How (if at all) do you know that you are not dreaming?

Résumé du document

One big philosophical question is to know whether we know anything or not. Knowing in a sense is quite different from its everyday use. As a matter of fact everyone claims to know various things all the time, but the conditions that are required to say that we know in everyday life are quite different from the ones that are required to say that we really know something in the epistemological way. Epistemology does provide us with different theories to know the truth (coherence, correspondence theory, foundationalism etc.). In this essay, I will use two (related methods) to see whether or not one can know he is not dreaming. The dream-argument comes from Descartes' meditations. For him, there is no sensible difference (in the way that we cannot feel it) between the awake stage and the asleep one. In this essay, I will however not keep this assumption, for I do not agree with it and I still feel it is worth it to see whether we can say that we know that we are not asleep once we have made the basic assumption that there is a difference between the two stages.

Extraits

[...] But, what if, say the change was that all the difference between a real like experience and a dream like experience ceased to exist all at once? There are two possible options here: either the dreams moved up to the real life quality or the real life experience moved down to a dream like quality. If we take the first option, A will still think he is not dreaming when he is awake but that cannot be considered as knowledge anymore. [...]

[...] Dancy, J ; Sosa, E. A companion to epistemology. Blacwell reference Cambridge, USA. [...]

[...] It holds because, by remembering how a dream like experience feels like, A can know that he is not dreaming at the moment. The person can remember his dreams, what they felt like, even though during the dream he can not know that he is not dreaming because he lacks the ability to. So here, If A was dreaming, he would not experience the quality of details, or normality that he is experiencing at the moment. So when someone is awake, he does know for sure that he is not dreaming because the feelings attached to a dreaming experience are not present. [...]

[...] How (if at all) do you know that you are not dreaming? One big philosophical question is to know whether we know anything or not. Knowing in a sense that is quite different from its everyday use. As a matter of fact everyone claims to know various things all the time, but the conditions that are required to say that we know in everyday's life are quite different from the ones that are required to say that we really know something in the epistemological way. [...]

[...] When looking at the fourth condition, it would also hold if P was A is believing that he is dreaming. In fact, it is the dream like quality of the dream that makes the dreamer thinks he is actually dreaming. Here arises a problem however. Even though we can agree that a normal person does have the capacity to tell whether he/she is dreaming, it is harder to make that assumption for a dreamer. A person asleep, dreaming can be said to lose a part of his abilities, its brain is not functioning normally (here by normally I mean as in the awake stage). [...]