PART ONE

The principles of human knowledge

1. The seeker after truth must, once in the course of his life, doubt everything, as far as is possible.

Since we began life as infants, and made various judgements concerning the things that can be perceived by the senses before we had the full use of our reason, there are many preconceived opinions that keep us from knowledge of the truth.1 It seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these opinions is to make the effort, once in the course of our life, to doubt everything which we find to contain even the smallest suspicion of uncertainty.

2. What is doubtful should even be considered as false.

Indeed, it will even prove useful, once we have doubted these things, to consider them as false, so that our discovery of what is most certain and easy to know may be all the clearer.

3. This doubt should not meanwhile be applied to ordinary life.

This doubt, while it continues, should be kept in check and employed solely in connection with the contemplation of the truth. As far as ordinary life is concerned, the chance for action would frequently pass us by if we waited until we could free ourselves from our doubts, and so we are often compelled to accept what is merely probable. From time to time we may even have to make a choice between two alternatives, even though it is not apparent that one of the two is more probable than the other.

DISCOURSE ONE

Light

The conduct of our life depends entirely on our senses, and since sight is the noblest and most comprehensive of the senses, inventions which serve to increase its power are undoubtedly among the most useful there can be. And it is difficult to find any such inventions which do more to increase the power of sight than those wonderful telescopes which, though in use for only a short time, have already revealed a greater number of new stars and other new objects above the earth than we had seen there before. Carrying our vision much further than our forebears could normally extend their imagination, these telescopes seem to have opened the way for us to attain a knowledge of nature much greater and more perfect than they possessed … But inventions of any complexity do not reach their highest degree of perfection right away, and this one is still sufficiently problematical to give me cause to write about it. And since the construction of the things of which I shall speak must depend on the skill of craftsmen, who usually have little formal education, I shall try to make myself intelligible to everyone; and I shall try not to omit anything, or to assume anything that requires knowledge of other sciences. This is why I shall begin by explaining light and light-rays; then, having briefly described the parts of the eye, I shall give a detailed account of how vision comes about; and, after noting all the things which are capable of making vision more perfect, I shall show how they can be aided by the inventions which I shall describe.

RULE ONE

The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgements about whatever comes before it.

The sciences as a whole are nothing other than human wisdom, which always remains one and the same, however different the subjects to which it is applied, it being no more altered by them than sunlight is by the variety of the things it shines on. Hence there is no need to impose any restrictions on our mental powers; for the knowledge of one truth does not, like skill in one art, hinder us from discovering another; on the contrary it helps us.… It must be acknowledged that all the sciences are so closely interconnected that it is much easier to learn them all together than to separate one from the other. If, therefore, someone seriously wishes to investigate the truth of things, he ought not to select one science in particular, for they are all interconnected and interdependent. …

RULE TWO

We should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and indubitable cognition.

All knowledge is certain and evident cognition. Someone who has doubts about many things is no wiser than one who has never given them a thought; indeed, he appears less wise if he has formed a false opinion about any of them. Hence it is better never to study at all than to occupy ourselves with objects which are so difficult that we are unable to distinguish what is true from what is false, and are forced to take the doubtful as certain; for in such matters the risk of diminishing our knowledge is greater than our hope of increasing it. So, in accordance with this Rule, we reject all such merely probable cognition and resolve to believe only what is perfectly known and incapable of being doubted....

published in Belgium towards the end of 1647, entitled ‘An account of the human mind, or rational soul, which explains what it is and what it can be’

[In the second article of the Broadsheet the author states that the attributes of extension and thought] ‘are not opposites, but merely different’. There is a contradiction in this statement. For, when the question concerns attributes which constitute the essence of some substances, there can be no greater opposition between them than the fact that they are different; and when he acknowledges that the one attribute is different from the other, this is tantamount to saying that the one attribute is not the other; but ‘is’ and ‘is not’ are contraries. He says ‘since they are not opposites but merely different, there is no reason why the mind should not be a sort of attribute co-existing with extension in the same subject, though the one attribute is not included in the concept of the other’. There is a manifest contradiction in this statement, for the author is taking something which can hold strictly speaking only for modes and inferring that it holds for any attribute whatsoever; but he nowhere proves that the mind, or the internal principle of thought, is such a mode. On the contrary, I shall presently show that it is not, on the basis of what he actually says in article five.

of rightly conducting one's reason and seeking the truth in the sciences

If this discourse seems too long to be read at a sitting you may divide it into six parts. In the first you will find various considerations regarding the sciences; in the second, the principal rules of the method which the author has sought; in the third, some of the moral rules he has derived from this method; in the fourth, the arguments by which he proves the existence of God and the human soul, which are the foundations of his metaphysics; in the fifth, the order of the questions in physics that he has investigated and, in particular, the explanation of the movement of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to medicine, and also the difference between our soul and that of the beasts; and in the last, the things he believes necessary in order to make further progress in the investigation of nature than he has made, and the reasons which made him write this discourse.

PART ONE

Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false - which is what we properly call 'good sense' or 'reason' - is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things.

René Descartes is universally acknowledged as the father of modern Western philosophy. It is to the writings of Descartes, above all others, that we must turn if we wish to understand the great seventeenth-century revolution in which the old scholastic world view slowly lost its grip, and the foundations of modern philosophical and scientific thinking were laid. The range of Descartes' thought was enormous, and his published work includes writings on mathematics, physics, astronomy, meteorology, optics, physiology, psychology, metaphysics and ethics. No one volume can hope to do justice to such an oeuvre, but the present selection includes the most famous and widely studied texts, and a good bit more besides. We hope it will be a serviceable and reasonably representative anthology for those who wish to study for themselves one of the most important and fascinating philosophical systems ever produced.

The first work included below (in extracts) is the Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence (Regulae ad directionem ingenii). This was the first major piece of philosophy that Descartes composed. It was written in Latin, probably in 1628 or a few years earlier, but was never completed, and was not published during Descartes' lifetime. A Dutch translation appeared in Holland in 1684, and the first Latin edition was published in Amsterdam in 1701. The Regulae (to use the title by which the work is generally known) reveals much about Descartes' early project for establishing a universal method for arriving at the truth, and it presents a conception of knowledge which is strongly influenced by mathematical standards of certainty.

PART ONE

The passions in general

and incidentally the whole nature of man

1. What is a passion with regard to one subject is always an action in some other regard

The defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions. This topic, about which knowledge has always been keenly sought, does not seem to be one of the more difficult to investigate since everyone feels passions in himself and so has no need to look elsewhere for observations to establish their nature. And yet the teachings of the ancients about the passions are so meagre and for the most part so implausible that I cannot hope to approach the truth except by departing from the paths they have followed. That is why I shall be obliged to write just as if I were considering a topic that no one had dealt with before me. In the first place, I note that whatever takes place or occurs is generally called by philosophers a ‘passion’ with regard to the subject to which it happens and an ‘action’ with regard to that which makes it happen. Thus, although an agent and patient are often quite different, an action and passion must always be a single thing which has these two names on account of the two different subjects to which it may be related.

[ON MEDITATION ONE]

[The rejection of previous beliefs]

Here I shall employ an everyday example to explain to my critic the rationale for my procedure, so as to prevent him misunderstanding it, or having the gall to pretend he does not understand it, in future. Suppose he had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.

We turn now to the application to sociological (including anthropological) concerns of the apparatus we have developed. In section 7.1 we consider the relevance of our theory to the traditional concerns of social anthropology; in 7.2 we turn to the analysis of significant patterns of interaction in particular social systems.

Social theory and the study of interaction

We have explored some systematic and universal properties of language use addressed to face redress. But what bearing has all this on sociological or anthropological theory or research? What is universal and pan-cultural cannot, at first glance, be of cultural significance. That which organizes such low-level orders of events can hardly, it might seem, have any bearing on the mainstream sociological concern with social structure. Indeed the study of interactional systematics has been impugned by Giddens (1973:15) on charges of being ‘a resurgence of crude voluntarism, linked to what I would call a retreat from institutional analysis’. Moreover, he continues, the views ‘that the most vital aspects of social existence are those relating to the triviata of “everyday life” … easily rationalise a withdrawal from basic issues involved in the study of macro-structural social forms and social processes’ (ibid.).

One suspects that many social theorists, including some anthropologists, share these views. Nevertheless, in actual fact in social anthropology there has been a persistent if rather thin strand of interest in the way in which social relations of various kinds are realized in interaction. And this interest follows from the sorts of theoretical orientation that have been most influential.

Introduction

We have claimed that a face-bearing rational agent will tend to utilize the FTA-minimizing strategies according to a rational assessment of the face risk to participants. He would behave thus by virtue of practical reasoning, the inference of the best means to satisfy stated ends.

We now claim that what links these strategies to their verbal expressions is exactly the same kind of means-ends reasoning. For example, suppose our Model Person has chosen the strategy of negative politeness: recall that negative politeness consists in doing the FTA on record, with redressive action directed to the addressee's perennial want to not be imposed upon. Then our MP must unambiguously express the FTA, and choose between a set of appropriate ways that would partially satisfy that negative-face want of the addressee's; that is, he must do so if he intends to rationally satisfy his desire to achieve the end we have labelled negative politeness. He may choose more than one such means of redressive action, as long as those chosen are consistent, and the effort expended not out of proportion to the face risk attending the FTA.

Such redressive action need not of course be verbal. In order to partially satisfy your want to have your wants desired, I may indicate my understanding of them by bringing you a gift appropriate to them.

Empirical research may have ramifications in multiple directions. Here we bring together those that we foresee and make some assessment of their relative importance.

Let us first summarize what we set out to do in this paper. We wished in the first place to account for the pan-cultural interpretability of politeness phenomena, broadly defined. We argued that this interpretability derives from the universal mutual-knowledge assumptions of interacting individuals: that humans are ‘rational’ and that they have ‘face’. On these lines we constructed an overall theory of politeness, integrating notions of polite friendliness and polite formality in a single scheme. From abstract ends, our two ‘face wants’, repeated application of rational means-ends reasoning will bring us down to the choice of linguistic and kinesic detail, to the minutiae of message construction. Only at the most abstract level, then, do we need to resort to concepts like ‘ethological primitives’, ‘innate dispositions’, and so on — concepts that notoriously block inquiry. Nor, interestingly, do norms play a central role in the analysis.

This is the core of the investigation, which is to be read against a set of sociological goals. The essential idea is this: interactional systematics are based largely on universal principles. But the application of the principles differs systematically across cultures, and within cultures across subcultures, categories and groups. Moreover, categories of egos distribute these universally based strategies across different categories of alters. From an interactional point of view, then, principles like those here described are some of the dimensions, the building blocks, out of which diverse and distinct social relations are constructed.

Preface

The reissue of ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena’ over a decade after it was written, perhaps calls for some explanation, especially as, for economy of production, we have have had to minimize revisions to a new introduction and bibliography. One reason is that we believe the issues addressed there (and originally, or at least most influentially, by Goff man 1967, 1971) have a perennial importance, for they raise questions about the foundations of human social life and interaction. For example, in the original introduction to this work, Goody (1978a: 12) notes how the phenomena we review below seem to require an enormously complex kind of reflexive reasoning about other agents' desires, and she suggests that this reasoning, with its roots in interpersonal ritual, ‘may be fundamental in an evolutionary sense to social life and human intelligence’. She goes on to suggest (1978a: 15), in the context of a discussion of ‘joking relations’, that it is the essence of these that they carry the ‘presumption of non-threatening intention’. From a gross ethological perspective, perhaps we can generalize somewhat: the problem for any social group is to control its internal aggression while retaining the potential for aggression both in internal social control and, especially, in external competitive relations with other groups (Maynard-Smith, in press).