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4. State at least three reasons why Descartes thinks that the senses cannot provide certain knowledge.
Then compare Descartes’s attitude toward the senses with Plato’s.

In order for Descartes to justify his knowledge, he decided that if he is able to find any reason to doubt a
method of knowledge, like his senses, he will be justified in rejecting the whole method. In this case,
Descartes reasoned that he cannot trust his senses because they have proven to be deceptive at times.
According to Descartes’s rule, if there is an instance where the senses were deceptive, such as a mirage,
that means that our senses cannot be a reliable path or method to achieve certain knowledge.

Furthermore, Descartes reasoned that, although it might seem foolish to doubt one’s senses, it is
justified because he can never truly be certain that he is not dreaming! There is no test that anyone can
think of that will prove that our reality is not a dream. Anything that we can experience in waking reality,
we can also experience in our dreams, and so, again, we cannot be certain of our senses.

The third reason for Descartes to distrust his sense experience is his “evil genius hypothesis”, in which
Descartes admits that he cannot disprove the idea that his whole life is being controlled by an evil deity
who ensures that everything Descartes believes is true, such as his mathematical knowledge, and
experiences is in fact an illusion. “How do I know that the universe was not created by a malevolent
demon whose only goal is to deceive so that even when I make the most basic mathematical judgments,
such as that 2+3=5, I err, yet I never know that I am erring?”

Plato’s epistemology or attitude towards the senses consisted of his belief in a visible world that
contains sensible objects and images. Images are the shadows and reflection of the sensible objects, and
if the object that you are perceiving is an image, then you are in a state of imagination, and if the object
of your awareness is a sensible object then you are in a state of belief. These two states do not amount
to knowledge. They are part of the world that is not reliable. In order for knowledge to be certain, it
must be expressed verbally in the form of Logos or logical theory. Plato also believed that also sensible
objects are mere abstractions of higher truths, which he called the Forms. They are the archetypes of
everything existing in the visible world. They are neither physical not mental, and so cannot be grasped
by the senses.