The Dreaming Argument

            Versions of the dreaming argument are a fixture in philosophy, East and West. One shows up in Plato, another in Chuangzhi. The version which has been most influential in the West is found in the first of Descartes' six meditations in the work entitled Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes does a good job not only of giving the argument but of setting the stage so as to make it plausible. That's one of the problems. Though the problems seems to arise in connection with examples of dreams and dreamlike or uncertain moments, it turns out to arise out of an abstract, tempting line of philosophical thought.

            The purpose of the dreaming argument is not to make anyone think they are now dreaming. We cannot take that seriously, and that's not how it is meant. Instead, it is about knowledge; the punch line is that we do not know. We could put the punch line, the conclusion or claim of the argument, more strongly or less strongly. We could say we don't know anything. Or we could be more tentative and it's still pretty strong, that it is not based on our perceptions that we know anything about the world around us. We do not really know that we are awake right now, and in the absence of that knowledge then any knowledge is a problem and needs us, philosophers with current licenses in our back pockets, to account for it. Further, this is the opening wedge in the argument from illusion, basically the same argument with the artificial and more broad term illusion substituted for dream.

             One version, then, of the argument goes basically like this: the way things seem to me now would be the same whether based on reality or based on a dream. Therefore I cannot tell the difference. Therefore I know nothing based on my senses.

            Further, we are not dealing with this argument just because it is a piece of our intellectual history, in our culture’s canon, but because it shapes our thinking. We are trying to get a grip on ourselves. If we are tempted to think any of the items on the following list, then we are almost certainly Cartesian dualists, and the argument from illusion and the dreaming argument are part of what has set us up to think them:

            I am not identical to my body; I am identical to my body; my mind is not really connected to my body; my mind is really connected to my body; my knowledge of reality is certain; my knowledge of reality is not certain; my knowledge of reality cannot be certain; reality is the same no matter what people think about it; reality is different for each person; reality is reality; reality is really only appearances/perceptions/seemings; reality is physical; reality really is physical and mental; reality is really only mental; it doesn't matter whether reality is as we think it is because we have to live as though it is reality; human values are separate from the world; human values cannot be separated from the world; words are the means by which human beings can find it possible to communicate their ideas, feelings, thoughts, memories, interpretations, perceptions, experience, plans, hopes, meanings, desires, loves and hatreds; words cannot really capture the life of the mind.

            This can be put in the first person as follows---If I am inclined to agree or to disagree with any of the above, then I am almost certainly (unless I am dreaming) a dualist. And if I take seriously the parenthesis, then I am certainly a dualist. Therefore I am a dualist. I need help.

            In the face of that problem of knowledge and realizing that a tempting way of thinking (about what human beings are and what the world is) depends on how we answer the dreaming argument and the argument from illusion, then we can try to get out of the dreaming argument. Here are some suggestions for answers to the question, How do I know I am not now (right now, as I read these words) dreaming?

•          In waking life, I can control my actions.

•          In waking life, shocking, non-ordinary things don't happen.

•          In waking life, science works (and not in dreaming).

•          In waking life, things are more vivid and clear, and what is weird is different from what counts as weird in dreams.

•          In waking life, you can really feel pain, but not in dreams.

•          In waking life, we discuss dreams, but not in dreams.

•          In waking life, we can feel the difference between dreams and waking life, and in dreams we cannot.

•          In waking life, life is boring, but dreams are not (and compare daydreams, when often we are deliberately constructing something less boring).

•          In waking life, you have to go through routines, go through space to get from one place to another.

•          In waking life, existence is not just in flashes or episodes, and I know what's ahead.

•          In dreams, time is different.

            None of these, though, will work. Those of us who are tempted by any of them need only consider a few responses. Claims about the characteristics of either waking life or dreaming have to be exceptionless for the argument to work, and possibilities of exceptions are not hard to raise. Things which one thinks never show up in dreams may be conceived or imagined as dreamt--though you may never have pain in your dreams, and though most people do not, yet arguing that it is conceptually impossible to dream that you hurt is insupportable. It would be like arguing against the possibility that you dream that you never have pain in your dreams. (Further, there are plenty of reports of dreaming that one is in pain.) Things which always show up in dreams which are not in waking life are not there by necessity--e.g., what one student called the typical jump cuts of her dreams do not have to show up in all dreams, so that the present moment, of your reading or listening to these very words, may not be interrupted by jump cuts whether it is dreamed or waking. Finally, some have offered suggestions that the existence of particular things in dreams might do the work of letting us know something, but what these things purport to let us know is that we are dreaming, not that we are not dreaming. That is, they are on the wrong issue.

            Attempting to answer the dreaming argument on its own terms will not work. Whatever certain signs we offer to show that we are not now dreaming can be dreamt. Descartes reminds us of his dreams; he often dreams that he is doing things which in fact he does do, including the writing he is doing as he composes the Meditations. You may not dream about reading philosophy, but you can imagine that you could.

Possible Positions

            I mean here to sketch or comment on some of what I think are the most tempting responses to the dreaming argument. They come under the following headings: a materialist response such as many current writers on cognition (Pinker, Tye, Searle, Dennett, Fodor) might give if we could get them to address it, an idealist response consistent with Berkeley, Bradley, Collingwood and with important similarities to phenomenologist approaches such as Husserl's; an empiricist logical monism such as John Cook attributes to Wittgenstein and as was endorsed by Russell in his middle years; a logical positivist view such as one might expect from Ayer or Carnap (though in fact they give an account more like the materialist account).

            (–And a prefatory comment on how all the possible positions seem consistent with a picture of human beings)

            I keep thinking that all the responses I list here as possible positions may be thought of as generated by a simple sketch of a person looking out at the world, a person receiving internally information from that outside world in the form of appearances or perceptions and basing her view of the world on those appearances. On this view, each of us is dependent on our senses to tell us of the world, and what the senses do is provide us with the product of some kind of causal chain originating in the world, but the product provided by that process is a mental product, a way that things seem or look or appear or are perceived by each of us in each and every moment. In the face of such a sketch, then the problems (Ayer's book makes it singular in his title, The Problem of Knowledge) can be seen as problems of, on one hand, accounting for how the causal chains work within the sensory organs, and then accounting for the relations of the mental products of those causal chains to the world outside us. Dreams become a wildly intransigent problem, since they are not caused in the same way as perceptions, but they present us with similar products--somethings, whatnots, like perceptions, but whatnots whose relation to the external world is not the same relation, we hope, as the relation of perceptions to the external world. Thinking of it this way suggests that it might be possible to call the whole sketch into question. But calling the sketch into question is difficult because it has a profound, simple and powerful pull to it. And in fact, none of the standard positions with the possible exception of a purist logical positivist position really can call the sketch into question--and even the logical positivists' response has disturbing similarities to McGeorge Bundy's recommendation for strategy in the VietNam War: "Declare victory and pull out."

            Behaviorism: One response then might be based in deep suspicion of talk about the mental. No one is really a behaviorist any more, that position having been very publicly slaughtered and its still-beating heart held up by Chomsky in his review of B.F. Skinner's book Verbal Behavior. But there were things about the view which one may still descry in later functionalist and cognitivist views, things which have some appeal still. Some of this is brilliantly laid out in Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind. We decide on this view that mental terms are (often? usually? always? you can pick the severity of your position anywhere along a long continuum from an Amish kind of behaviorism like Skinner's to a Unitarian view like Dretske's) a kind of illicit shorthand for describing things we might think are accessible only through subjective introspection but which really are events which are public and observable and objective. That is, we might think that a clown's clowning is intelligent (one of Ryle's examples) and think we are thereby describing something about the mind of the clown, but in fact we are describing an ability the clown has to do things in a certain way, with originality and prompting surprise in us the observers of a certain kind, all of which is describable in the way events or behavior are describable. Norman Malcolm's reading of dreams flirts with this when he decides that having a dream is no more nor less than waking up with a story to tell. The story, after all, is not something hidden and invisible but is rather something anyone could hear, something the dreamer can repeat for you or me or over the phone. The idea that a dream is separate from the report of the dream is thus thought to be a kind of caving in to loose talk. Dreams are a kind of behavior we engage in, a telling of stories with which we awake. An investigation of dreams will not be philosophy but will be psychology, the psychology of dreams, in principle no more difficult than an investigation of digestion or preferences regarding tastes (tastes being thought too to be about something hidden and internal but the fact that that is mistaken can be seen by reminding ourselves that tastes are made manifest or are real to the extent they show in public choices we make). Mental things are an embarrassment of which we can rid ourselves by insisting on public accounts involving confirmation by other people, and in the insistence that dreams are the waking with a story to tell we find we have already made the crucial move before the problem arises, a kind of safe sex approach to the problem in which the power of dreams to puzzle us as to what is real is taken care of by insisting they be presented only on the public stage and there we have previously agreed to what is real, namely you've woken with a story to tell us and all of us are not now dreaming.

            Chomsky's unanesthetized vivisection of behaviorism is well worth reading, but I want to make a couple of other, simple remarks about materialistic and behavioristic accounts which are also relevant to later versions of materialism and physicalism--and perhaps relevant to others of our possible positions on the dreaming argument. These are abbreviated remarks about motivation, about a kind of diagnosis which helps me make sense of all the physicalists as dualists in denial. The remarks come out of taking a more distant stand on the issues, and asking how Ryle, how Malcolm, and how Skinner know what needs to be explained--in all their cases the answer is they know what needs to be explained away. I think once the question is asked, the answer is easy to see: they feel they need to give an explanation for exactly those things which Descartes would classify as mental. That may not have much bite, but it could also be put this way--they feel they need to explain away those things we might be tempted to classify as mental. They know what those things are by having as a conceptual tool going into their work a particular dichotomy, the dichotomy between mental and material (or physical), and their work is basically work to show that one half of that dichotomy is unreal but the other is real. They work within a dualistic framework to try to deny the existence of the framework. How we know what material means depends on the intelligibility of its opposition, namely mental, but they wish to deny that mental means anything. Having done away with mental they will find they have no longer any meaning for material. Therefore, their view is incoherent.

            Idealism: Another response is that of an idealist, for whom the dreaming argument only represents one aspect of a more general problem, the problem of getting past perceptions to anything which is not perceptions, including getting past perceptions to physical objects. On this view, dreams do show an important aspect of perceptions, namely the lack of necessity, the lack of a reliable, logical connection, in their relationships with the objects of perception. Dreams are dreams of something, granted, but the something does not exist in the way physical objects exist, and therefore there is a disconnect between perceptions and physical objects. The dreaming argument has an important part to play in the construction of idealist epistemology because the dreaming argument provides or can provide an intermediate step toward the view that there are no such things as physical objects. One could caricature this slightly by saying that if there are perceptions in the way all psychologists think there are, then Berkeley is simply and irretrievably right--epistemology has to have a different agenda from the agenda of accounting for knowledge of physical objects in the external world, because there is no certainty to be had regarding physical objects and further there is no need to include them in an account anyway. In a mirror image of the behaviorist/physicalist view, we can look at our talk of tables and chairs and all the other medium-sized dry goods (to use J.L. Austin's phrase) surrounding us and realize that categorizing them as physical objects is a mistake since all our knowledge of those alleged objects and all our talk of them is really knowledge of and talk about our ideas of them and they, the ideas, have no physical existence. What the dreaming argument does for us is contribute toward the insight that all sight is insight. The world, as Schopenhauer says, is my idea. All is interpretation, perception, representation. Husserl's advance on this is to realize how it undermines itself unless one can isolate interpretations from the things of which they are accounts, by a bracketing of experience in which we notice our own perceiving and experiencing in the moment and separate that from the content of our experience. Our ability to do that, he thinks, saves the idealist view from the kind of incoherence I mentioned above which one can realize underlies behaviorism. There is still a contrast, which we need in order for the terms we use to be intelligible, but it is a contrast between experience of the self and experience of other--experience of experiencing and the thing that fills out the phrase "consciousness of . . ." or perception of . . . or “dream of” (or heft of, etc.) when we fill it out with accounts of things which are other than ourselves.

            What the idealist position does, then, is reduce all reality to something like dreams. The difference between when I'm driving home and when I'm dreaming I'm driving home is even more difficult to articulate for an idealist than it is for Descartes or for the skeptic, and I'm tempted to say that idealism is where one ends up if one believes in the skeptic's dreaming argument. I’m further tempted to agree that if there are such things as perceptions, then the argument is a good one and Berkeley’s idealism is the inevitable position.

            Logical Monism: Another position we might take with regard to the dreaming argument is to regard the appearances of things as neither mental nor physical but rather as the atoms of which both the mental and the physical are made when we add the hamburger helper of linguistic conventions to them. That is, we might regard the things which come to us in dreams as just like the things which come to us in waking life, which are neither our ideas nor the physical world which causes ideas but rather the moments of contact between the two or between each of us and whatever else there is, of which the present moment is also made. Not only that, the flow of these logical monads or atoms, which we might as well call the flow of empirical atoms or the flow of experiences--this flow is the only thing which is real (this is what makes this a monism), and our ability to make sense of the experiences and then to talk of all the things we do when prompted by our experiences is what needs explaining. This is the cartoon view of logical monism, the view John Cook attributes to Wittgenstein in his series of powerful books beginning with Wittgenstein's Metaphysics. It is the most fundamental of empiricist views, a view of reality as purely empirical, purely the appearances of things manifested in the flow of human experience.

            Logical Positivism: Finally, the verificationist or logical positivist approach also has a lot of pull. The way this would go is as follows: like Russell's five minute old universe hypothesis (in which we ask why we should not suppose that the world was created five minutes ago with our memories and the records and geological stratigraphy and libraries which we have hitherto taken as evidence of a past that lasted longer than five minutes), the dreaming argument's punch line is logic- and evidence-proof, but this is its weakness as well as its strength. That is, nothing can tell against it, but that means nothing can tell for it either. Its problem is not that we cannot find a way to refute it but rather that there is in principle no way either to refute or to verify it and so it is either unscientific (this is the mild form) or meaningless (the stronger, positivist form). The argument is built on the possibility that anything one can perceive or sense one can also dream, and so my present moment's perception can possibly be a dream. I might suppose that I can publicly verify that this moment's perception of the purple finch on the bird feeder is not a dream by asking you to verify that there's a purple finch on the feeder. But I would be wrong to suppose this is foolproof since I could also dream that I am asking you to verify there's a purple finch on the feeder. Because of the possibility that any verification could itself be dreamed, there is no way to verify that one's present perception is or is not dream, and so the claim that I do or do not know that I am not now dreaming is beyond the reach of verification. Since there is no way to verify the claim or the denial, one reasonable way to respond would be to dismiss the claim and its denial as senseless or at the very least as unscientific.

            A main objection to the positivist approach is that it seriously undermines itself once one asks on what grounds we should decide that what is unverifiable is senseless--what's the argument? Further, if it is true, how does one verify the claim that what is unverifiable is senseless? The argument for the equivalence of unverifiability and senselessness seems to be only that without it we have no way to cope with (which means, dismiss) the five-minute-old universe hypothesis, the dreaming argument, and other similar positions–a tactic a little like claiming that we must have lost our keys over under the streetlight because otherwise it's too dark to find them. Worse, suppose it is true that claims which are unverifiable are senseless. How shall we verify that? The answer is that the claim, that claims which are unverifiable are senseless, is not verifiable, and so it is senseless. The only way to save it from being senseless is to suppose that it is false. Either way the positivist is in trouble.

            This positivistic response can still be defended. Its main appeal was that it does give us some insight into a problem with the five-minute-old universe hypothesis which seems analogous to something wrong with the dreaming argument. I expect that working on the five-minute-old universe hypothesis might be helpful to us on the dreaming argument, and that in fact there are other responses, but we'll have to find a way to do that without relying on a verificationist theory of meaning like the logical positivists'. Some of the attack on the five-minute old world hypothesis can be made without leaning on verification even though it's the verificationists which pointed out the way to us--for instance, if the hypothesis is right then a great many terms about time do not mean what we take them to mean and indeed a great many terms will become hopelessly confused nonsense, such as "geological time" and "six minutes" and "history" and "the seventeenth century," with the result that the term "five minutes ago" threatens to dissolve in the same acidic swamp.

            O.K. Bouwsma's essay on the Evil Genius makes a related point about Descartes' attempt to conceive of a godlike creature who deceives us about everything, the point being that the meaning of deception depends on their being an alternative to deception, namely getting it right, and that if Descartes tries to take that away from us then we no longer have any way to make sense of deception. I doubt that such a point can be made in connection with the dreaming argument because Descartes’ claim there (as opposed to the in the Evil Genius argument) is not ever categorical in such a way that the contrast between dreaming and waking is threatened. Instead, it's now that I might be dreaming, and now that I have no certain signs, rather than some such claim as one finds in Chuangzhi or in Russell, that my life might be a dream or dreaming might be the real thing.

            Pragmatism and the Question, What's at Stake?

            Pragmatism: The Pragmatist position is importantly founded on the idea that nothing turns on the dreaming argument. While it may be that I can find no certain signs by which I may tell I am not now dreaming, nevertheless I must live as if I can find those signs easily. That this is so shows even beyond the dramatic cases or those like Hume mentions, of my leaving the philosopher's study wondering about whether this or that might be a dream and stepping into the street as a coach and four approaches--whether it's dream or not, I had better step back. That might be a pedestrian case, but others are even more mundane. I may be dreaming I am pecking away on my laptop and the purple finch is at the feeder outside the window, but I have to accept that those things are not dreams in order to go on living as I do. The result is that if I am now dreaming, it makes no difference. The pragmatist goes on to suppose that she should turn her attention to things which do make a difference. Rorty, for instance, hopes to get intellectuals engaged with issues (poverty, compassion, oppression, socialized health care, educating for imagination) regarding which the social consequences are more clear, and to get them to put the traditional philosophical issues behind them as of no consequence. For Rorty, paying attention to the dreaming argument is indulging in a kind of sterile scholasticism. Nothing's at stake. We should leave it alone.

            This notion of nothing being at stake is one of the main blunders made by the pragmatists. What's at stake is subtle and articulating it may be difficult, but it is not small. Part of what is at stake is our ability to mean what we say when we say we know, when we deny knowing, when we inquire about knowing, at least if epistemology is partly an account of those things. Further, part of what is at stake is a susceptibility to Cartesian dualism and all the alienation and isolation that makes us heir to. Part of what is at stake is our ability to tell when we are still saying things rather than gabbling parrotwise or deluding ourselves into thinking we are making sense. The dreaming argument is in part a test case for whether philosophy is doable without engaging in nonsense, and so the stakes involved are stakes not just for the dreaming argument but for the profession.

            One way to see that pragmatists may have misunderstood the stakes is to consider their claim that if we are dreaming, it makes no difference. We might be tempted by this idea, but it is an important reminder that we are tempted within a particular context, namely the context in which the dreaming argument presents itself as a threat to our ability to judge what to do, considered abstractly and philosophically. Because we wish to defuse the strength of the argument, responses which deny that strength are tempting. One problem is that the response does not deny the argument--indeed, saying that [even] if we are dreaming it makes no difference allows for the possibility that we might be dreaming, which means the pragmatist allows that the argument's conclusion may be right. Descartes would cackle in triumph–“Okay, you can live as if you know, but nanny nanny boo boo, it’s just living as if.” Another problem is that the pragmatist has only a pragmatic view of what matters, namely whether the argument results in anything which will change what we do. Their claim that if I am dreaming I am writing this paper or dreaming that I see an oncoming coach and four heading my way as I step into the street it does not matter because I will go on writing the paper and I will step back out of the street leaves out other possible ways it might matter whether I am dreaming.

            And there is another problem, in that the pragmatist's notion that it does not matter whether I am dreaming or not is not grounded in any examples of dreaming--the quickest survey of possible cases will suggest that sometimes it does not matter and sometimes it might matter. The suppositions, that I might now be dreaming or that I am dreaming or that I am not dreaming, can sometimes affect what I do. Suppose I have a history of dreaming that the phone is ringing or someone is at my door, and when I have this dream I often start to get out of bed before I catch myself, and tell myself it's only that dream again (or some such). These dreams come and go in their frequency, sometimes occurring a couple of times a month, sometimes once a year. I've had them now for about ten years, spent some time trying to figure them out, now just tolerate them. This morning, after a late night grading papers, I sleep in, but wake to a knock at the door, pull back the covers but realize that I was dreaming and fall back onto my pillow. Then I hear a knock at the door, and in my befuddled state I feel some alarm because after all I'm more awake now but there it is, still the knock--this is a new and more insistent version of my recurrent dream, I think, and I pull the pillow over my head in time that I avoid hearing Ed McMahan call my name.

            Or you, to take another case, sometimes have vivid dreams of interactions with your siblings and parents and confuse yourself into thinking they really happened. With some of these of course it won't matter--you ask your sister whether she got her car fixed and find it was never sick, and all that turns on it is a bit of embarrassment--but with some it may involve misunderstandings for higher stakes, as when you ask your sister whether she's told the father yet that she's pregnant or you let it slip to him yourself.

            What accounts for the pragmatist's failure to acknowledge these commonsensical stakes? What the pragmatist was thinking is that if all our experiences are dreams or all our experiences are on the same level as regards dreaming versus waking, then we will have to treat them all the same. She was thinking of my looking up and seeing what seems to be a coach and four bearing down on me as something I might do whether I am dreaming or awake because seeing what seems to be a coach and four bearing down on me will always be the same whether I am dreaming or awake--and given that, then I will always if I am reasonable react in the same way. The dreaming argument, though, does not attempt to establish any such general claim. In both Plato's version (in Theaetetus 157b and following) and in Descartes' version) there is a carefully thought-out emphasis on the present moment, on the issue of whether there are any certain signs that I may tell that I am not now dreaming. Cases like those above show that the stakes change with the content of the moment, and that sometimes it does matter. Whether Descartes is sitting by the fire in his robe pecking on his laptop or is sleeping naked in his bed may not matter much, but whether he is taking the reddish glow of firelight on his curtains as a dream rather than as a neighbor's house burning--that might matter.

            Thinking of dreams and appearances and reality in a schematic way which emphasizes how all these are the same across various cases obscures how the cases can be different. The phenomenologist and the logical monist are at about the same point in this labyrinth as the pragmatist, having granted more than the dreaming argument tries to establish in their treatment of all moments as the same in this way--that since whatever we see presents us with an appearance which remains the same whether it is dream or real, then only those appearances are truly real.

            Part of the charm of the pragmatist position is that it bites the hand that feeds it--Rorty's ditching philosophy for humanities and literature because philosophy does nothing to help cope with oppression, injustice, bigotry, human and global catastrophes, alienation and ennui, besides falsely implying that literature and the humanities have a better record as helping professions in humane causes, ignores the source of his ability to articulate the causes, which source is philosophy.

            The result, once again, is that the question about what is at stake with the dreaming argument can be seen as closely akin to the question about what is at stake with philosophy. Rorty takes the dreaming argument to typify what is wrong with philosophy, but curiously he takes it to do this by showing what philosophy does best and then he rejects this as otherworldly. What the dreaming argument does is show that certainty is not present in our ordinary lives and that the attempt to derive certainty is an attempt to run down a mythological beast. Much better to stick with real possibilities and to treat certainty as if the kinds of certainty which can be achieved were all that should be sought. In other words, it is always possible that we could be wrong, but we cannot practically eliminate that possibility and so must live as though it is not a real possibility.

            I've suggested some stakes involved with accepting dualism. Here's more. Consider some of the pathologies of dualism. We absorb dualism so deeply and so pervasively in this culture that it is like the air we breathe, so permeating our world that we cannot see it. Yet it divides and alienates for all that. Before we ever get to the mental aspects of human beings, the basic taken-for-granted part about our physical existence is an account that emphasizes separation, individuality, boundaries, countability and position and extension as though that were what we were. Human beings' bodies are bounded by their skins. Humans weigh a certain amount, should never be confused one with another, always have a particular location in space which cannot be the location of another human being at the same time no matter how much we might try, are individuals and separate. Separate from everything. Separate from the landscape, separate from the earth, separate from the universe, separate from our neighborhood and neighbors to the extent that loving them seems a wildly paradoxical notion because it is flatly impossible. Nothing in the story about dualism overlaps with the other stories we might tell about being together or being a part of something, being in a group or family or couple or discipline or situation or church or pickle or love or neighborhood so thought I would stop by. Instead it is all about being alone and separate and divided by space from every other human being and we haven't even got to the place where we really live up there behind our eyes where we are pulling levers and shouting to the engine room. That's the other side, the mental.

            The mental, especially to the extent that it is private and inaccessible to others, provides us with yet another grand set of dissociations and divisions and alienations, all in a realm that is already spectacularly separate, one that threatens to float isolated in Laputa or a Never-never land beyond the reach of our friends and family. Characterizing the mental and the issues which arise in connection with the mental calls forth an array of horribly mixed metaphors. The relation of the mind to the body, however we would like to settle the philosophical problem (even mind-brain identity stories, founded on heroic denial, leave intact the problems about how my hopes that you will call can interact with my leaping to the phone when it rings), winds up being an account of how the captain on the bridge can understand the messages from the lookout and can convey orders to the engine room, an account which leaves me connected to my own feet by the most fragile and mysterious lines of communication--that is, if I am connected at all. Besides being characterized as a captain of a ship, the mind sometimes is conceived as an inner theater, or as a windowless room within which we live and on whose walls we see portrayed for us the world as the senses paint it, along with the world as we dream and imagine and hope and dread and hallucinate it, a room one could rent out if one were a brain in a vat. I pass over the part of this story about rationality as the one thing we can trust, rationality conceived as that faculty which evaluates arguments impartially, and impartiality conceived as the deliberate dissociation (because they are never a help and often a hindrance) from our families, our bodies, our hopes and memories and histories of victories and defeats, our desires and our appreciations. But one clear result of the standard accounts of mind is that within the mind is where we exist with our thoughts and hopes and significances and associations and feelings and memories and dreams, and that in there each of us is irredeemably alone.

            Wittgenstein has at both pieces of this account. It is part of his accomplishment that he increases our awareness of how many of our philosophical lines of thought rely on fragments of dualism, as though those lines of thoughts are carriers of this recessive gene. He examines, for instance, the temptation to say "Only I can have my pain." He winds up on the same side as Josiah Royce. Royce castigates people who would say, "Your pain is not the same as my pain, for your pain is much easier for me to bear" with the remark that pain is pain, after all, and this puts Royce on Wittgenstein's side in this battle against our own philosophical ontogeny. After all, it is not always the case that your pain is much easier for me to bear, not when I am speaking to my children or lover or when I am compassionate.

            Suffering with others is one clue that dismantling dualism might have a therapeutic effect on more than academic philosophy. Outside philosophy we easily acknowledge things which are of the greatest puzzlement to philosophers. "This is the same headache the previous tenants used to get." "She's a great one for stoicism, but I know she's in pain." "We're in this together." "Madame Chairman, I've not met the previous speaker, but I am of the same mind on this matter as he."

            This therapeutic work might lead in part to a simple recognition. In this way it is reminiscent of some literature of enlightenment. It's a recognition which would prompt us to express humility on behalf of the profession of academic philosophy and on behalf of all of the academic world who have swallowed and now in their work express those unacknowledged bits of philosophical legislation. The recognition would be that in philosophy and in the academic world we are accounting for things which are not our property--we are accounting for knowledge, justice, language, art, science, argument--and that what we are giving accounts of are things we need to keep our eyes on. We have not done this. If we give, and we have given, an account of knowledge which has nothing to do with the cases in which people claim to know or ask whether someone knows or deny knowing or correct claims to know or confirm that they do know, then this is a clue that perhaps we have gone astray. And to the extent that we are working on accounts of what it is to be human beings, we might be led to a recognition that sometimes we are not alone, not cut off from others, in the way philosophy so quickly and deeply assumes and even requires that we are. We'll need to keep our eyes on human beings too. Doing so, we might find that philosophy could rejoin the human race, be its ally and its friend.

Objections (pointing out that dualism is poisonous doesn’t show it’s wrong, only that it would be nice if it were wrong)

I.

             It is crucial to the dreaming argument that it succeed in bringing us to doubt that the senses can provide us with knowledge, and that it does this by bringing us to the point that we can entertain doubts about whether we are now awake or dreaming. The first objection is that for Descartes' argument to work we have to treat doubt as a performative, a term for which if we fulfill the constitutive rules for engaging in the practice then when we say we do it we in fact thereby do it.

Consider the following version of the dreaming argument. How do I know I am not now dreaming? The way things look to me could be the same whether they are real or are dreamed. Therefore there are no certain signs by which I can know that I am not now dreaming. Therefore I do doubt that I am not now dreaming.

            One problem with this argument is with whether we can take the issue seriously. That is, if I agree that I can doubt whether I am now awake, then Descartes' dreaming argument leaves me gasping and flopping around on the dock, having swallowed hook line and sinker--BUT I have to agree that I can doubt whether I am now awake, or doubt that I am not now dreaming, and in order to do that it seems I have to follow Descartes' lead and agree to doubt just that.

            But the word "doubt" is not a performative. That is, it is not like "promise" or "warn" or "guarantee," those words where if I say the words in the right kinds of circumstances then I have done the thing that the words say--If I say "I promise" in the right circumstances, then I have promised, no matter even if I intended to promise or not, no matter if I intend to fulfill my promise or not. Likewise for the wedding vows--I may intend to sleep around or ditch my wife the next night, but if I say "I do" at the altar in front of witnesses and all that, then I did. This is in contrast with other words--run, know, understand, remember, appreciate, own, bite--where saying the words does not make it so that we have understood or bitten. I might say, "I hereby bite you," but this is unlike when I say in the proper and standard circumstances, "I hereby swear that the testimony I am about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," because I have not bitten by saying I have bitten as I have sworn by saying I swear. This can be investigated by those who are standing around, for whom my saying "I hereby bite you" does not establish that I have bitten you, though my saying "I hereby swear that the testimony . . .[etc.]" does establish that I have sworn.

            Doubt does not work like that. It does work, though, even with dreaming and being awake. It is possible to doubt we are awake. Nightmarish events may make us doubt whether we are dreaming. A sudden appearance of an old lover in the hall outside class might make us think we are dreaming. Hitting a bear while driving home on 101, or being involved in a multi-car pileup on a busy freeway, or hearing a doorbell in that transition period between sleep and waking--any of these might prompt us to ask ourselves whether we are dreaming. But march through Descartes' dreaming argument and then see whether you can say, "I doubt whether I am not now dreaming." Toss in the word "hereby," even, to make it more official. That is, check and see if you do doubt. You don't. The issue is a non-starter, because doubt requires more; it requires the kinds of circumstances and contexts we see in examples, the examples of which we can remind ourselves in which we do doubt whether we are dreaming or not. It's not a performative, not something we make so by saying it's so. We might be tempted to go on and say what it is, tempted perhaps to say that it is a report of a psychological state which either obtains or does not obtain, tempted to say further that Descartes' insight in the _cogito_ that even if I doubt I exist I must exist to do the doubting depends on an assumption that the law of the excluded middle holds, that there are only two possibilities, that I do not doubt I exist and so I do exist, or that I doubt I exist and therefore I do exist (or I could not be doubting), --and perhaps these temptations would lead us to the insight that Descartes has left out the possibility which in fact does obtain for almost all of us almost all the time, that we neither doubt nor do we not doubt that we are dreaming or that we exist, the possibility then that we need more to make sense of this way of talking than the dreaming argument has given us.

            II.

            There is a related objection to the dreaming argument which can be made into a more general objection to some common philosophical methods. The relevance of examples and the existence of the issues in examples of which most philosophical problems are made are the key ingredients in this objection. To get to this, let's look again at part of Descartes' account which greatly aids him in establishing the plausibility or legitimacy of the question. That question is, how do I know I am not now dreaming?

            Descartes is in search of a method by which he can sort out the things to which he can give assent with confidence. That he hits on the knowledge he derives from the senses as a category probably deserves attention, but I'll pass that by for now. Let us grant that it is a category of our knowledge (we sometimes do reply to the question, "How do you know?" by saying things like "I saw it myself.") Descartes also shrewdly acknowledges that doubting what one sees or hears or touches seems crazy, as though the philosopher were (as indeed she is) like those persons who maintain they are made of glass or have heads made of pumpkins or that they are dressed in royal robes though they are in rags. That is, questioning one's senses seems something we can do on pain of suspicion that we are crazy or deluded.

            But Descartes dreams. Of course most of us dream. But Descartes has a certain kind of dream which helps make his asking the question, how does he know he is not now dreaming? a quite reasonable asking. Here he is, writing for us across a gap of three hundred fifty years, sitting by his stove wearing his robe. But after he quits, the battery runs down and the laptop starts beeping and he shuts it down, brushes his teeth, takes off his clothes and crawls under the quilts, he dreams that he is writing, dreams that he is sitting by his stove wearing his robes, and sometimes he awakens and realizes he was dreaming that he is doing the same thing he was doing before the laptop gave out.

            Some of us have dreams of doing the things which we do when we are not dreaming, and for most of the rest of us it is easy to conceive of doing this. When I first got the crane operator's job in the mill, I went through a spell of dreaming that I was walking around the mill holding the crane control box and the cargo belts hanging behind me. Several of us have similar accounts. A few, perhaps, have dreams of coming to philosophy seminars and sitting listening to professors read papers about the dreaming argument. We will expect the result is a kind of vertigo, a sense of deja vu which threatens to disorient us, as philosophy often does.

            When and where do we feel this disorientation, and how much hamburger helper will it take before the disorientation takes over all our senses?

            Suppose that you belong to a group, Food and Thoughts Not Bombs, that meets at Powell's house on Tuesday evenings, that the group has been discussing the dreaming argument for some weeks, and suppose that you dream on a Sunday morning that you are listening to Powell read on Descartes' dreaming argument.

            When you awaken will you doubt that the dream is a dream, or doubt that you have awakened? Further, when you go to Powells' and the group finishes eating dessert and turns to the dreaming argument, will you doubt whether the discussion might be a dream? You will not--or, stronger, it is hard to know what doubting such a thing would be so that we can say you will or will not--despite telling the group your dream and despite Descartes' supposition that the fact that you have dreamed the same thing you are doing now not dreaming would or at least could lead you to doubt whether you are not now dreaming.

            It is only in the face of the dreaming argument that it seems we are called on to account for the fact that we do not doubt.

            Something odd has happened. The dreaming argument has the effect of making us feel we need to account for something, something for which otherwise we should feel no need to give an account. The something is equivocal, too--on one hand, there is a need to claim and to defend the claim that I am not now dreaming, and on the other there is a need to claim and to defend the claim that I know I am not now dreaming. That there is such a distinction and that Descartes does not see the distinction needs some comment.

            Suppose Pat is working two jobs, sixteen hours a day in two different factories on two different production lines. He cannot get the hang of sleeping during the day when he is not working. He gradually over several weeks becomes exhausted to the extent that he is beginning to fall asleep in the lunch room and sometimes has to stop on the shoulder of the highway to take a nap driving home. He begins occasionally to hallucinate, and the hallucinations seem to him dreamlike intrusions into his waking life. Sometimes his dreams and the hallucinations seem the same--twice while driving home he has hallucinated someone, a largish stranger, standing up on the shoulder of the highway in the predawn darkness and throwing a football at him in his car. And he has had this same thing happen while he was lying in his bed dreaming--he dreams he is driving home, exhausted, and sees someone rise up in the weeds along the road and throw a football at him. The first time this happened while he was driving he veered, badly frightened, though the apparition vanished as it should have gotten clear. The second time, over a week later, he was startled but steady and tried to notice more detail--the stranger seemed to rise up off one knee and stood a second, cocked his arm and threw, leading the car enough that Pat felt that, had the car been a convertible, he would have had a chance to catch it. Suppose Pat next makes a terrible mistake. He tells a couple of his friends from his college football days about this hallucination/dream. One, Roger, is a bit of a sadist. After Pat has told his friends about it, Roger puts together a prank--he gets his older brother, whom Pat has never met, to wait in the weeds etc. Pat is driving home slowly, absolutely wasted, and is hardly fazed when he sees the man rise up, until the football hits his windshield.

            Now Pat could doubt the football thrower was not a dream or hallucination, though perhaps the fog might clear enough that he will realize right away that it was a mistake to tell Roger. In case he does doubt, what accounts for his doubting? The answer is that the example has provided us with the account. We can summarize that, but the summary has the story we have told as its basis. Pat is exhausted and has been dreaming or hallucinating the same thing that just took place, and it is important for the account that "the same thing" get spelled out, along with the extreme nature of his fatigue and the sadistic joke that is being pulled on him. That means that it is this story, this example, which provides the account making sense of his wail. The particular story, the particular example, is the account which explains in case Pat should wail in bewilderment to a passenger, "I don't know if I am dreaming or hallucinating or not." If his passenger is not in on the prank, has seen the football thrower, then the passenger will need to know more of the story before she can understand his wail, and when she understands enough to pat him on the arm and say, oh, no, I saw it too, that will let him know it was a major mistake to tell Roger.

            I expect other examples could be put together which would make intelligible a character in the example saying, "Am I dreaming?" or "I don't know if I am dreaming or not." These examples might not have to include extreme sleep deprivation, though we expect such things as fatigue, hallucinogenic drugs, _delirium tremens_, wildly unlikely events, odd juxtapositions of the ordinary and the bizarre, a history of having dreamt the particular thing which is at issue, and perhaps other factors. We can construct cases such that someone might say, "I don't know whether I'm dreaming or not," or "I wonder if I'm dreaming," or "I might be dreaming," or "I know [or, I don't know] I'm not dreaming." With enough details and weirdnesses we might be able to provide cases in which the speaker will think she does know but in fact is wrong, but that will not matter. The truth of the speaker's claim, whatever it is, may be a separate matter from whether we have the material in the example to understand the claim. That is, its intelligibility can sometimes be distinguished from its truth.

            It might seem we have helped Descartes out, since we have succeeded in providing an account for how someone might be led to say he doubts he is not dreaming. We have not. What we have provided is an account _for the particular person in the example_, and not for anyone who is not in the example--not even for anyone else who is in the example (for instance Roger or the passenger in Pat's car). Most importantly, we have not provided an account which would make sense of your or my saying that this present moment, my typing these words, my reading these words aloud, your reading or your hearing these words, might be a dream. Instead the examples support the idea that if such an account as I have given makes intelligible saying this present moment might be a dream, then unless you and I have had some similar, strikingly unusual things going on we are lacking just such an account. In other words, absent such a particular account our saying such a thing would be without basis, without sense. Descartes thought his example would justify a categorical claim for all of us that we might now be dreaming (or that we do not know we are not now dreaming). But in fact an examination of examples shows that the examples are what justify the claims which arise in and for those examples, and that those examples are particular, that is, they are not all examples. In particular and most pointedly, they are not examples which include either the present moment you are in or the present moment I am in. His argument fails. It fails to establish the truth of his claims, that I might now be dreaming and that I do not know I am not now dreaming, but more importantly it fails to provide intelligibility for that claim.

            In the face of any question we might raise about why we should think that this moment [my pecking away, your reading or listening] might be a dream, Descartes only has the insight that some people have dreamed or could have dreamed such moments as we are in. A quick look at examples shows that won't be enough to make sense of such a question, won't be enough that someone would ask or even understand his question. His own case is a halfway house case--he dreams often of doing such things as we are doing now, of pecking away or of listening to a professor read a paper on the dreaming argument. Does he then wonder whether he might now be dreaming? No, he does not do that--instead he wonders how he knows he's not dreaming and fails to come up with an answer. Knowing, after all, has been his main interest, not dreaming. He concentrates on the epistemological question. But the reason he fails to come up with an answer is not that he does not know but that he has failed to ask an intelligible question. And there is an explanation at hand for how he could have been led to ask his question, an explanation which casts doubt on the legitimacy of his enterprise and doubt on the legitimacy of our temptations to the extent we were happy to follow his lead.

            That explanation can be abbreviated in different ways. One way would be in terms of assumptions: he assumes that either we know or we do not know whether we are dreaming; he assumes that dreams provide us with appearances just as our perceptions do; he assumes that the possibility of someone dreaming what we are doing now implies that we might be dreaming now without looking at what kind of examples make sense of that possibility. The first assumption, the application of the law of the excluded middle restricting the answers to the question, do you know you are not now dreaming? leaves out the possibility that the question gets no traction, makes no sense, absent the kinds of details that can be provided in examples. The second assumption is the assumption of dualism, assuming mental appearances and physical reality, an assumption which has to be projected into examples rather than one that emerges in them. The third assumption confuses logical possibility with possibility in just the way that an examination of examples can help to disentangle.

II, Continued: a Comment on Method

            Finally, some comments which I hope will help clarify the method involved in this kind of objection. The objection does not hold up what we would say in examples of conversations and examples of thinking from when we are not doing philosophy as a criterion. It only holds up what we would say as a way to raise suspicions about sloppy work. When we are absolutely sure of ourselves and our work, it is absolutely unlikely we will take such reminders about what we would say seriously. To the extent that those reminders do show something bothersome or unexpected or jarring, they may reveal hidden or covert sloppiness, but if we can examine that possibility and dispose of it we are back to business, can proceed reassured, and need not worry about our work. To the extent that those reminders reveal problematic assumptions or unconscious sketches guiding our formulation of the philosophical problems, then we cannot go back to business but must settle whether the problems are legitimate problems, whether they make sense in the way we thought.

            Descartes' dreaming argument cannot survive this objection. Am I dreaming? or How do I know I am not now dreaming? is a question I can ask in some examples but not now and it is not a question Descartes can ask based only on the fact that he has dreamed of doing what he is doing now. We may be tempted to think that one need not establish the intelligibility of questions one asks but can rely on the question making sense in terms of the philosophical problem, but the objection in terms of appealing to examples of what we would say and think when we are not doing philosophy--that objection makes this temptation into a live issue. If it's a live issue, we need arguments. The arguments for the legitimacy of asking "might I now be dreaming?" or "how do I know I am not now dreaming?" have not been forthcoming, unless we do as Descartes does and rely on assumptions which have the effect of legislating the legitimacy of the question.

                        jwp

-|-