I'm finally back from Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to all who invited me to speak and hang-out in various locales down under. It was a grand trip and I'm eager to go back again sometime in the near future. About the only thing that I won't miss is getting up at 3:30 am on cold winter mornings to do Philosophy Talk Now that I'm back stateside, I hope to resume regular blogging. I probably could have blogged more from down under. But I was pretty busy with other things, both philosophical and non-philosophical, during my stay there.

Anyway, let me go back a couple of episodes to our show onDescartes. I've been gathering some thoughts about whether we've managed to move beyond what I called "The Cartesian Moment" on the air. Ron Rubin, our guest, didn't really want to attribute the moment I have in mind to Descartes in particular, He's probably right. He's the historical scholar, after all. Still, I like that designation and will stick with it at least for the nonce.

我所说的笛卡尔时刻，指的是在西方哲学中，个体认识主体和主体自己的思想内容被提升为第一个和最可靠的知识对象的时刻。在那一刻，思考主体之外的一切知识——上帝、其他心灵、物质世界——都成了问题。一旦我们进入笛卡尔时刻，关于我们“有多大可能”了解外部世界的问题，包括我们自己的身体、他人的心灵或上帝，就会获得某种哲学上的紧迫感，如果不是现实上的紧迫感的话。

As we mentioned all too briefly on the show, Descartes's own solution to the philosophical pickle he articulated turned on his argument that god exists and on the additional conclusion (one we didn't really discuss) that god must be non-deceptive. That's because god must be, according to Descartes, the sum of all perfections. Deceptiveness would be a kind of imperfection. So god, the sum of all perfections, must not be deceptive.

当然，上帝不是一个骗子的事实并不意味着我们从不犯错。我们所做的。但从某种意义上说，这些错误是我们自己的错，而不是上帝的错。Because god is not a deceiver, according to Descartes, thencertainof our ideas and judgments are "guaranteed" to track the true. In particular, he thinks that if we base our judgments only on what he calls "clear and distinct" ideas, then the non-deceptive nature of god guarantees that we will judge truly and never falsely. So the trick to advancing our knowledge is to discipline our minds so that we judge only on the basis of clear and distinct ideas and refrain from judging when we lack such ideas. This is complicated and somewhat murky stuff. I won't go into it deeply here.

没有多少哲学家被笛卡尔所呼吁的非欺骗性的上帝所说服，以确保清晰和清晰是真理和确定性的指南。但如果我们拒绝笛卡尔关于非欺骗性上帝存在的论证，同时又接受笛卡尔时刻的推理，我们就真的陷入困境了。我们似乎被困在自己的思想里，没有明确的出路。

Descartes wanted to blaze a path out by finding inward marks that distinguish truth-tracking judgments from judgments that fail to track the truth.Personally, I doubt that there are any such inward marks. We simply can't tell, merely from the inside, whether we're judging truly or judging falsely. Some false judgments can feel so inwardly compelling, so irresistible, that we could never imagine giving them up. On the other hand, some true judgments can feel so feeble and inwardly uncompelling that we could easily imagine giving them up. If this is right, then the Cartesian search for an "inner mark" of certainty and knowledge is probably misguided from the start.

说笛卡尔对确定性和真理内在标志的追求是错误的，并不是说我们应该完全放弃对真理的追求。真理是一件该死的好东西。然而，不幸的是，真相往往隐藏在乌云之中。这意味着我们对真理的认知总是有争议的，总是受到争论和争论的影响。笛卡尔自称的目标(如果不是他的实际实践)是试图将科学置于一条安全而确定的道路上，使我们能够积累越来越多、越来越深的真理，显然，甚至没有后退和重新开始的可能性。但是，是否有这样的前提保证似乎值得怀疑。The absence ofguaranteesis not, however, the absence of thepossibilityof scientific progress or the accumulation of ever greater and ever deeper knowledge. But our path to such knowledge is bound to be more precarious, less secure than Descartes longed for it to be.

Rejecting the Cartesian quest for certain foundations does not in itself get us entirely beyond the Cartesian moment. Dropping that quest still leaves untouched the supposedly problematic nature of all knowledge other than knowledge of our own mind and its contents. I will offer just a brief word on this score for now. I tend to think that Descartes misdescribes the epistemic situation from the very start. On my view, it is a mistake to think that the mind is immediately epistemically given only itself and its own inner contents. I tend to think instead that the mind is epistemically given itself as an object of knowledge only simultaneously with its being epistemically given the external world as an object of knowledge. To cognize myself and my own inner states is already to cognize myself as a being in and over against a world that is distinct from me. It's true enough that being epistemically given either myself or the world is partly a matter of my having certaininnerrepresentations.Withmy inner representations I cognize both the external world and my own inner life. This makes my inner representationsvehicles我的思想和知识。But those inner vehicles need not themselves be immediately epistemically givenobjects思想和/或知识。我甚至不会在这里对这个说法做一个哲学上的论证。我想说，笛卡尔没有完全理解思维载体和思维对象之间的区别。思想的载体是“内在的”，在一个强有力的意义上。有些知识的对象也是内在的。但并非所有人都是如此。我们对内在知识对象的认识论把握，是否比我们对外在知识对象的认识论把握更可靠，这一点也不明确。

My hunch is that by keeping the distinction between vehicle and object always in mind we may be able to do full justice to much of what is truist in Descartes -- his representational theory of mind -- while avoiding some of his most consequential errors.