my body. Another argument to the same effect (courtesy of Maine de Biran):
I feel resistance to my will; this resistance is the materiality of time-space
existence, which meets me first of all as the presence of my body.
The sociological cogito thus gives us assurance of several items of reality:
thinking, language, other people, time and space, material bodies. This is not
to say that illusions do not exist, or that mistakes cannot be made about
particular things of this kind. But perceptual illusions and other mistakes can
be discovered and rectified in the usual ways; particular errors occur within a
framework of social language, time, and space, and do not call the reality of
the framework into question. This can be demonstrated by the method of
Cartesian doubt. To say “this is not a real person but a showroom dummy (or
a computer)” is nevertheless to affirm that language exists, with its social basis
and so forth. The possibility that I am dreaming when I make these statements
is nevertheless formulated in sentences, with the same consequences; whether
I am dreaming or not at this particular moment, language and society never-
theless exist.^3
We seem to have drifted beyond the borders of strictly a priori argument.
My arguments as to what is beyond doubt, what survives its own refutation,
have led to asserting the existence of the realm of empirical experience. This
seems inevitable. The distinction between purely conceptual thinking and
empirical experience is not absolute, and indeed is hard to pin down precisely.
Especially when one affirms a sociological view of thinking, there are regions
where the empirical and the conceptual fuse; for example, this fusion takes
place in every particular moment of the experience of thinking. The procedure
of Cartesian doubt is a methodological game; we use it for the sake of
argument, granting one’s imaginary skeptical opponent the maximal possible
concessions, to show what can be established at the highest level of certainty.
Peirce held that Cartesian doubt is impossible, since in fact one never really
doubts everything, but only focuses the beam of a targeted doubt on some
specific points. Peirce meant that the Cartesian philosopher is already immersed
in a stream of language. I have been drawing out the sociological realist
implications of this immersion.
Let us now pass beyond the methodological cogito. A second methodologi-
cal principle can guide us: we are always in medias res, in the middle of things.
We always find ourselves in the midst of time, space, discourse, other people.
In medias res means that our thinking is always preceded by other thinking,
our own and other people’s. Wherever we are is always a region from which
space stretches out toward an indefinite horizon. In medias res is a primal
experience, before we begin to probe for precision. The history of philosophy,
and of mathematics, is full of deep troubles which arise in the search for precise
860 •^ Meta-reflections