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Stroud's Dream Argument Critique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John O. Nelson
John O. Nelson
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

In his recent work, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud proposes to carry out an in-depth critique of the attempt by philosophers to invalidate all knowledge of an external world on the basis of Descartes' dream argument. His more particular aims in this endeavour are to uncover significant features of any such scepticism and to disclose in the process fundamental aspects of ‘human knowledge’ itself. Thus, among other features of knowledge that his study discloses, he thinks, is, echoing Kant, the idea ‘that a completely general distinction between everything we get through the senses, on the one hand, and what is true or not true of the external world, on the other, would cut us off forever from knowledge of the world around us.’ And a significant feature of Cartesian dream scepticism he believes to have uncovered is that its ‘effectiveness’ rests upon the philosopher's traditional assumption of an objectively existent world that is understandable ‘from a detached “external” viewpoint.’

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 266 , October 1993 , pp. 473 - 482
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

1 Stroud, Barry, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Stroud, , op. cit., p. 43Google Scholar: ‘I think the right kind of investigation into the sources of Descartes' requirement [that we be able to show that we are not dreaming if we are to know an external world] promises to illuminate something about our actual conception of knowledge, or about what we seek when we try to understand it, or perhaps even about human knowledge itself.’

3 Ibid., 248.

4 Ibid., 82; 273–274.

5 Ibid., 273; 274.

6 Ibid., 272–273.

7 Ibid., 42 ff.

8 Ibid., 83 ff.

9 Ibid., 274. See also 82.

10 Ibid., 269–270.

11 Ibid., loc. cit.

12 Ibid., p. 271.

13 See this essay, p. 473.

14 Bohr, Niels, Essays 1958–1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (Bungay, Suffolk, Richard Clay and Company, Ltd.), p. 10.Google Scholar

15 Stroud, , op. cit. p. 272.Google Scholar

16 See Grice, Paul, Studies in the Way of Words, (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 13.Google Scholar

17 Moore, G. E., ‘A Defence of Common Sense,’ Philosophical Papers (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1959), 40–41.Google Scholar