Descartes Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 3

Descartes - Essay Example Thus, the dream argument seeks to establish that, inference of the accuracy of information is not entirely a decision that humans can rely on the senses, rather, it is essential to apply rigorous testing to determine their authenticity. The dream argument is a postulation by Descartes. He argues that the act of dreaming is a preliminary evidence of the possibility that the senses that people rely on to make a distinction between reality and illusions are not trustworthy. He further seeks to show that, there is the need for further evaluation of the senses and their perceptions to establish the facts of reality. In the usual life, people dream as they sleep (Descartes 9). However, in these dreams, the people perceive and feel things as though they are real. The people, while in the dream, do not have the knowledge that they are dreaming, they only come to realize they were dreaming when they wake. Thus, this then raises the basis of the dream argument as Descartes presents it, that, there is the possibility that people are constantly dreaming and never wake into reality. Moreover, there is a possibility that people cannot ascertain whether they are in the dream or awake in their engagements. In this first meditation, he presents what is in doubt, opening the mediation with several falsehoods that believed in his life and further faulting of the knowledge that he built on those falsehoods. The mediator sweeps all his former knowledge away, sits himself and decides to build up his knowledge. However, as he realizes from so doing, he establishes that, all the things that he learned in the past came through his senses. He continues further to doubt the foundations of all opinions that he founded on his senses, acknowledging that the senses can deceive. To illustrate his argument, Descartes presents the dream argument using the