The problem of deduction ; #1 Dream of Descartes

<Rene Descartes, a french philosopher.>

  Waken up, but don’t know whether it’s dream or not. Because it was so realistic. In 「Inception」, a famous movie in Hollywood, Dicaprio spins a top to distinguish dreams from reality. If it stops, then he’s in reality. But if it keeps spinning, then he’s in dream. We experienced similar symptoms. A dream more realistic than reality. We don’t know whether it is dream, until we’re awake. Everyone dreams like this, but someone derived philosophical arguments from it. It was Rene Descartes.

 

  Descartes was an ambitious philosopher. He decided to find a truth without religion, tradition, and convention. What could be a definite truth in the world? First of all, let's see the empirical things. 'Crows are black.' But what if I didn’t see the exact color because of my color blindness? And white crows can be found someday, then it turns out to be a false. Secondly, the deductive proposition. for example, ‘2+2=4’. If ‘2+2=5’ was right and we’re being taught by mistake and some great mathematician derives it, then what would you do? It happens all the time to turn it out false what we believed to be true. It will happens again and again. Descartes even doubted if there’s a existence in the world or not.

 

 

<It’s getting harder to distinguish virtuality from reality because of the VR's advance>

 

  Is it real a person in front of me? It could be a delusion I made. Is it real my hands in front of me? What if I’m in the capsule and some images are playing on it, just like VR? Descartes made a conclusion with his brilliant insight. At least, I am being when I’m thinking these question. Without me, there’s no possibility of these arguments.

 

  He made a great quotation, ‘Cogito ergo sum.’ It means ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It contains a philosophical conclusion from his desperate epistemological skepticism.

 He made philosophical arguments without any convention which was very drastic trial. It showed that our observation and even deductive proposition like mathematics could be uncertain. Scientific knowledge is made with it but the science and not-science are different. Many philosophers debated about it after then. In the next post, We’re gonna talk about the problem of deduction with ‘theory-ladenness of observation.’

2018.01.04 Han Kwang Hee