you twisted what I said. I didn't talk about language itself, but about how the mind works the sentence out into meaning. For us, the abstraction of the word "thinking" usually does not make sense since in our mind we just strip it off relativeness to other objects. So, when we look at the word we think that there ought to be "somebody" thinking, as the world is relative and not abstract (in general at least, I guess extreme forgetfulness makes things exist without relativeness to things such as "when", "where" and "how", but that's not normal and so we seek out to find out how these "remaining objects" came to our mind in the first place)Impenitent wrote:
existence as a result of the rules of language is not proof
verb therefore subject doing verb?
oh, special verb therefore existence of subject doing verb...
language is fun
-Imp
A sentence does not make something true in and of itself. The point, my point at least, about Descartes is that its highly reasonable that there ought to exist "something" thinking, something having the thoughts, or containing the thoughts etc. Even if a thought does not strictly speaking need to have it, it makes no sense(/reasonableness) for it not to have it. Because of this, a non-fundamentalist sceptic can digest it and find him-/herself content with it, even if you could in principle apply further doubt.
I usually consider myself some kind of sceptic, but I prefer to work on reasonableness instead of too much principles. Which I guess is the stance of most sceptics.