On Wittgenstein's Certainty and Critics of Descartes’ “Dreaming Argument”

Subject Areas : Epistemological researches

Aezam  Mohseni ¹ (PhD candidate at Imam Khomeini international university, Qazvin)
Seyyed Maseoud  Sayf ² (Associate professor of philosophy department, Imam Khomeini international university,)

Received: 2017-07-23 Accepted : 2018-02-27 Published : 2018-12-22

Keywords: Skepticism, Descartes, Wittgenstein, Dreaming Argument, Metaphysical Certainty, objective Certainty, subjective Certainty,

Abstract :

 Wittgenstein frankly is speaking on certainty as a basic term which precedes skepticism believing that doubt game is possible in certainty ground, and we have no ground except certainty, extremist skepticism is self contradiction. Wittgenstein claims that Descartes' “Dreaming Argument” is the deepest and most powerful form of skepticism; in the first Meditation, Descartes is able to infect himself, as it were, with a profound skeptical difficulty about perceptual knowledge: what he calls "the principal reason for doubt, namely my inability to distinguish between being asleep and being awake". From past to the present, the attempts to neutralize such threats have been largely regarded as unsuccessful. But the writings of Wittgenstein mark a new development in defusing this deflationary posture. Unlike most philosophers who have assumed that Skepticism represents a coherent position that demands a responsible rebuttal, Wittgenstein emphasized that it was senseless, and required no formal refutation. In this paper we seek to demonstrate that Descartes' purpose has never been to remain uncertain; he always tries to overcome doubt and he wants to come to a certainty; In the case of “Dreaming Argument” ultimately in the sixth Meditation Descartes is prepared to solve and dismiss this very same difficulty in a mere paragraph; here we told that "the exaggerated doubts of the last few days should be dismissed as laughable". He writes that there is a vast difference between being asleep and being awake.

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