How does the ‘Painters Analogy’ answer the ‘Dreaming Doubt’?
Descartes uses the Painter Analogy to limit the extent of the skeptical application of the dreaming hypothesis. Besides, it is used as a conduit to ferry the meditator from attachment to the external world via senses to the intellectual world. The analogy is composed of two phases. The first takes both the colors and the items of the composition to be real. These include the head, hands, eyes, and body. As Descartes used, this first phase reminds the meditator of the naivety of the standard empiricist’s view that thought is passive. And only the active senses furnish all items of knowledge. This phase does not respond well correctly to the dreaming doubt. It requires things to be real for it to be valid. Descartes 1974 denotes that “ I am here, clothed in my dressing gown, seated next to the fireplace when, in fact, am lying undressed in bed.” He is dreaming and feels like the thing happening are actual in though they are not real. They are not accurate because it does not involve the whole body.
I was having a coherent and predictable dream as our everyday sensory experience is a rare scenario. In most plans, wild and unexpected things happen all the time. For instance, I am in a restaurant eating lunch with my father’s childhood friend; then, suddenly, I am playing Tetris with my dog. Descartes denotes that as he considers these matters more carefully, he sees no definitive signs to distinguish being awake from being asleep. So perhaps there is a standard sign by which to indicate being awake from being asleep: if my sensory experience is coherent and predictable, then I am awake.
The second phase of the analogy takes every item in the composition to be wholly fictitious and unreal. However, the colors used in the design are real. In paintings, color is the only essential component it has. For instance, if all elements in a photograph are fictitious, the image is non-representational. The picture does not resemble anything that has existed before since it is non-representational. He makes a comparison between being awake and being asleep. There is no discrete distinction between being awake and being asleep, as he puts it. Therefore, if that is the case, then there is a reason to doubt the sensory beliefs of the current surrounding at a particular time.
In the meditation, the writer insists that even when the painter creates something not, yet certainly at the very least, the colors from which they fashion out to be true. The things that we see in dreams might be false; however, one must admit that at least certain other things that are even more simple and universal are real. These certain other things are essential ingredients out of which sensory experiences are constructed. Besides, our sensory beliefs about these crucial ingredients are still despite having a particular experience as a product of our dreams. The shape of extended things, their quantity, corporeal nature in general, and its extension are examples of the primary ingredients. These are the same items that mechanists held were the fundamental properties of matter.
The second phase addresses the dreaming doubt more convincingly. Naturally, a painter cannot represent an entirely new creature but must confine herself to recombining creatures’ features. Likewise, our dreams cannot present us with altogether false streams of sensory experience. According to Descartes 1990, just painters employ models; our goals must, at the very least, be based on prior acquaintance with objects that exist in reality. They must recombine the features of sensory experiences we had if the doubting dream argument gives me a reason to doubt that there are other people or things similar to other people. At least some of my beliefs about them are secure. This suggests that the doubting dream leaves our general sensory beliefs about the world around us unscratched. In this phase, items are unreal except for their colors. The sensory opinions experienced during our dreams are bogus and fictitious. The stage does not give us a reason to doubt our beliefs about general corporeal nature; it does provide us with reason to challenge most of our sensory thoughts.