[...]... God existed and caused it in us And this may suggest that Descartes offers a causal account of (at least) the idea of God Besides the fact that the idea of God is unique and, so, the account of its content cannot be extended to the rest of ideas, this is not even what Descartes maintains about the idea of God Descartes infers that God exists and is the cause of the idea in us because of the way in which... typically constitutive of sensory ideas On the other hand, the object being presented to the mind is not determined by the causal connection itself but rather by a latent conceptual description of the object Once this is clarified, the mechanisms of sensory representation and misrepresentations are easily explained Descartes relates the notion of sensory misrepresentation to that of obscurity and confusion throughout... Meditation Three, Descartes claims that there are two ideas of the sun There is the sensory idea that misrepresents the sun as something small; and then there is the correct idea of the sun obtained through astronomical reasoning I am assuming here that Descartes is talking about the latter in the above example Descartes account of ideas 19 obscure and confused ideas, on the one hand, and clear and distinct... ideas, and sensory ideas differ from intellectual ones insofar as they are the by-product of the mind body union, sensory ideas also exhibit different mechanisms of representation Or, did Descartes hold an account of sensory representation consistent with DA despite the fact that sensory ideas are modes of the mind body union? These questions raise the broader issue of the relation between the senses and. .. experience it, the idea of red misrepresents the properties of the material world Descartes calls ideas of secondary qualities “materially false” in Meditation Three and in the Fourth Set of Replies and continues to regard them as misrepresentations of the material world in all subsequent works 2 Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation Despite this leitmotiv in his writings, Descartes never... together with its solution to the puzzle of sensory misrepresentation Chapter 6 addresses various objections to my descriptivist-causal account A brief conclusion follows with a summary of the advantages of my account over those surveyed and discussed in the book 1 Descartes Account of Ideas and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation I begin with a presentation of Descartes general account of ideas and. .. by and large, the attribution of a causal theory of sensory representation to Descartes is not forced on us by his account of sensory misrepresentation because we can interpret Descartes claim that sensory ideas represent their objects as other than they are in a way compatible with DA Rather than reading the phrase sensory ideas represent their objects as other than they are” as implying that these... 8 Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation obscure and confused representation of its correct object The puzzle of misrepresentation does not go away in virtue of endorsing a reading of Descartes claim that sensations misrepresent their objects along the lines of DA I have identified at least two different answers to this question in the current literature Either the fact that sensory ideas... content of the idea and its referential content Descartes is saying here that the idea is not simply a sign for its referent but provides the necessary and sufficient condition for identifying the referent by providing the “true” description of the object ( the idea of the sun is the sun itself existing in the intellect”).9 9 Notice that my reading of Descartes claim that the idea of the sun is the sun... modes of the mind body union The missing account of sensory representation and misrepresentation that Descartes failed to bequeath 8 I will clarify the notion of presentational content in Chapter 1 below As it will become clear in Chapters 5 and 6, on my view, these two components of the presentational content of sensory ideas are inseparable (or fused together) in the infantile mind 10 Descartes and the . explaining Descartes theory of sensory representation 2 Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation ought to include an explanation of how sensory ideas are misrepresenta- tions of their objects. sensations, the puzzle is a red herring. Since the puzzle is generated by the claim that sensations are representational, the denial of that claim implies the rejection of the puzzle. The tenability of. arguments for these various claims are in the ensuing chapters. THE EXEGETICAL AND THEORETICAL PROBLEM: THE PUZZLE OF SENSORY REPRESENTATION According to Descartes, the senses misrepresent the material