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<blockquote>“But no sooner had I completed the whole course of study that normally takes one straight into the ranks of the ‘learned’ than I completely changed my mind about what this education could do for me. For I found myself tangled in so many doubts and errors that I came to think that my attempts to become educated had done me no good except to give me a steadily widening view of my ignorance!”</blockquote>
Descartes concluded that if his goal was to attain certain knowledge about the world,the accepted methodology for doing so must be rejected, and a new one would be required. Methodology held a central place in his epistemology; in fact, one of Descartes’ criticisms of Galileo was that he failed to produce a fully developed methodology to justify his discoveries, and had simply explained particular physical phenomena.[[CiteRef::Ariew (1986)]] To that end he embraced his skeptical doubts Rather than experience and devised a intuition, Descartes new methodology based on , '''methodological skepticism'''; a methodology whereby he rejects was based on reason and on embracing his skeptical doubts. His strategy was first, to reject all knowledge that he cannot be certain of, accepts accept only those propositions which he can accept as certain, and proceed deductively from those axioms according to reason. By this method Descartes hoped to produce a kind of systematized knowledge that, he believed, could be universally acceptable. In his 'Meditations on First Philosophy', [[CiteRef::Descartes (2004)]] Descartes identified the sole indubitable proposition upon which he would build the his entire rest of his philosophical system as his famous '''‘Cogito, Ergo Sum’''' (also styled ‘Dubito, Ergo Cogito, Ergo Sum’ or simply as ‘the Cogito’); “I think, therefore I am.” He concluded that the one thing he could be certain of was his own existence as a thinking being. From this foundation Descartes deduced that he was a created thing, his requiring a creator, that creator being God, the benevolent nature of God, and the consequent reliability of his God-given senses and reason, all that were therefore useful to gain knowledge of which an external world. This reasoning formed the broader foundation of his systematized scientific worldview.[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]]
Although Descartes maintained some methodological aspects of the Scholastic-Aristotelian mosaic – namely the axiomatic-deductive, epistemic-foundationalist structure of investigation – one critical difference in his methodology was the shift in the method of theory choice. It jettisoned the Aristotelian expectation that a theory must be experientially based and intuitively obvious for it to be acceptable, and although his system, as it ended up, allowed for knowledge that was both experiential and intuited,[[CiteRef::Newman (2014)]] the ultimate justification for knowledge claims was human reason. Descartes was both a '''rationalist''' and an ''a priorist'', in that his epistemology and metaphysics allows for the existence of synthetic a priori propositions.
