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Argument From Dreaming. 1

Argument From Dreaming. 1. This is the second sceptical argument – the second wave of doubt, after the argument from illusion – senses cannot be trusted. Descartes thinks he may have gone too far in doubting the senses – that he should trust them after all!

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Argument From Dreaming. 1

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  1. Argument From Dreaming. 1 • This is the second sceptical argument – the second wave of doubt, after the argument from illusion – senses cannot be trusted. • Descartes thinks he may have gone too far in doubting the senses – that he should trust them after all! • He is after all pretty certain of sitting by the fire in his winter dressing gown. • But – he thinks it perfectly possible he is dreaming he is sitting by the fire in his winter dressing gown. • Thinks there is no certain means by which he can distinguish dream from reality. • We can support Descartes here by noting that when we have certain dream experiences the body appears to accept what the dreaming mind accepts as real – we suffer adrenalin rushes and palpitations of the heart when we feel we are being chased by a murderer in our dream.

  2. Argument From Dreaming. 2 • Descartes’ point is that if we cannot tell dream from waking experience – if we do not even know that we are dreaming rather than awake – then we do not even know if we are having sense experience or not. • Thus the idea of sense experience being reliable is further weakened. • Descartes suggests that although while are dreaming of a round red ball it does not actually exist as an object, the dream perception is based on real experience of a round red ball. • So the dream still points to waking experience – depends on it in fact! • Even if the object is a non existent one – a scaly dragon with a bird head for example – the parts that make up this non real creature are grounded in reality – scales, bird, colour, etc. • In fact Descartes thinks that ideas of shape and number – roundness, two legs, one beak and so on – are ideas which are reliable because they exist even if the objects associated with them in the dream do not.

  3. Argument From Dreaming. 3For whether I am awake or sleeping, two and three added together always make five and a square never has more than four sides and it does not seem possible that truths so apparent can be false. (Med 1) • The argument from dreaming seems to suggest that all ideas dependent upon the senses are unreliable – all a posteriori ideas are to be rejected. • But this leaves a priori ideas – maths, etc, intact and reliable. • Descartes will need the evil demon argument to destroy the reliability of a priori ideas.

  4. Argument From Dreaming. 4Meditation 6 • By the time he arrives at Med 6 Descartes has established the cogito as certain, stated the clear and distinct rule as certain and most importantly established the existence of a wholly good and all powerful God. • This God is no deceiver and he argues in Med 6 that sense experience is real since God would not allow us to be deceived – even the minor errors – the sense of itching in an amputated leg – can be corrected by God’s gifts of rationality, memory and the use of the other senses. • So having convinced himself of the fact that he has solved the problems he raised in Med 1, he now has to revisit the argument from dreaming for earlier he had argued it undermined trust in the senses and now he is in a position where he thinks, because of God, that they can be trusted. So he must show that he was in error about the dream argument earlier! • How to do it though?

  5. Argument From Dreaming. 5Hence, I need no longer fear that what the senses daily show me is unreal. I should reject the exaggerated doubts of the past few days as ridiculous. This is especially true of the chief ground of these doubts – namely, my inability to distinguish dreaming from being awake. (Med 6.) • Dreaming experience is fragmentary and disjointed. For example:- • We find ourselves in locations without having travelled to them. • People appear out of nowhere. • We appear not to exercise memory in dreams – our experience seems not to be continuous but episodic. • Time hardly seems to figure in dreams. • Waking experience has continuity and coherence. For example:- • We can relate our presence in a place easily to how we got there, where we were before. • People we meet have independence from our thought process. • In waking life we have a very powerful sense of this moment being part of a stream linking all parts of our life together. • Time figures strongly in waking life.

  6. Argument From Dreaming. 6 • Descartes brings little that is new to his consideration of dreams in Med 6. • Although a non deceiving God is now in the picture and encourages him to believe God would not allow him to be seriously deceived in mistaking dream for reality, the key points that distinguish waking from dream experience (slide 5) could have been made when the dream argument was first raised. • Waking mind can tell the difference between dream and reality – the dreaming mind cannot. But the waking mind is more essentially “me”. • We can apply clear & distinct rule here – we know that we are awake now! • Descartes refers to his doubts as “exaggerated....ridiculous”...is this a way of escaping the rigor of Cartesian Method? • Does dream argument need a philosophical solution?

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