Meditation 6. Trusting the Senses• The senses certainly appear real.• Rejects God or himself as the source of

sense impression & concludes they are real.• God is no deceiver and God is in control.• It would be a sort of deception if God

allowed the senses to appear so real yet be false...so they can, in general, be trusted.

• There are still errors in sense perception but one false sensory perception is usually corrected by the other senses and by memory and rationality.

• A man may feel pain in an amputated limb but his other senses correct his error.

Meditation 6. Dreaming Revisited• Dreaming is incoherent by nature.• In dreams our experience is quite

disjointed and fragmented. • In dreams we do not experience

our lives as part of a life whose history is part of our memory.

• We know when we are awake for we do have memory and our thoughts and actions/experiences are coherent.

• While we take dream experience seriously when dreaming, we are quite clear it has no reality when awake. We can tell the difference.

Descartes’ Meditations. Test (1)

1. Explain the Cartesian method of doubt (3)

2. Explain Descartes’ views on the senses and authorities as sources of knowledge. (3)

3. Explain the dream argument and it’s purpose. (4)

4. What does the evil demon argument do that the dream argument can’t? (4)

5. How does the 2nd Meditation open? (3)

6. What is the cogito? (3)

7. What kind of “I” does Descartes’ believe he is? (1)

8. Why does he draw this conclusion? (3)

9. Explain the wax example. (3)10. The cogito appeared clearly and

distinctly true. What rule does this lead Descartes to state? (2)

11. Explain the Trademark Argument. (5)

12. In Med 6 Descartes returns to the senses and dreaming. Explain his conclusions. (6) (40)