Posted for reference and discussion.
I wonder why they didn't pick this one: "Good sense is the most evenly distributed commodity in the world." (He should have said, existence)
Norman Malcolm's Critique of Descartes' Skepticismby Rebecca Pastor
Norman Malcolm 's Dreaming and Skepticism (1956) is a direct response to Descartes' First Meditation. In his famous work, Descartes says that on many occasions he has, in sleep been deceived by illusions, and he concludes from this that there are no certain marks distinguishing waking from sleep. Malcolm disagrees, and in Dreaming and Skepticism he explains how and why. Malcolm is very careful in the development of his argument, as well he should be; after all, arguing against Descartes is tantamount to, well, arguing against Descartes; Malcolm has a very detailed and specific argument, and he anticipates objections to it and deals with them.
Malcolm's argument is this: If you are thinking, perceiving, feeling, drawing conclusions, making connections, etc, then you may be certain that you are awake; thus, if you are awake, you are not sound asleep, thus, you can tell the difference between waking and sleeping. This is in opposition to Descartes, who states that when we are asleep the same kinds of mental states and mental occurrences are present in us as when we are awake; the difference according to Descartes is that, as a general rule, our minds don't work as well when we are asleep. Descartes conceives of dreams as being a part of a continuous mental life; Malcolm does not. Descartes says that the identical thoughts and sensations that you have when you are wide awake could occur to you while you are asleep--the content of a dream and of a waking episode could be the same. From this it logically follows that there is no way to tell the difference between sleep and waking.
Malcolm is careful to first make the distinction between sound asleep and half asleep. He does this by defining both and then establishing criteria by which to determine if a person is in one of these states. He does this because, as he points out, one may think and perceive while he is half asleep, but he may not while he is sound asleep; this distinction, then, is vital to his argument. To define the terms, and to set up a semantic game, he makes a distinction between is sound asleep and was sound asleep and is half-asleep and was half-asleep. If someone is sound asleep then he meets the following criteria: his eyes are closed, his body inert, his breathing rhythmic, and he is unresponsive to questions, commands, and stimuli of moderate intensity. If someone was asleep, this state can be verified only when he is awake. We wait for him to be awake and then we ask him if he has any recollection of what occurred in his vicinity while he was asleep, and if he has none, then indeed he was sound asleep. Malcolm says that the criteria of someone's being half asleep would seem to fall into the same two categories of present tense and past tense.
Malcolm goes on to point out the absurdity of the statement "I am sound asleep." If a person claims that he is sound asleep, then he is not, for claiming, asserting, stating, etc., are functions of the waking state of consciousness. Furthermore, Malcolm states, one cannot merely afflrm in his rnind that he is sound asleep, for if he does, he is not sound asleep. The assertion "I am sound asleep," even if asserted non-verbally in one's mind, is self-contradictory because in a sound sleep, one does not assert anything. Nor does one wonder, conjecture, realize, affirm or doubt. In a sound sleep, one does not realize or know that he is sound asleep; if he does, he is not sound asleep. A person can drearn that he is sound asleep, and he can dream that he knows it. In this case, the person "knew in his dream that he was sound asleep," but Malcolm states that knowing-in-your-dream that you are asleep is not the same as knowing that you are asleep. You may know something in your dream, but you cannot go on to apply that to your waking life, you cannot make connections between your sleep world and your waking one. Quite simply, if a person is in any state of consciousness, it logically follows that he is not sound asleep. One cannot have thoughts while sound asleep, and from this it follows that one cannot be deceived while sound asleep. Malcolm goes on to say that, furthermore, while a man may tell us his dream, it is impossible to verify this report; there is nothing to verify or report, for it is another language game at work. That a man had a dream and that a man is under the impression that he had one are really the same thing, for there is no criterion for distinguishing the two. This is also true in the case of remembering a dream correctly and seeming to oneself to remember it.
Malcolm questions the idea of a dream as an occurrence; he says that it is not an occurrence during sleep in the same way that breathing is. Nor do we have any way of determining when a dream "occurred" or how long it lasted. He says that some psychologists have conjectured that dreams occur not in sleep during during the awakening from sleep. It is now known that in face dreams do occur within the mind of the soundly sleeping person. As well, dreams have physiological evidences, that is, brain waves can be tracked and REM recorded, thus making it possible to determine exactly when a dream begins and ends. In defense of Malcolm it must be pointed out that not only was he living under Descartes paradigm of dualism (under which a mental experience had nothing to do with the body), but he was also living in a time when brain waves weren't monitored and perhaps people's eyeballs were not scrutinized as they slept. And most importantly, these modern discoveries do not change Malcolm's argument, because his argument hinges entirely upon the content of a dream and the inferences which may be made from that dream content; although he states that drearning is purely a mental experience and he says that there is no way to detemmine when or how long a dream occurred, he is not at all concemed with the process of dreaming and so this does not affect his argument. Also, it must be pointed out that sleep-talking is not a mental process the way claiming something is. Malcolm does not deal with the issue of sleep-talking when he says that we cannot claim something in our sleep for the reason that sleep-talking is merely random uttering which does not involve mental cognition.
In part six Malcolm says that, contrary to Descartes, one can never be deceived while in sound sleep, because if one is, then, as already established by Malcolm, he is not really sound asleep. So then, Descartes is simply wrong in claiming that sleep is indistinguishable from waking. That is to say, in Wittgensteins' temms, we use the language game differently in talking about the two states. The experience of, for example, thinking your bed is on fire, and being sound asleep and thinking in your dream that you bed is on fire, are "experiences" in different senses of the world; nothing is really "experienced" while one is sound asleep, and dreams differ from waking life in that you cannot perceive, think, feel, etc., while sound asleep.
Malcolm concludes by saying that in the notion of the dream of sound sleep, there is no foothold for philosophical skepticism, for it is an error to say that one cannot tell whether he is awake or sound asleep. That is because it is impossible for one to think that he was wide awake and really be asleep, because one does not think while one is asleep. If one thinks that he may be sound asleep but really is aware or just half-asleep, then all he needs to do is open his eyes and have a look around to verify that he is not asleep. Throughout his argument Malcolm he supported this thesis in several different ways, and in doing so he has shown that Descartes' inference from the dream state to the waking state is illegitimate.
I think I exist.
I exist.
Exist.
.