Descartes 'Dream Argument'

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Descartes started an argument called the Dream Argument, in which he believes that we shouldn’t trust our senses completely and that our senses are capable of blurring the lines between reality (awake) and dreaming (asleep). Descartes didn’t rely on his sense of perception but rather he held the belief that true knowledge comes through reason. When he put his argument forward, G.E. Moore created his defense against the Dream Argument. and stated that “the senses should be trusted completely and that some things cannot be explained”. The things that were not able to be explained would be explained as common sense. Most often, that is not the case and reasoning should justify certain knowledge since senses are often warped by illusions or impaired. …show more content…
Descartes states that he doesn’t know when he isn’t dreaming because his dreams have deceived him previously, but Moore argues that for one to know that they have been deceived they must’ve trusted their senses. This is where Descartes argument becomes inconsistent/self-defeating because one point he says is that he never knows when he is dreaming but on the other point he says he has been deceived in dreams”. Moore wants to understand: how can Descartes know he has been falsified? This means that Descartes acknowledges his senses, and that's how he knew he was awake and that whatever he saw was in his …show more content…
Descartes, and other philosophers who hold a similar mindset believe that our sense are inaccurate and we can only obtain true knowledge through logic. On the other hand, there are philosophers who don’t see the seriousness of it and brush it off as common sense. Such a person was Moore, who believed that we know a lot of things, but many of those things simply cannot be explained and it's due to common sense. He created two oppositions, “Flipping over the argument and the other considering Descartes as inconsistent”. Both these oppositions point towards Descartes claim of how he specifically knows the fine line between fake and real, what made him believe the dream was actually a dream and when did he know he was he awake. Although senses might seem accurate they can be distorted, and for this reason, we need to understand certainty by the use of
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