Rene Descartes represented a major break from the Aristotelian philosophy that had dominated European thought. In his Meditations, Descartes presented the idea that he could not trust his senses, and all that he thought to exist should be doubted. His first Meditation sets forth his skepticism, and uses three examples to prove that he should doubt his experiences. His three examples are the deception of the senses, the deception of dreams, and the deception of God (or an evil genius). This paper will explain Cartesian skepticism and discuss the dreaming argument.
The goal of Descartes’ skepticism is to provide a clean slate from which to build his philosophical system. Descartes claims that he had “detected how many were the false beliefs” that he had “admitted as true” for a bit of time before he started writing. Descartes believes that not everything he has learned or experienced is true, so he doubts that anything is true. As he frames it, “if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole.” From this vantage point, he can begin to decide what is really true.
Descartes presents three examples in which his senses or experiences are clearly incorrect. His first argument doubts the senses, by showing how they can deceive him. His second argument rests upon the idea of dreams being false experiences, those that seem to be real, but are not. And his third argument is based upon the concept of some sort of supernatural being that is able to trick him into thinking that what he experiences is real. By the end of the First Meditation, Descartes claims to have found ample reason to doubt all that he experiences. This lays the groundwork for the rest of the Meditations, so the destruction of his skeptical arguments leads to the ruin of his philosophical system.
Although many have found fault with all three of Descartes’ skeptical arguments, I find the dreaming argument to be the most problematic. The dream argument aims to discredit sensory beliefs by showing that we often have sensory experiences that are false. By showing that what we experience in dreams, although they may often appear to be real, is false, Descartes hopes to present a different side to his overall argument that the senses should be doubted.
Descartes begins the argument by admitting that “in my dreams representing to myself the same things or sometimes even less probable things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments.” This statement is damaging to the argument, because he says that his dreams are often (if not almost always) not easily confused with actual experience. However, he goes on to state that he has often dreamt that he was awake, sitting at his desk writing. This is a dubious claim.
First and foremost, it is difficult to believe that his dreams were so vivid as to represent the world fully enough to believe they were real. A reply to this may be that our dreams may produce enough sensation to temporarily fool us into thinking that we are truly awake. This reply is no good because we will eventually wake up and realize that we were merely dreaming.
Secondly, by making this claim, Descartes is admitting that he was indeed able to distinguish the dream from actual reality. He would not be able to make this claim if dreams were as powerful as Descartes claims they are. One possible answer to this issue returns to the beginning of the Meditation, in which Descartes states that if there is reason to doubt one item in a set of experiences, then the entire set of experiences should be doubted, and because we have all experienced at least one dream that felt to be real, we should question how many experiences we thought we have had were really dreams. To this reply, I have no answer, and I feel that if this is what Descartes intended, this is a strong argument in favor of the dream argument.
Descartes’ next major point is that what we dream is based upon actual experiences. By this, Descartes is saying that our dreams do not invent anything new, but alter and twist what is real. As further evidence, he states that even artists are unable to invent new paintings without relying upon existing images. What Descartes wishes to do with this is show that we cannot trust the whole product, but that we must rely upon the simplest form that objects take. He uses this to claim that only the “basic” sciences such as “Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind, which treat only things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not” should be trusted.
However, this statement is also counter-productive to the dream argument. It is counter-productive because this argument can also be used against what Descartes is arguing for. Descartes wishes a return to the Platonic system in which reason rules, as opposed to the Aristotelian system that had been the accepted school for over a millennium in Europe. While his goals and motives may be worthy, his argument is not. By putting forth that only sciences that deal with imaginary objects are valid, Descartes is strengthening the validity of his dreams. In other words, if we trust arithmetic because we cannot ever truly see “two,” and we can only envision the concept within our minds, then we must also trust our dreams, which we will never experience outside of our minds. Although Descartes means to say that these objects may only be viewed in “the mind’s eye” (the Cartesian Theater), I feel that it is still weak. The Cartesian Theater has been thoroughly discredited over the years, and is no longer an accepted theory (for a particularly vivid attack upon the Cartesian Theater, refer to Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett).
Descartes’ conclusion is weak as well. He states at the beginning that if he is able to find fault with some sensory experiences, he should doubt them all, and then sets about to find a few sensory experiences that he can doubt. Unfortunately, his logic uses inference, which is far weaker than deduction. A deductive argument follows from the premises, whereas an inductive argument uses the truthfulness of the premises as proof that the conclusion should be true, if the conclusion is of the same type as the premises. So, by using inference, Descartes is further weakening his claim.
Overall, I appreciate and agree with much of Descartes’ final analysis of the world in the Meditations. However, I feel that the senses argument and the evil deceiver argument are flawed as well. Throughout the Meditations, Descartes makes claims with little or faulty backing evidence, which weakens his arguments considerably. I feel that the dreaming argument is one such case.
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