 Not all epistemic self-doubt is so evidently constructive. Socrates could hope to find his answers in the future in part because his doubt was not directed at his faculties for gaining knowledge, and the matters on which he believed himself ignorant were specific and limited. This left him confident of his tools, and still in possession of a lot of knowledge to work with in seeking his answers. For example, it was possible for Socrates to be both sure he did not know what virtue was and yet confident that it was something beneficial to the soul. In contrast, Descartes in his Meditations set out to rid himself of all beliefs in order to rebuild his edifice of belief from scratch, so as to avoid all possibility of erroneous foundations. He did so by finding reason to doubt the soundness of his faculty of, for example, sense perception. Instead of casting doubt on his empirical beliefs one by one, he would doubt the reliability of their source and that would blanket all of them with suspicion, loosening the hold that even basic perceptual beliefs had on his mind. Descartes’ epistemic self-doubt was extreme in undermining trust in a belief-forming faculty, and in the wide scope of beliefs that were thereby called into question. As in the case of Socrates though, his belief states fit together sensibly; as he convinced himself he might be dreaming, thus undermining his trust that he was in a position to know he had hands, he was also shaken out of his belief that he had hands.