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What are Descartes’s reasons for believing that ‘physical objects are not really known through sensation or imagination, but are grasped by understanding alone.? Are the reasons any good?

Descartes did not trust his senses "my senses may deceive me," meaning that he was a rationalist. He believed that the information we get through our senses is not nearly accurate. His first step is to throw everything that he knew, denying to believe in even the most fundamental premises prior to proving them satisfactory to himself. He is credited often with being the 'Father of Modern Philosophy.' because he breaks with his promotion and development of the new mechanistic sciences and with the traditional philosophy of Scholastic-Aristotelian that was there during his time. (Plato. Stanford, 2014).

One of the reasons he gave is that in the dream, he argues that he frequently has dreams of things that give the impression of being actual to him when he is sleeping. He illustrates with a dream, as he states he sits in his room, and he sits by a fire, and it appears that he can feel the fire's warmth, just as he feels when he is awake, although there is no fire. The reality that he can feel the fire does not really allow him to say when he is sleeping and dreaming, and when he is not sleeping. Besides, if his senses can bring him the heat from the fire where he really did not sense it, he cannot have faith that there is the existence of fire when he is awake. In this argument, he is trying to reason that senses can make you feel something even when it is not real.

Where he can feel the warmth of the fire even when he is sleeping; also, in this argument, he admits that he feels that he knows that he is wearing a gown, and again, he is papers because he can see those things with his own eyes. This incident would be enough evidence in supporting the assertion that he is, in fact, wearing a gown and also reading papers if it were not for the reality that he has on event seen such things in dreams only when waking up and find they were not real or genuine. He further reasons that he did not know the truth of what he saw on those events, and he can be sure a hundred percent that he is not dreaming.

For that reason, he can never be sure a hundred percent that the things he knows to be true since he can see that they are real are right. It is meant to show that the factual information does not rise to knowledge level, as it does not have the quality of not being liable that Descartes hold on to be called knowledge. In his argument, he says that ‘my senses are deceiving me therefore I cannot trust them.' For instance, we can see a rainbow that does not exist, or even we can see an oasis that is not there. When one is ill, their sense of smell, touch, and even taste can be inactive or inaccurate.

In the argument of the deceiving God and evil, he suggests that, for all he knows, he may be under the influence of a being that is all-powerful intent on deceiving Descartes “there is an evil demon supremely powerful and cunning who works as hard to deceive me’. In that case, he at all does not have a body but is solely a brain fed information and hallucinations by the omnipotent being. His point is that he wants to demonstrates that the senses can be deceived. If we cannot have trust in our senses to give the right or true information about the world surrounding us, we cannot have trust in deductions that we have made on the sense perception grounds. Had would have had to be an empiricist. Alternatively, he thought that a demon of deception was tricking him and that all sensations could have been more than hallucinations. In this argument, he tried to say that someone's senses can be influenced by what he called 'all-powerful being' where the senses can deceive someone.

The other argument that Descartes had was on the wax argument. In this argument, he aims to express indeed that we have knowledge of things via understanding instead of using the senses and that we understand the mind more than anything. In his wax argument, he first appraises what he knows regarding the wax through the senses; smell, size, taste, hardness, and shape. He additionally indicates that he must understand his mind more than other things “I must understand my mind more than other things." Above all, as he has acknowledged, he may not see the wax piece in any way; it may be a hallucination or a dream. But when he perceives the wax piece, he cannot lack certainty that he perceives not that he regards what he sees to be the wax piece, and the two react as of thought implicit that he exists.

His ground concentrates on the change process where the wax that is solid melts to a liquid plash. The senses appear to inform us things regarding the globe, and he acknowledges that what we understand on the solid wax piece, we come to know by means of the senses. The senses can likewise perceive us concerning the wax that is melted, but they may not say that the wax that is melted and the solid is the same. Only the mind can make sense and organize what we recognize. The senses acknowledge only a disorder of data; understanding is what assists us in knowing it.

Descartes admits the senses tell us concerning the global but declares that the senses can only provide us disorganized data. With no understanding, we would make no sense of the things that are seen. Descartes's reasons are good; this is because the argument on the dream seems to be true. As he illustrates his dream, we can see that it is true; when one dreams, they cannot know if it is accurate or not. When dreaming, all the things that we see seem to be true that one cannot differentiate when they are dreaming and when they are not. For me, I find his reasons to be good.

References

Plato. Stanford. (2014, January 16). Rene Descartes (Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/

Sparknotes. (, 2020). Meditations on first philosophy: Second meditation, Part 2: the wax argument, page 2 | SparkNotes. SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides. https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/meditations/section4/page/2/

Wikipedia. (2008, March 12). Cartesian doubt. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved September 17, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_doubt