Why do Gettier-style cases demonstrate that the tripartite account of knowledge is unsustainable? How should one go about offering a theory of knowledge that is immune to Gettier-style cases? Can one offer a theory of knowledge that is immune to Gettier-style cases?

The Classical Analysis of Knowledge

Steve drives to work and at the lights he sees his colleague, Ann, in her car. He smiles and waves at her, but she looks at him as if she has never seen him before. This upsets Steve and he keeps thinking for the rest of the day why Ann has acted that way.

The scenario above fits the Classical Analysis of Knowledge as Justified True Belief:

S  knows that p if and only if 

(i) p is true;

(ii) S believes that p;

(iii) S is justified in believing that p (Ichikawa).

Steve forms a belief that he sees Ann, he is justified in his belief - he sees her in the car next to his, this is a standard morning situation, they usually meet at the lights on their way to work. And Steve is right, Ann is in the car. All conditions are met, so Steve’s belief can count as knowledge.
Gettier cases
     There is a twist in the story above. Steve doesn’t know that the woman behind the wheel is not Ann, but her identical twin sister, driving Ann to work in Ann’s car that morning. Ann is sitting next to her, but at the moment when the cars meet, she is bending down trying to pick her lipstick from the car floor. In the light of these facts, does Steve really have knowledge?
     The scenario is an example of a Gettier-style case, which shows that it is possible to lack knowledge even though one’s judgement is both true and supported by evidence, therefore justified. Apparently, the JTB is insufficient for knowledge. The problem was first acknowledged in the Middle Ages by Dharmottara, but only after Edmund Gettier’s famous paper "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” (1963),
it spurred epistemologists to rethink the concept of knowledge and to fix what was missing from the tripartite analysis (Ichikawa). Gettier cases show the following pattern:

(i)             S believes that p

(ii)            p is true

(iii)          S has good evidence for the p

(iv)          there is a hidden fact S is not aware of which causes him to make a false assumption regarding the belief.

     Gettier “knowers” arrive at justified true beliefs unaware of hidden facts. There are three major factors that undermine the JTB: false assumptions, fallible justification, and the presence of luck. All Gettier “knowers” form beliefs on false premises, and despite good evidence they end up with justified false beliefs. Only thanks to luck the false beliefs turn out to be true.

Strengthening justification - adding a fourth condition (JTB + X)
     In the light of the above conclusion, the solution seems simple – let’s strengthen the justification condition by eliminating false beliefs and hidden facts that destroy the justification. That was the idea behind M. Clark’s No false lemmas approach, followed by K. Lehre and T. Paxson’s No defeater approach, both adding a fourth condition to the JTB (Ichikawa).
     According to No false lemmas, S knows that p if and only if
(iv) It is on true grounds that S believes that p (Clark 447).
The problem is the condition excludes good cases of knowledge. In real life, one false belief does not undermine the weight of solid evidence supporting a true belief. It would not be reasonable to deny knowledge every time a false premise slips in between a tonne of true ones. Investigators working on crime cases would not be able to claim they have made justified judgements against the suspect, if just one witness gave a false testimony (Nagel 49). If knowledge requires forming a belief on entirely true grounds, then this one false testimony ruins everything. Another problem here is that the approach fits only cases where the knowers form beliefs on the basis of inference, and does not apply to instances where knowers do not rely on an inference.

     Lehre/Paxson’s No defeater proposes a different fourth condition. In Gettier cases the justification the “knowers” have to support having knowledge is destroyed by
a defeater – a hidden fact they are not aware of (Ichikawa). The analysis of knowledge should be then Undefeated Justified True Belief and the fourth condition is:
(iv) there are no justification destroying facts (defeaters).
The problem here, however, is that one can have knowledge despite hidden defeaters, as long as one defeater cancels out the other one (e.g. Lehre/Paxson’s Tom Grabit case) (Sudduth). But what if the defeaters cancel one another, and the knower’s belief is still “gettiered”? For example, Sue knows she has $5 bill in her wallet – that is how much change she got after paying for coffee. What she doesn’t know is that the bill slipped out when she was putting it in the wallet. Later that day, her husband who owed her $5, puts a $5 bill in her wallet, unbeknownst to her. She knows that she has $5 in the wallet and she is right. Does this count as knowledge given the circumstances?

Dropping Justification : The Causal Theory of Knowledge, Reliabilism, and Tracking Theory

     Adding a fourth condition to the JTB does not help. Maybe the problem lies in the JTB itself? In 1967, A. Goldman suggested dropping justification in favour of  causal connection (Nagel 51). The problem with justification is that it does not always lead to truth, it can support false beliefs and mislead the knower. What is more, sometimes we cannot justify how we came to know a fact, which does not mean that we cannot claim knowledge. Knowing a fact is caused by a belief about that fact (Goldman 451). Therefore S knows that p if and only if
(iii) p is causally connected in an appropriate way with S’s believing p.
Sense perception, testimony, and inference – all count as appropriate causal connection. As long as the knower’s belief is causally connected to the fact through any of above ways, he can claim knowledge. Gettier “knowers” are causally disconnected from the facts about which they form a beliefs, for example the traveller in the desert believing he sees water is not connected through sense perception to said water. It is his mind playing tricks on him. So appropriate causal connection might fix the problem, and also save the instances of knowledge for which the knower does not have a proper justification on hand.

     The Causal Theory is not free from objections. What exactly is meant by “appropriate causal chain”? Or can we really quit the justification condition? And what about cases of knowledge which do not depend on causal connection but some environmental factors? Goldman’s Fake Barn scenario illustrates a case in which the knower is causally connected to a fact and does not have knowledge: Henry visits
a county where 99% of the barns he drives by are barn facades, of which Henry does not know. When he points at one of the barns, showing it to his son, it is the only genuine barn (Nagel 52). However, with all the fakes around, can we say that he knows he is looking at a real barn? The causal connection here is intact, and yet it is questionable whether Henry knows. Given the environment, Henry is forming his belief in an unreliable way. Gettier-style luck and accidentally true belief play a major role here.

     This led Goldman to replace the Causal Theory with Reliabilism:
S knows that p if and only if
(iii) S has a true belief formed by a reliable belief-forming process (Nagel 53).

Reliable belief-forming process (e.g. through sense perception) has to be likely to deliver the truth in the knower’s environment. And this is what causes objections here: if reliable means ‘likely to produce a true belief’, then how much of  “likely” will be enough to count as “producing true belief” and counting as knowledge? How do we identify the reliable belief-forming mechanism? Depending on the mechanism we choose, we either end up having knowledge or not (Nagel 53). And even when our belief-forming mechanism is a reliable one, e.g. judging the probability of how likely it is that you have a winning lottery ticket, you cannot really know until the results are announced (Nagel 53).

     To avoid the problems posed by Reliabilism, another approach to knowledge was proposed, R. Nozik’s Tracking Theory, which introduced two counterfactual conditions (tracking conditions):
S knows that p if and only if
     (iii) If p were not true and S used belief-forming method M, then S would not  
     believe p;
    (iv) If p were true and S used belief forming method M, then S would believe that p
    (Adams 19).

To know a fact it is not enough to be right about the state of affairs. Our beliefs must track the truth given the methods by which we form them. The tracking theory solves certain problems caused by the Causal Theory and Reliabilism, but generates new ones, e.g. it is incompatible with the closure principle.

Conclusions
     Fixing the problem pointed out by Gettier seems unsolvable. All the alternative analyses prove untenable, being either too strict and ruling out cases of knowledge, or  exposing further problems. In real life, knowers have no access to all the necessary facts that contribute to whether they have knowledge or not. To construct an analysis that would be immune to objections, it would need to contain
a condition that the knower is omniscient. Otherwise, there is no way of escaping false assumptions, hidden facts, ugly surprises, false testimonies, and lucky circumstances. Perhaps this is why the analysis of knowledge is ineffective.

Word count: 1556

Works cited

Adams, Fred. Tracking Theories of Knowledge. Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da
     Pucrs 50 (4):1-35. Pontificia Universidade Catolica, 2005

 

Clark, Michael. “Knowledge and Grounds: A Comment on Mr. Gettier’s Paper.”
      in M. Huemer (ed), Epistemology - Contemporary Readings, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 447-9


Collins, John M. “Epistemic Closure Principles.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
     iep.utm.edu/epis-clo/#SH3b. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021

Goldman, Alvin. ”A Causal Theory of Knowing.” in M. Huemer (ed), Epistemology
     - Contemporary Readings, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 450-63

Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins and Matthias Steup. "The Analysis of Knowledge",
     The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N.
     Zalta (ed.), plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/knowledge-
     analysis/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2021

Nagel, Jennifer. Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction. Kindle ed., OUP Oxford,  
     2014

Sudduth, Michael, “Defeaters in Epistemology.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
      iep.utm.edu/ep-defea/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2021

 

Bibliography

 

Gettier, E. L. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” in M. Huemer (ed.), Epistemology
     - Contemporary Readings, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 444–6

Lehrer, Keith and Thomas Paxson. “Knowledge: Undefeated Justified True Belief.”
      in M. Huemer (ed.), Epistemology - Contemporary Readings, London and New
      York, Routledge, pp. 464-74

Pritchard, Duncan. What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? 4th ed., Kindle ed.,  
     Routledge, 2018

Can reality be known as it is? What is the role of the senses in the quest for 'real' knowledge?

       The two questions invite us to consider whether we can know the truth about the external world. It is also implied that there is a possibility that the ‘real’ reality is not what we actually perceive with our senses. The issue is multi-layered and in order to get the whole of the picture we need to consider the following aspects: how do we define ‘real’  and reality in the first place, to what extent it can be known – in other words, what kind of access we have to the external world. Then we need to look closer at the problem of sense perception, whether it is a passive or active process, and how the structure of cognitive organs and perceptual apparatus affect the perception. Lastly, we can formulate conclusions regarding the relationship between perception and reality – whether reality is an objective mind-independent realm or whether it exists only in the form of ideas in a mind. The answers to the two title questions will vary depending on how we understand the concepts.

What is real?

      If real is what appears to our senses, then, to quote Morpheus from The Matrix (1999), ”real is nothing more than electrical signals interpreted by the brain”. By that definition anything that the brain processes might be called real: illusions, hallucinations and dreams. Is real, then, any sensation that occurs as a psychical event in a person who experiences it? Obviously not. The fact that something appears to the senses is not sufficient to be called real or reality. We need a more precise definition here:  “real is whatever is truly in one's experience and is not falsely alleged to be so and what is coherent with the overall network of our experience” ( Ritchie 265). So the criteria for “real” can be summed up as follows:
(i) there is an agreement between the inferences drawn from the experience of our different senses, (ii) other people’s judgements concur with our own, (iii)  the present experience is consistent with the results of our and other people’s previous experience.

What is reality?    

      There are many definitions of reality, but the most exhaustive reads:
“the sum or aggregate of all that is real or existent within a system, as opposed to that which is only imaginary. The term is also used to refer to the ontological status of things, indicating their existence. In physical terms, reality is the totality of a system, known and unknown” (Wikipedia). The “unknown” part here is interesting, taking into consideration the fact that as human species we only get access to a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of the electromagnetic spectrum[1] (NNSA). We do not perceive most of reality surrounding us, at least not with a “naked eye”.

Views on reality

      Before the advent of science in the XVII^th century, the philosophical perspectives on reality can be summed up as a debate about whether the external world is independent of the observer’s mind (Platonic realism, naïve realism, indirect realism),  or whether it is the observer’s mind that brings it into existence (George Berkeley’s idealism) (Wikipedia). These two positions were reconciled in XVIII^th c. with Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism: there is a mind-independent reality (noumena) but what the observer makes out of it is an entirely different thing (phenomena) (Stang). The observer cognizes the external world not as it is in itself, but only as it appears filtered through or processed by the observer’s mind’s innate systems. It is as if we had blue-tinted glasses[2] on all the time, and anything we look at looks bluish, even if the objects are not bluish themselves (Blumenau). This was a revolutionary insight.  

  Problems of perception

      Human species acquire knowledge about the external world primarily through sense perception: five sensory modalities of vision, audition, olfaction, touch and taste). The role of the sense perception is therefore to help us successfully navigate reality. The fact that we have survived as a species must mean the sense perception is doing its job well. Naturally, we tend to assume that our perceptions are an accurate portrayal of the real world, quite literally what we see, is what we get, but when we compare our sensory experience with other people, we often find out that  the same things cause different sensations in us: we disagree about the colour of things, temperature of the ambience, smells, and tastes of meals. We also notice that there are people whose perceptual experiences differ substantially to ours (e.g. colour blindness or tetrachromacy[3], lacking certain receptors that decide whether or not we experience certain tastes or smells[4] ), and as medical science progressed we learn that our differing perception has its roots in the structure and the workings of the organs responsible for receiving and relaying the signals from the outside world through the nervous system to the brain. All of the above  show that, in a way, we live in different subjective realities. Such constatation may raise doubts whether there is any objective reality (a blow for a realist), independent of the observer. On the other hand, something is causing perceptual sensations in us. Something external to us,  “the thing in itself” or noumena as Kant calls it (Stang).

      Another important thing we know about perception is that we do not perceive objects directly - the perception is mediated by tiny particles, in case of vision they are photons which bounce off the objects and hit the retina of the eye, in case of the audition vibrating particles hitting the receptors in the ear, or in case of olfaction molecules released by substances hitting the olphactory receptors. The signals are transmitted to the brain which translates the data into images, sounds or smells.. This fact alone should make us cautious that since we have no direct access to the material world, we can’t know for certain that what we perceive with our senses is the thing in itself. We are directly acquainted only with what is mental in nature (Westerhoff 39).  The external meaningless sense data is translated into meaningful information understood by the brain, which means that perception is an active process. What appears in our mind depends largely on the structure of the sensory apparatus (e.g number of cones and rods in the eye, nerve cells condition, etc), the fact that  our cognitive tools are integrated and as a network affect the decoding and  interpretation process (Russell’s analogy to blue-tinted glasses illustrates nicely how the sensory apparatus affects perception). And on top of that there are cognitive factors that contribute to the whole process (prior experience, expectations, implicit  biases, etc).  All things considered, it is obvious that all these factors affect the picture of reality that we conjure up in the mind. It is only obvious that there must be distortions, some information “lost in translation”, all leading to subjective renditions.

       Studies in cognitive science and neuroscience further confirm the thesis that we do not perceive reality as it is, but as we are – with our sensory limitations, cognitive biases and post-perceptual interpretations. As  Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, puts it:  "We don't just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the inside in. […] In fact, we're all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It's just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality” (Seth)

Conclusion       

      So can reality be known as it is? The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It is knowable, even if only within certain ranges of frequencies. We do have access to it through our senses (albeit indirect and mediated, but still first-hand). Over the centuries we have managed to build vast knowledge about reality – knowledge that works in practice, so we get something right. We have survived as a species, which means that our sense perception is efficient.  However, there is no way we can step out of ourselves (or take off the blue-tinted glasses) to check if what we get is what we see.  
      Errors and illusions show (together with studies)  that perceptual reality does not match the objective reality. The brain has an active part in the decoding of data. Reality is constructed in the mind, but for sure there is an external reality which causes the perception. The role of the sense perception in the quest for ‘real’ is to make reality as user-friendly to enhance our chances of survival, as the computer desktop interface is to its users.[5] Accuracy is not as important as fitness of perceptions. We perceive what we need to perceive and in way which will be best understood and utilized by the brain.

 

WORKS CITED

·                Blumenau, Ralph. “Kant and the Thing In_Itself.” Philosophy Now, no. 31, 2001, www.philosophynow.org/issues/31/Kant_and_the_Thing_in_Itself .

·                Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "electromagnetic spectrum". Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Mar. 2019,  www.britannica.com/science/electromagnetic-spectrum . Accessed 24  Nov 2021.

·                Hoffman, Donald. The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition

·                NNSA National Nuclear Security Administration. “Visible Light: Eye-Opening Research at NNSA.” Energy.Gov, 17 Oct. 2018, www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/visible-light-eye-opening-research-nnsa .

·                Ritchie, David G. “What Is Reality?” The Philosophical Review, vol. 1, no. 3,1892, p. 256. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2175783.

·           Seth, Anil. “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality.” TED Talks, TED Ideas Worth Spreading, 18 July 2017,   
  www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality

·                Stang, Nicholas F., "Kant’s Transcendental Idealism", The Stanford
      Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
      www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism . Accessed 21 Nov 2021

 

·                Wachowski, Lana, and Lilly Wachowski. The Matrix. Warner Bros., 1999.      
      www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the_matrix.pdf

·                Westerhoff, Jan. Reality: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)  (p. 15). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.  

·                Wikipedia contributors. "Reality." Wikipedia, The Free Encycloped  Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 Oct. 2021. Web. 24 Nov. 2021.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

·                Guttenplan, Samuel; Hornsby, Jennifer; Janaway, Christopher; Schwenkler,
      John. Reading Philosophy. Wiley. Kindle Edition.

·                "Primary and Secondary Qualities ." Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  
      Encyclopedia.com. 25 Oct. 2021 www.encyclopedia.com. Accessed 20
      Nov. 2021

·                Perman, Anna. “The ‘brussels Sprouts’ Gene: TAS2R38.” The Guardian, 14 Feb. 2018, www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/nov/01/brussel-sprout-gene .

Robson, David. “The Women with Superhuman Vision.” BBC Future, 5 Sept. 2014, www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision .

---

[1] The electromagnetic spectrum covers an extremely broad range, from the lowest to the highest frequency (longest to shortest wavelength), includes all radio waves, infrared radiation,visible light, ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and gamma rays (Britannica)

[2] The blue spectacles analogy was used by Bertrand Russell  to describe the work of  Immanuel Kant in  A History of Western Philosophy (1945)

[3] The women with superhuman vision https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision

[4] The 'brussels sprouts' gene: TAS2R38 https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/nov/01/brussel-sprout-gene

[5] Analogy used by Donal Hoffman in his book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes . W. W. Norton & Company. 2019

Why is there more to knowledge than merely true belief or even justified true belief?

 

What is knowledge? The answer seems easy, but as soon as we begin to analyse the concept, we trip up on the problem of the criterion. Should we take the methodist approach - define the criteria and then look for cases that meet them, or the particularist approach - pick cases of knowledge and identify the criteria (Pritchard 21-2)?

Let us take the methodist approach and consider the classical account of knowledge attributed to Plato (Pritchard 23). It states that knowledge is Justified True Belief - if one claims to know a proposition, one must believe it to be true and support it with good reasons (justification). However, there are situations when we know a fact but find it difficult to justify it with confidence. For example, a co-worker asks you what time the meeting starts, and you reply “3 p.m.”, but when she asks you how you know it, you cannot remember.  As it happens, you are right, and the meeting starts at 3 p.m. So why isn’t a true belief sufficient? Shouldn’t truth be the essential requirement for a belief to qualify as knowledge? To answer this question, let us consider another situation. Two students take an MCQ exam. Student A has studied diligently and confidently picks the right answers. Student B has not revised; he picks the options that seem correct, but he is not at all confident; he keeps changing his mind, erasing and choosing the answers again. Surprisingly, he ends up getting most of them correct. Although both students achieve the goal of passing the exam, student B cannot credit his success to knowing but to dumb luck. A random guess or fallacious reasoning may coincidentally lead to truth, but a belief formed in such a way cannot equal knowledge.

We can see that knowledge is more than mere true belief. Knowledge gives certitude; mere true beliefs are volatile. Plato makes a clear distinction between the two concepts, comparing true beliefs to unchained statues of Daedalus - they lack lasting value considering how easy it is to lose them. In contrast, knowledge is stable, not prone to change, and therefore more valuable, instrumentally or intrinsically. It can be used with confidence and will take the knower far (Pritchard 14).

Plato’s JTB is not free from a major problem, though; one can be justified in their true belief and not have knowledge. Edmund Gettier’s famous counterexamples illustrate such cases (444-6). Gettier-style knowers arrive at justified true beliefs unaware of hidden facts, e.g. in the Stopped Clock Case, the person looks at the clock at just the right time it indicates, and not knowing it is broken, forms a justified and true belief about the time (Pritchard 24). The belief is formed on false assumptions, though.

In the attempt to fix the Gettier problem, philosophers have proposed a number of alternative theories and approaches to the analysis of knowledge. Some suggested adding a fourth condition to strengthen justification, others tried replacing justification with a different requirement (Ichikawa). The fact that none of them has managed to yield a satisfactory solution further exposes that knowledge is a lot more complicated and defies analysis.

                                                    Works Cited 

Gettier, E. L., ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ in M. Huemer (ed.), Epistemology - Contemporary Readings, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 444–6

Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins and Matthias Steup, "The Analysis of Knowledge", The     Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/knowledge-analysis/. Date of Access 25.02.2021

Pritchard, Duncan. What Is This Thing Called Knowledge? 4th ed., Kindle ed., Routledge, 2018.

Is Descartes right in saying ‘there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep’?

      The question can be rephrased as  “Is Descartes right in saying that we cannot prove that we are now awake and not dreaming”?  It is a question about how we can distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary.  How can we know that we are not constantly dreaming? Descartes’ doubt implies there is a possibility that one is dreaming right now, or that one is always dreaming. In all fairness, who has never had similar doubts? Surely we all can remember occasions when the reality in our dreams was so vivid,  palpable and very much like our everyday experiences that only after we woke up we found to our surprise that the reality and events were just a mental projection and that all of this disappeared the moment we opened the eyes.

      Depending on the approach we take, the answers to the question will vary. If we decide to take a global sceptic’s approach and jump headlong into the “rabbit hole” of regress argument, we will soon see that our search for foundational beliefs will lead us nowhere, and we will have to agree with Descartes. To every argument and justification against Descartes’ claim, a sceptic can say that you still do not know whether all of that is not a product of your dreaming brain.

      On the other hand, if we take a commonsensical pragmatic approach supported with our day to day experience, we will have to disagree with Descartes.  Firstly, his assumption that foundational beliefs are the only warrant of certainty is flawed. We have no means and no time to look for foundational beliefs every time we come across a debatable knowledge claim.  What is more, certain claims do not have a foundational belief. Secondly, Descartes formulates  his sceptic hypotheses only on the assumption that sensory-based knowledge might be unreliable. Sense perception is only one of a number of cognitive faculties we use to gain knowledge about the world. At every moment a network of cognitive faculties is at play.

      Our common sense provides us with rational arguments that can be the proof Descartes’ seems oblivious to.  Argument #1 has already been stated above:  when we are awake we are aware of the two distinct states  (sometimes  we are aware of dreaming when we are asleep, and we can control the course of the events) . Surely a sceptic will reject it, saying that the awareness of the two states does not exclude the possibility that we are dreaming about a dream in a dream. So if  #1 is insufficient, let us go through a list of other signs that bear more weight.

      Argument #2: The reality we experience in wakefulness differs in a lot of respects from the reality in our dreams. One of the features of dreams is the discontinuity of narration, absurdity, lack of coherence. Laws of physics break down in dreams, we can fly, jump over high buildings, we teleport from a place to place, we want to run but our feet stay put, we meet long gone relatives, or assume roles we do not perform in our wakeful life.  This is not what we experience when we are awake.

      Argument #3: Certain sensations in dreams do not resemble the same wakeful sensations, e.g. excruciating physical pain (Springett). In fact, if we feel physical pain in dreams, it is not the pain generated by a dream, but an actual pain whose source is located in the body (e.g. toothache giving us hard time), and in that case we usually wake up.

      Argument #4: Intense emotional sensations evoked by the events, such as terror,  often cause the dreamer to wake up suddenly, horrified and confused. Again, this is not what happens in our waking life (I really wish it would be the case, to “wake up” when things in life get too stressful or unbearable).

      Argument  #5: “Principle of coherence” and critical thinking are two of the signs of waking life. In wakefulness, we can clearly see how our current state and experiences are linked to our life. The narrative in our life constitutes a coherent network of events and relations;  there is consistency and compliance with the laws of physics (Springett).

      Argument #6: our mind (or the intellect to use Descartes’ term) intuitively recognizes what is “clear and distinct” about our waking experience. In the course of the dialogue with himself, Descartes formulates a reflection that whenever his senses fail him, it is the mind that recognizes what is clear and distinct (wax argument).

      To sum up, Descartes is not right believing that ‘there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep’.

 

 WORKS CITED

Guttenplan, Samuel. Hornsby, Jennifer; Janaway, Christopher; Schwenkler, John. Reading Philosophy. Wiley. Kindle Edition.

Springett, Ben. “Philosophy of Dreaming.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP), iep.utm.edu/dreaming. Accessed 4 Oct. 2021.