Speaking again as an empiricist, knowledge comes from experience. Yet what if all our experiences were illusions and everything we saw, felt, tasted, smelled, and touched was just a dream? Could we then claim to have any knowledge at all? In Richard Feldman's Epistemology Skeptics believe The Standard View to be far too self-idulgent as justification for belief is really unjustifiable itself.
Does it matter though if life is a dream? What is "real" is relative. One can describe what "really" happened in a dream. Thus, the knowledge we have of the world, which skeptics claim is unjustifiable, works to help us function in this dream. Even if I am dreaming, if I am hungry I know I need to eat food and it is the act of eating which helps make the human condition bearable on any level of reality. As a pragmatist, I believe survival is the ultimate goal for anyone so even if I am in a dream I want to survive it. I know I need to have shelter, sleep, water, food, and clothing to survive in this dream. Those are the essentials which work to sustain life in this reality and it is better for me to accept that than to take my chances with the alternative.
(Gotta say a bit more about Empiricism for me: what's the central claim there, and use an example.)
ReplyDeleteWell, if all our experiences were illusions, we'd be screwed. :-) But... they aren't are they? I know I'm not dreaming, don't I? :-) (Spell out the implications of the dream argument.)
OK, good discussion of a pragmatic response to dreams. Note that this response is different than a Relativist might give, because at the base of it is the idea that your beliefs are in contact, in some fashion, with an independent reality. It's that reality that determines if your beliefs 'work'. How would a Relativist think of things instead?