knowledge turns out to be false? Discoveries like these are unsettling, and

they can provoke questions about the possibility of knowledge itself.

People can be wrong about so many things, but how can we be certain

about anything? That is the question of Descartes' Meditations. In his first

Meditation, he comes up with the hypothesis of dreaming. One of the

points Descartes raises is to discuss the issue of what kind of things we can

know with certainty even under the hypothesis that we are dreaming.

Descartes tries to doubt whatever he finds some good reason to

doubt which is a process known as a methodological doubt. The point of

the doubt is like an instrument for finding out a certain foundation of

human knowledge. This skeptical argument is still aimed at the kinds of

beliefs that are based on sensory experience. The dream argument

threatens our beliefs about bodies outside us, but Descartes does not think

it threatens our beliefs about mathematics. “Whether I am awake or

asleep, two plus three make five, and a square does not have more than

convinced, while in the dream, that what we are dreaming is real. So the

quite dizzy, and this dizziness nearly convinces me that I am

The dreaming argument threatens all knowledge based on experience,

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