Meditation 6. Trusting the Senses

1. Meditation 6. Trusting the Senses • The senses certainly appear real. • Rejects God or himself as the source of sense impression & concludes they are real. • God is no deceiver and God is in control. • It would be a sort of deception if God allowed the senses to appear so real yet be false...so they can, in general, be trusted. • There are still errors in sense perception but one false sensory perception is usually corrected by the other senses and by memory and rationality. • A man may feel pain in an amputated limb but his other senses correct his error.

2. Meditation 6. Dreaming Revisited • Dreaming is incoherent by nature. • In dreams our experience is quite disjointed and fragmented. • In dreams we do not experience our lives as part of a life whose history is part of our memory. • We know when we are awake for we do have memory and our thoughts and actions/experiences are coherent. • While we take dream experience seriously when dreaming, we are quite clear it has no reality when awake. We can tell the difference.

3. Descartes’ Meditations. Test (1) • Explain the Cartesian method of doubt (3) • Explain Descartes’ views on the senses and authorities as sources of knowledge. (3) • Explain the dream argument and it’s purpose. (4) • What does the evil demon argument do that the dream argument can’t? (4) • How does the 2nd Meditation open? (3) • What is the cogito? (3) • What kind of “I” does Descartes’ believe he is? (1) • Why does he draw this conclusion? (3) • Explain the wax example. (3) • The cogito appeared clearly and distinctly true. What rule does this lead Descartes to state? (2) • Explain the Trademark Argument. (5) • In Med 6 Descartes returns to the senses and dreaming. Explain his conclusions. (6) (40)