INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 

RESPONSE PAPER DRAFT - QUESTION 2 

Shikhar Sheoran  

Question 2. In Meditations I, why does Descartes need the Dream Argument 

to show that he cannot trust the deliverances of his senses if he already has 
established that his senses sometimes deceive him? 

Introduction 

In Meditations I, Descartes sets out to reject and disregard all of the beliefs he 
holds, and these beliefs he has built up through experience throughout his life till 
now. Now, he realizes that these opinions that he held were false, and all of the 
other beliefs that he carries on top of these foundations are thus false. Thus, to 
disregard all of these beliefs, he starts by dissolving the foundations on which they 
have been built. To dismantle his beliefs, he must understand why they are false. 
One reason why they can be false is that his senses, based on which he perceives 
the world, can deceive him. Descartes knows that his senses can deceive him about 
things that are ‘in a bad light,’ or a long way off,’ to quote Descartes. The issue here 
arises that he can be deceived in two ways, in my view. The first one is where only 
his senses are faulty, which has happened to him in the past. The other case where 
he can be deceived is if the reality in which he exists is false, which can occur in a 
dream state. Thus, just by establishing that his senses are wrong, he cannot 
completely rule out the possibility of being deceived in any other manner, as he can 
be fooled by the reality in which he exists, as he has experienced in the dream 
world. Thus, to prove this point, he uses the Dream Argument to show his senses 
cannot be trusted, regardless of whether he knows his senses deceive him or not.  

Thesis 

Descartes establishes that his senses sometimes deceive him, but still, he gives the 
Dream Argument to show that he cannot trust what his senses tell him. When he 
says that his senses deceive him, we can infer that he means that the information 

 
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provided to him by the senses is false. However, to identify that the information 
provided is false, he needs some external validation, which can convince him that 
his senses are deceiving him. This so-called external validation can only be obtained 
through the rest of the world, which we will refer to as the external or the real 
world. Thus, while checking the correctness of the information from his senses, he 
can depend on the real world. However, Descartes has also experienced the 
phenomenon of dreaming. While dreaming, he is convinced that whatever is 
happening is real, only to wake up later and find out that the dream state was not 
real, and was in fact, a false reality. 

Now let us focus on the dream state. Following suit from the real world, which is a 
state of not dreaming, while Descartes is dreaming, he considers the dream world 
as the real world. Because he is still dreaming, he does not know whether he is 
dreaming or awake. While dreaming also, if he depends on his senses, there can be 
two outcomes. The first one is that his senses deceive him about something, and he 
can check the correctness of his senses through validation from the external world, 
which is still a dream world because he is currently dreaming. The second outcome 
can be that his senses work fine and are in sync with the external world, which is 
still the dream world. In both cases, he relies on the external world to check 
whether his senses are deceiving him or not. The issue here lies in the fact that the 
external world can also be deceiving him because, in the dream state, the external 
world might be completely false. However, he would still believe that it is the real 
world, at the moment, because there is no way for him to validate whether he is in 
a dream state or not while he is dreaming. Only after waking up does he realize that 
he was dreaming, and what he considered to be the real world was, in fact, a 
real-world in the dream state, which may or may not be completely real. Thus, 
Descartes needs the Dream Argument to show that he cannot trust his senses' 
deliverance because even if his senses are working correctly according to the 
validation from the external world, the external world might be a completely false 
world, as he can be dreaming. The Dream Argument works very well in establishing 
that in no situation possible can anyone trust their senses. We can only validate 
what we perceive from the reality surrounding us; the correctness of perception 
depends entirely on the reality surrounding us. 

Furthermore, as Descartes has already experienced, the reality surrounding him 

may not always be real. Thus we can never really establish whether whatever we 
are experiencing is real or not. As we only know that we were experiencing the 
dream state after we wake up, we may not yet know whether we are dreaming or 
not; thus, we can never really trust our senses entirely. Moreover, this fact cannot 
be proved without establishing that our reality can, at times, be false, which is 
 
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proved by the Dream Argument. One good thing that exists is that we can 
distinguish whether we were dreaming or not, allowing us to recognize the 
possibilities of false realities in our past. However, as we have no way of knowing 
whether the present is a dream or reality, we can never honestly know what we 
perceive through our senses is the truth or is false. 

Conclusion 

We have set out to understand why we need the Dream Argument, if we have 
already established that our senses can deceive us. We start by showing why 
Descartes needs to show his senses are deceiving him. Once we have established 
that, we then show how his senses are deceiving him, and to prove that, the Dream 
Argument is necessary. 

In the above given thesis, we have given an important reason as to why the Dream 
Argument is necessary, and why Descartes is justified in using the Dream Argument 
in order to prove that his senses are deceptive, using which he can disregard his 
past beliefs, which have been built on top of the perceptions of these senses.  

 
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