How Do We Know Anything?

Author: Nagel, Thomas.

Publication info: What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. New York: Oxford UD, 1987.

Class: Theory of Knowledge

Category: In class
 



freewebs.com



                Nagel states that we cannot know whether we are living in the real world because we only know what is inside our brain. We rely on our senses and experience to explain the physical world but we cannot be sure whether we are living in the physical world. Nagel states that everything exists in our mind. We cannot know whether we are living in the physical world because there is a possibility that everything is a dream. It is possible that we are living in a dream right now.



            This article relates to the movie “Inception” in the sense that it brings up a point about our lives possibly being a giant dream. We cannot be sure which is the real world—our dream when we lie in the bed and sleep, or the world we wake up in or neither. How do we know that the physical world is not our dreams? How do we know that when we wake up from the dream, we are now experiencing the physical world? Is there a way to figure this out? Or is it like Nagel said, impossible to figure this out because we only know what’s in our mind?



            It’s sort of frightening to think that we could be living a life full of never-ending dreams. There is a possibility of our lives being as how “Inception” shows us, waking up and dreaming continuously. We could all be confused which world is the “real” world because we cannot really know for sure. We cannot be certain because there are so many possibilities. We believe that the world we wake up from is the real world because we want it to be. We want to have a sense of stability in our lives. Therefore, we’re practicing pragmatic theory. We believe that there is a real world, because it benefits us by giving us a form of stability in our lives, something we can build our lives on.