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Reflecting on this, Descartes concludes that “there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.” This leads ...
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Phil. 159: Epistemology Sept. 6, 2018 Lecture 2: Descartes’ Dreaming Argument I. Descartes’ First Meditation A quick and dirty overview of the main dialectic of the First Meditation :
II. The Dreaming Argument Let’s look more closely at Descartes’ dreaming argument. (Or, rather, let’s look more closely at one common interpretation of that argument.) Descartes’ first step appears to involve making the following inference: (1) Sometimes when you’re dreaming, you can’t tell whether or not you’re dreaming. (2) So, even when you’re awake, you can’t tell whether or not you’re dreaming. This is a significant move: (2) is a stronger claim than (1). It might seem that, in making this move, Descartes is assuming the following to be a generally valid inference: (b) When you’re in the bad case , you can’t tell whether you’re in the good or the bad case. (g) So, when you’re in the good case , you can’t tell whether you’re in the good or the bad case. However, this sort of inference is not always legitimate. (Can you think of a counterexample?) Descartes thinks that there is something special about the connection between the specific case of dreaming that he is considering (= the bad case ) and the corresponding case of being awake (= the good case ) that makes (2) follow from (1). What is that connection? It’s that one has the exact same course of experience in both cases: “from the inside,” the two cases are indistinguishable. So we can add an extra premise to the dreaming argument to represent its dependence on this assumption: (1) Sometimes when you’re dreaming, you can’t tell whether or not you’re dreaming. (1a) Any course of experience you can have while awake can also be had while having one of those sorts of dreams. (2) So, even when you’re awake, you can’t tell whether or not you’re dreaming. From (2), it seems that we can conclude the following: (3) So, you can’t know that you’re not dreaming.