The Dream Argument
Let's open up this can of worms again...
The dream argument attempts to demonstrate that belief in the existence of an "external" world is never justified. The argument apparently traces its roots to Pyrrohnian skepticism, but ultimately found it most popular and memorable expression in Descarte's Meditations.
Klein, in his SEP article on skepticism, contends that the Dream argument conforms to the following schema:
[quote=Klein, 2014, Skepticism, SEP]
1. If I know that p, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p.
2. U is a genuine ground for doubting that p.
3. Therefore, I do not know that p.
[/quote]
A suitable appropriation might look something like this:
1. If I know that the object I am holding in my hand exists independently of my mind, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting it.
2. If I were now dreaming, then there would be ground for doubting that the object in my hand exists independently of my mind.
3. Therefore, I don't know that the ball in my hand exists independently of my mind.
The argument turns on several considerations, but here are a few of the most important:
1. Having grounds for doubting a claim is incompatible with a claim counting as knowledge.
2. Dreams are (in principle if not in practice) epistemically indistinguishable from waking experience.
3. Mind and world are ontologically dichotomous, with experience being entirely "internal" to the mind (e.g. qualia, ideas, representations, etc.) and the world being entirely "external" to it.
I've found that a person typically finds the argument convincing to the extent that they find the above considerations convincing.
Do you think the argument is a decisive objection those who think belief in the mind-independent existence of the world is justified? Why or why not?
The dream argument attempts to demonstrate that belief in the existence of an "external" world is never justified. The argument apparently traces its roots to Pyrrohnian skepticism, but ultimately found it most popular and memorable expression in Descarte's Meditations.
Klein, in his SEP article on skepticism, contends that the Dream argument conforms to the following schema:
[quote=Klein, 2014, Skepticism, SEP]
1. If I know that p, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting that p.
2. U is a genuine ground for doubting that p.
3. Therefore, I do not know that p.
[/quote]
A suitable appropriation might look something like this:
1. If I know that the object I am holding in my hand exists independently of my mind, then there are no genuine grounds for doubting it.
2. If I were now dreaming, then there would be ground for doubting that the object in my hand exists independently of my mind.
3. Therefore, I don't know that the ball in my hand exists independently of my mind.
The argument turns on several considerations, but here are a few of the most important:
1. Having grounds for doubting a claim is incompatible with a claim counting as knowledge.
2. Dreams are (in principle if not in practice) epistemically indistinguishable from waking experience.
3. Mind and world are ontologically dichotomous, with experience being entirely "internal" to the mind (e.g. qualia, ideas, representations, etc.) and the world being entirely "external" to it.
I've found that a person typically finds the argument convincing to the extent that they find the above considerations convincing.
Do you think the argument is a decisive objection those who think belief in the mind-independent existence of the world is justified? Why or why not?
Comments (57)
However, the reality of dreaming does raise the spectre that all experience is going on inside my head. If I can dream of people, trees, colors, sounds, even feels on occasion, then what makes my perceptions fundamentally different? A challenge for direct realism is to account of the fact that sometimes, we do experience an internal world (this also applies to daydreaming).
This, I suppose, is the motivation for some, like Dennett (at least in the past, not sure about now), to deny that we actually dream. Instead we "come to seem to remember" upon wakening. Thus, dream skepticism can be avoided. But I find that entirely unbelievable.
EDIT : After re-reading this, I realized that it might not be clear as to what I was trying to say.
Conclusion : The act of dreaming can never be used as grounds for doubting existence-sans-minds. Either we know the difference between dreaming and non-dreaming and could not logically use dreaming to disprove something about non-dreaming or, we do not know what a dream is and cannot hold it up as evidence for doubt.
In the end, the dream argument is more of an argument through metaphor than a logical argument. If you were to bring logic into it, you'd have to have an ultimate reason for something to exist, rather than nothing. Since there can be no ultimate reason, nothing can logically exist. Since 'somethingness' is logically untenable, it cannot be true. Thus, anything appearing to exist is false, such as dreams and balls and universes. The real fun begins when you begin to define nothingness, which is true.
I'm one of the realists around here. I don't think it's a decisive objection at all. One big problem with it is that it confuses the conceivability that not-p, or the coherent possibility of doubting that p with grounds for doubting that p. Grounds for something need to be more than conceivability or coherent possibility. After all, just as it's possible that one is merely dreaming that p, it's also possible that "one is dreaming that p" is false just as well. So if possibility is sufficient for belief, it's required that one believe contradictory claims, p and not-p, for almost every claim.
That it's a contradiction to believe two opposing things is not that it's a contradiction to claim that neither thing is sufficiently justified.
I think it would be useful to provide some context by providing some detail on Pyrrhonian scepticism.
(Ref: Beckwith, Christopher I. (2015). Greek Buddha: Pyrrho's Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. Princeton University Press. p. 28.)
The point is that Pyrrho's original intention was soteriological, i.e. concerned with attaining 'ataraxia', equanimity or imperturbability; it was a different kind of attitude to the later development of academic scepticism and sophistry, or 'doubt for the sake of doubting'.
Realism is sufficiently justified only insofar as it is implicit in the logic of all our linguistic usages; but not beyond that. Beyond that it is simply incoherent. The notion that everything might be a dream is doubly incoherent; both in terms of our linguistic usages and beyond that as well.
The "everything might be a dream" hypothesis just suggests that the relationship between waking experiences and whatever mind-independent things explain the experiences might be similar in kind to the relationship between dreams and the brain, i.e. there's a causal relationship between the two but no constitutive relationship such that the experience (or dream) is of its cause. When I dream of a tree I'm not dreaming of my brain, even though my brain is the cause of the dream, and so when I see a tree I'm not seeing whatever things are the cause of the experience, even though they're the cause of the experience.
It might be wrong, but I don't see how it could be incoherent.
I see it as incoherent because it relies on an analogy with a relationship that is meaningful only within a context. And this very context, and hence the meaningfulness of the relationship the hypothesis is dependent upon, is denied by the hypothesis itself.
You even say it here yourself: in principle if not in practice. That "in principle" is thus a quite limited argument when it goes against practice.
"In principle" is enough for a hefty argument. If it's true that there's nothing I might observe (even in principle) that would tell me whether I'm dreaming, then per Leibniz's Law, there is no difference between this and a dream.
That's a bad argument. You shouldn't ask for justification of belief in the existence of an external world under the assumption that the external world doesn't exist, or that we would never encounter the external world, only our own internal constructs.
For my part, I don't think it works either, for reasons similar to those provided above. I thought 's analysis provided in his "conclusion" was particularly pithy.
But experiences are not objects of observation; it's trivially true that you don't observe whether this has dreamy or veridical features... and from the lack of such observation it doesn't follow that there would be no difference between this and a dream.
Is there a difference between the dream table and the real table? What properties does one have that the other doesn't?
You can fly off the dream table, or it could turn into something else.
On the other hand you probably cannot choose to do a comprehensive spectroscopic and carbon dating analysis of the dream table or have it be reliably there for use for the next twenty years.
Unlike the dream the real table has the property of being the object of your experience of a table. For example, its present features in your visual field cause your visual experiences of it.
The dreamt table, however, is not causing your dream of it, instead it is evoked by your memories of a table, or your will, habits, or familiarity with describing tables.
The two experiences might be momentarily indistinguishable despite their difference in objects experienced, but it is not difficult to find out whether there is a table in your visual field.
The mistake of the skeptic is to assume that what the dream and the veridical case have in common would also be the object that you experience, or an element of the experience. It isn't. They only have in common what is constituitive for any experience, brain events. They differ, however, in what causes them, e.g. the real table as the intentional object of perceiving it, and in the dream it is your memories etc.
Among the table's properties is that you can fly off of it? But one can fly off a real table. A real table can change into something else. There may be in there some marks of distinction between dreaming and reality, but I don't think it has to do with the table's properties.
Dream tables can definitely be carbon dated and spectroanalyzed. If it's my dream, the analysis will inevitably yield some odd results like it spells the word "Fractured," or it's the name of a King, but I don't know which King and maybe it's a chess King.
A dreamworld is not a duplicate of the real world. It's usually pretty easy to tell them apart objectively.. But dreams do have quite a bit in common with the real, and the real has quite a bit in common with dreams.
If it's Descartes' dream argument we're talking about, it's not a side-by-side analysis we're doing anyway. It's a subjective thing. Are you dreaming now? If not, how do you know? What tells you that you're not?
You'd say exactly the same thing in the dream if the question came up.
Nothing is literally said in the dream.
You're not making sense. Would you care to explain?
So it seems to me that in both cases, we are simply describing the physical conditions which appear to result in these two examples of beings finding themselves somewhere and then deciding that one, being born, is more real than the other. In the ignorance of the basis of being and how beings come into being.
An aside, I have on ocassion woken from a dream with a strong sense that I am awake, only to find subsequently that I am still asleep and in a dream, a dream in which I am convinced I am awake. Then I wake up again and have to concentrate really hard on where I am and we're I was before I fell asleep, to establish that I am indeed awake.
I didn't say anything about it being a contradiction to say that neither thing is sufficiently justified.
So what? How in the world are you getting from that question and my response that I was saying something about it being a contradiction to say that neither thing is sufficiently justified?
The objection is "the belief that we're not dreaming isn't justified because there are ground for doubting it". You suggested that the same can be said about the belief that we are dreaming; it isn't justified because there are grounds for doubting it. And you said that because this entails believing contradictory things, the objection fails. But it doesn't involve believing contradictory things. It isn't a contradiction to claim that both the belief that we're not dreaming and the belief that we're dreaming are not justified.
I've just been reading Fogelin on skepticism so I may be writing Under The Influence. My feeling is that this is all what he would call 'Cartesian' rather than Pyrrhonian skepticism: some rules for debate are pre-assumed in which 'genuine' can reasonably be defined, for instance, so it's only skepticism within a certain framework, not skeptical of the framework.
I can imagine - indeed a friend told me there really is such a thing, but the reality or not doesn't matter for the argument - a society in which dreaming is held to make more sense than awakeness, and to bring one closer to the divine. In their society the boot is always on the other foot: how can you be sure you're not awake when you hope and believeyou are dreaming?
Even to be able to imagine such a society is to say that any assertion can be doubted, any claim to knowledge is in some way contextual. It depends upon the company you've been keeping and what you're talking about with them, on what mutual terms.
Mostly this doesn't matter, for 'knowing' is understood in a certain way as between, say, scientists, or lovers, or people who have an intuitive mutual understanding, or philosophers talking about epistemology. So Pyrrhonians - on this view - happily say 'Yes, I know' and mean it at the time.
You're ignoring my conditional. I said that IF the mere conceivability or possibility of a claim is sufficient for believing that claim, then it would require believing contradictories for the vast majority if claims.
Sorry... "In the dream, you asserted P." is true IFF in the dream, you asserted P.
Did I assert P in the dream? Yes, I did.
Problem?
Then as I said, it doesn't address the objection, which is that realism isn't justified because there are grounds to doubt it – which is not the same as claiming that realism is false.
Yes, do you mean that the existence of dreams, or dreams of saying things, would somehow show that we never know whether we dream or not?
I asked how you know you aren't dreaming right now. What does it suggest.. that you don't simply answer the question?
When I said you could fly off the table; what I meant is something like that you could levitate of of it, even if it is the living room. I suppose you could fly off a table if it was outside and you were wearing a 'jetpack' or something like that.
A real table can turn into something else; a pile of wood perhaps, but if it is a wooden table it cannot turn into something which is not wooden, short of a Biblical scale miracle. A dream table, on the other hand, could turn into a fish, an elephant, or a troupe of buffoons.
The interesting thing about dreaming is that it only during lucid dreaming, that is when you know in the dream that it is a dream that you can control the dream and do anything, and go any where, you wish. Or so, I am led to believe.
As to how I know i am not dreaming now; I would say that it is because I can remember so much detail about the last couple hours and how what I did during that time relates to what I did yesterday and the rest of my life as I remember it. i do not remember having that kind of experience of sustained memory and meaning in dreams. We must be able to make at least some meaningful distinction between waking and dreams, even to be able to ask the question.
I explicitly said in my comment that the initial post presents no grounds beyond conceivability/possibility.
Quoting John
Do you really remember a lot of detail about the last couple of hours? I know people vary when it comes to that.
Quoting John
Right. My application of Leibniz Law was partly as a lark. The conclusion of the argument is not that there is no distinction (anymore than the one about the Evil Demon is concluding that there is an evil demon.)
Since I perceive the world directly there is no reason for me to doubt whether my experiences right now when I'm awake might be real or dreams.
Quoting Mongrel
No, after your clarification your question turned out to be easy to dismiss (despite your misuse of "logic").
I can remember quite a bit of detail if I make the effort.
I don't think we are actually disagreeing about anything, just looking from the different available angles.
:P
I wonder if this is something the dream argument needs to work. On the surface I would say no. Supposing there is no ontological dichotomy between mind and world, the mere possibility that we are in a dream seems to be enough to make the argument get off the ground. In fact, if we conclude skepticism on these grounds, it would seem to be consistent to simply not have an opinion on the matter.
I used to argue exactly this, but I think it's a mistake in reasoning. We can distinguish between dream and reality, but what this does not do is provide justification for concluding that I know the ball I'm holding exists independently of my mind. Rather, all we are doing when we distinguish between dream and reality is setting how we use the terms "dream" and "reality" -- and applying a lack of coherence to the former and more coherence and rules to the latter. But could it not be the case that there are two types of dreams?
All the dream argument does is show that we are, in some cases, mistaken about how we use "reality" -- in what we term dreams we mistakenly believe they are real. So it is possible to believe something is real when it is not real, even by the mere definition of the terms set forth above. Hence, we have a reason to doubt, and therefore do not know. (via the argument, at least).
I suppose that would depend on how we cash out the terms "grounds for doubt" -- it would seem strange, I think, if a skeptic claimed to know, and on the basis of that knowledge then claimed to have grounds for doubt. The skeptic would claim that they do not know what a dream is -- but we have examples of being wrong about knowing when to appropriately use the word "reality" or "existence". Surely I know how to speak, hence our speaking. But that knowledge does not grant me reality, at least as far as we usually understand reality to not be defined by our speaking.
My perspective is in reference to being and the fact that due to some unknown process beings find themselves either in a dream, or in waking life, or perhaps in some other place such as as a ghost, or in some kind of heaven, or another world. Beings with minds just find themselves somewhere and be there.
Another way of saying this is that if solipsism is logically consistent (which I think it is), then a solipsist is in the same condition as this being I describe. They find themselves in a place, or state, through some unknown process and at some point will find themselves in another place and be there.
The problem is that if I am actually dreaming when I think I am awake, then all the characters that I interact with in my waking life have no conscious experience. Say it is true, as usually believed, that in my dreams the other characters are my purely own creations, and hence do not have any inner experience, then if it were also true in my waking life, this would amount to solipsism, pure and simple. And we all know that solipsism cannot be disproven, but that it is a very silly position to hold for obvious reasons.
Regarding the issue of other minds, in some sense we are all one mind(all the biosphere on Earth). So it may not be an issue atall.
Yes, it's true there is that 'universal mind' interpretation of solipsism, but it is very different to the solipsism that says that the only consciousness that exists is my own.
I don't think the argument from the OP leads to solipsism. Looking at it again:
Quoting Aaron R
Quoting Aaron R
Support for P2 being that a dream is not distinguishable from existence, in that we attribute reality to the dream while in a dream, but not when out of the dream.
The power of the dream scenario has more to do with how total it is, I think. When you are in a dream and you do not realize that it is a dream, then literally everything you experience is what, on this side of the dream, we would term not real. And, as @mcdoodle pointed out, we don't even have to term that side of the dream as not real -- we can actually term either side as "real" or "not real". There is a sense in which we've made a decision about reality in order to separate the real from the not real prior to the dream argument. And since what is in a dream seems total, and we've certainly thought that a dream was real before (and hence everything we experience, which we believe to be not real, is believed to be real) -- and so "U" -- we have a genuine ground for doubting p, and hence do not know that everything I experience is real.
But just because I do not know this that does not then imply, because of the character of "U", that I am a solipsist. If I am a skeptic, I would not be a solipsist in the sense that I would not claim to know that I am the only existing entity.
That's true. Soft solipsism says 'for all I know I am the only existing entity' rather than 'I am the only existing entity'. My point was only that if what we call waking life is really a dream, then it seems to inexorably follow that I am the only existing entity.
And if that's the case, then your reductio ad solipsism wouldn't apply to the argument.
Also, I might agree that the skeptic is saying something even weaker than "for all I know I am the only existing entity"; she might be saying: " I don't know that I am not the only existing entity". She might be saying this on the grounds that she believes that in the context of her dreams she is, as the dreamer, that is as the creator of all the entities she encounters there, the only existing entity. So, she believes that in the context of the world of the dream at least, solipsism is true. So if waking life is really nothing more than a dream, then solipsism would apply there also just as it is believed to in the dream context..
I've been making a weaker claim, though. A genuine ground for doubting comes about merely because we choose what we count as real and what we count as not-real, first (how to use the words "dream" and "reality"), and then we have experienced being completely wrong about everything we experience (in what we term "dream" we have believed everything we experience is what we term "reality"), in accordance with how we choose to use those words. If that be the case then we could be completely wrong, once again. Therefore it is possible that I am in dream. That doesn't mean that I am in a dream, only that the possibility is there. The possibility, as I understand the argument at least, is enough to give "genuine grounds for doubting" -- at least as the skeptic has it.
Since the skeptic -- as I am rendering the argument -- is not making a claim about whether or not she is in a dream, much less what that dream is (solipsistic), it's just not the case that you can reduce her position to solipsism, as that is making a claim about reality.
I think you're still misunderstanding my point. I'm not claiming that skepticism can be equated with solipsism; I'm simply pointing out that to say that it might be the case that I am dreaming amounts to saying that it might be the case that I am the only entity, given that in the context of dream I am commonly understood to be the only entity. But you could be skeptical about that too, and say that in dreams I might be interacting with independently real entities, and not, as I usually think. with my own mental creations. But if you thought that then the possibility that I am now dreaming would be no ground in any context for doubting the independent existence of the entities I am encountering.
I think that's where the disconnect is. The skeptic doesn't believe either that we are in a dream or that there are independently existing entities. Rather, the skeptic points out that as we have been wrong, entirely, before, we could be wrong again -- and this is just in reference to common uses of the terms, so "being wrong" does not contain an ontological commitment. Hence, due to the possibility of error, we have a reason to doubt.
I do have difficulty coming to terms with the idea that doubting something could be coherent, unless I have a clear idea of what it is that I am doubting. So, if there were no clear idea about what the ontological statuses of waking life and dreams were, then there would be nothing to doubt. Then, I wouldn't call such a state 'being in doubt' but rather 'abiding in acceptance of mystery'. That would be quite congenial to me.
:)