Rene Descartes's Perceptual Knowledge
This is evident through arguments such as “The Argument from Past Failures”, “The Argument from Madness” and “The Dreaming Argument”. In Descartes’ famous “Dreaming Argument” Descartes argues that “there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.”, giving an example where he thought he was sitting next to a fireplace, unaware he was actually in bed dreaming (13). This argument challenges the idea of the senses again as it presents the idea that we can never know if what we are currently experiencing is real as we may be in a dream. Proving that there is no way to differentiate between reality and a dream, resulting in the idea that our whole life may have just been a dream, Descartes provided a counter argument to elaborate on the “Dreaming Argument” known as the “The Painting Analogy”. This analogy explains how like a painting and painter, dreams derive their material based on experiences we have while awake (13).
In the First Meditation, René Descartes called upon all knowledge to be doubtful. It was a significant reflection on how reality and dreams are vague. By eliminating previous knowledge and theories, Descartes wiped out every conceivable mistake in finding new establishments of information. An indisputable outcome of questioning the senses induced the chance that God is in actuality a malevolent liar, a powerful being capable of manipulating the senses. In the Second Meditation while he contemplates the previous day, he discovered trouble in solving his questions and deemed his senses and memory conniving and faulty.
Although, Descartes makes a good claim for doubting our knowledge, he lacks fundamental support for his claims. Therefore, the dream argument is not credible and is not a good enough reason to doubt our perception of the world. Although I disagree with Descartes claim that we must doubt all our knowledge because the world as we know it might be a dream and therefore, unreliable, I do not doubt his idea that we may be living in a dream. In my paper, I will proceed to prove that the fault in Descartes argument is doubting our knowledge of a real world based on our perceptions of the world we live in. Descartes’ Dream Argument is flawed in the sense that we cannot doubt our knowledge because our perceptions (real or not) must come from something that
Notre Dame ID: 902008117 In René Descartes ' Mediations on First Philosophy, Descartes abandons all previous notions or things that he holds to be true and attempts to reason through his beliefs to find the things that he can truly know without a doubt. In his first two meditations Descartes comes to the conclusion that all that he can truly know is that he exists, and that he is a thinking being. In his third meditation, Descartes concludes that he came to know his existence, and the fact that he is a thinking being, from his clear and distinct perception of these two facts. Descartes then argues that if his clear and distinct perception would turn out to be false, then his clear and distinct perception that he was a thinking being would not have been enough to make him certain of it (Blanchette).
In Skepticism and Content Externalism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Brueckner, summarizes an Hilary Putnam’s argument about “brains in a vat.” Putnam was an American Philosopher and scientist. “Brains in a vat” was an experiment that was taken to help scientist further expand on knowledge. It was a new and updated version of Rene Descartes’ Evil Demon experiment. In the Evil Demon experiment, he believed there was a demon whose purpose was to mislead us by creating illusions for our bodies and our world.
While Descartes is clearly considering even the most remote possibilities in his method of doubt, all he offers is the claim that such a being could exist. However, this is not seen as a solid basis upon which absolute doubt, required by Descartes, can be built. Ironically, his skepticism offers such that I am in a state of doubt, I will also have doubt about the possibility that there could even be a deceiving being. As such, my doubt about the possibility of such a being serves to undermine the greater doubt that is supposed to be generated by this being. In order for the evil demon to generate such a degree of doubt it must be possible for it to exist.
Therefore, Descartes proposes the possibility that some all-powerful, malicious demon could be responsible for the deceit. This demon has the ability to make him doubt rationalist knowledge and he concludes now that even a priori knowledge can be doubted. Seen as Descartes has decided to be uncertain of everything, this demon idea is somewhat
In the ‘Mediation of First Philosophy’, Descartes talks about the foundations of beliefs and knowledge, in which he essentially aims to overturn the basic foundations of knowledge and beliefs, due to previous falsehoods, which had been centred on all scientific and mathematical foundations. Descartes is attempting to go straight for the basic principles on which his former beliefs rested. Descartes first step in undermining his basic principles is to demolish the idea the perception of our senses. In order for Descartes to accomplish such a tedious task, lays out possible arguments to support the idea for which can undermine our senses. He develops an argument called the ‘dreaming argument’, in which he explains that “There are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep” (13).
However, even when he is in fact not sitting by the fire, but lying on bed and sleeping, or deceived by the malicious demon, he is also able to see the same thing under any of these states (Note that this is the possibilities that cannot be eliminated). Descartes emphasizes that “All this will not happen with such distinctness to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did not remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while asleep!” (Descartes, Mediation I, 13).
For how he can be certain that 2+2= 4 and not 5, how can he know for sure that he is not being deceived into believing the answer to be 5 due to a demon. But even if an evil demon did indeed exist, in order to be misled, Descartes himself must exist. As there must be an “I”, that can be deceived. Conclusively, upon Descartes’ interpretations we can come to decipher that in order for someone to exist they must indeed be able to think, to exist as a thinking thing.
The idea that if one can comprehend something in a dream, it therefore must exist in real life. The fact of this is that we know no positive transition between our dream state and the state of reality, and since dreams are so similar to reality, one can never tell when they are truly dreaming. Descartes demonstrates this idea with his own experiences, “How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events-that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire – when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my eyes are certainly awake” (Descartes 145). By using simple experiences like these Descartes is able to emphasize that when a person is dreaming, they do not usually know they are dreaming, and the sensations they experience are as real as if they were awake.
Descartes’ Dreaming argument and Evil Demon argument question the fundamental reality of whether we are asleep or wake and if so how do we know that even when we are awake what we understand to be true is in fact actually true. In this essay I will examine and question both arguments as to whether we can decipher reality from dreaming and whether an evil demon is manipulating us into thinking even the most simplest of things are untrue. The Dreaming Argument from Descartes is an argument that doubts certainty in the external world as we can never fully trust our senses. Everything we know to be true we have learnt through and from our senses.
The first thing he does is doubted what the senses give us. However, Descartes pushes his doubting one step further by doubting whether we are actually awake. In the dream argument Descartes is saying that he often experiences the sensations of dreaming while he is awake. From reflecting on this he comes to the conclusion that if he can falsely perceive himself to be awake while he is dreaming then he can falsely believe he is dreaming while he is awake. So, he can never actually know when he is awake or dreaming (Windt).
5. Why can’t an evil deceiver deceive Descartes about his belief that he thinks? He sees that he can be certain that he exists and that he thinks because even if an evil genius is doing everything possible to deceive Descartes, it can 't deceive him into believing he doesn 't exist. In order for something to be deceived, it must at least exist. Then, Descartes comes up with a rule which allows him 6.
The next step that Descartes uses in the second meditation is the existence of this Godly figure. He questions his own beliefs with that of the God, and argues that a mind should be capable of thinking for them to be of existence, “Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, which puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am capable of producing them myself?” He then puts forward that for one to be deceived by this “evil demon” as he describes it, they have to exist to be deceived.
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