 Each of these emerge as necessary planks of Descartes’s argument in the Meditations. By simply having a thought (e.g., “I am doubting”) I know that I am having a thought and that this necessarily entails that I exist. This inference depends on the transparency of the mental and a reflective act (which Descartes further emphasizes in the Third Meditation, CSM II 34 / AT VII 49). Further, the intentionality of thought is part of what allows the meditator to infer that he is not alone in the world—he has a thought of an infinitely perfect being, and he has other thoughts of material objects. From this material—the thoughts and what they appear to represent—he is able to infer that God and the material world do in fact exist.