In Rene Descartes Meditation on First Philosophy, Descartes has cast a net of doubt on everything that he knows using three main arguments. In order to know something to be certain and true, he must get rid of the skeptical hypotheses to find truths that one simply cannot doubt. In order to fully overcome these doubts that he casts in Meditation I, he must analyze and show that he could be certain of the existence of the material world, despite the dreaming and demon arguments, which can be seen in the Sixth Meditation. He methodically gets to this by first considering the possible causes of material objects followed by the nature of these material objects and which attributes they possess.
In Meditation VI Descartes considers the relationship between the cause of an idea and the idea itself in terms of the “formal” or ‘eminent’ reality in the cause and the ‘objective’ reality in the idea. Formal reality is the kind of reality something has by virtue of the kind of thing it is, while the objective reality is possessed only by representations, that is, by things that stand for other things. In essence a thing has objective reality, for Descartes, if it is a representation of something. For example, a bird is objectively real, and to say that the bird, as the cause of my idea, has formal reality is to say that it has the represented properties that my idea has in actual fact. In other words, the bird actually has wings, whereas the idea only has represented wings. We can distinguish between the idea, considered as the carrier of the representational content, and also the idea considered as the content itself – much in the same way that when we consider a painting we can think of it as canvas and paint, and also as a painting of something (say, a bird). Descartes’ job is to show that the formal reality is the true source of the objective reality of the idea; to do