusion confounded", ibid., 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 her article "Confused and Obscure Ideas of Sense," in Essays on Descartes' Meditations, edited by Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, 393. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

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 textual inadequacies. For example, some? text supports Field's affirmation that Descartes uses 'materially considered idea' in two different senses; 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, 309–33;

and my article "Descartes on Mental Representation", manuscript, . nn. 80, 82 and 84.

---

Have ChatGPT search for all examples of types of materially false ideas.

---