Dreams
Shall I annoy thee with a Shakespeare quote? Perhaps not.
There's a problem about dreams.
Suppose that last night you dreamt there was a mauve armadillo on the dresser. Probably you didn't. This is not the sort of thing people really dream of, usually. But it's not impossible -let's say you did. You did not dream of a fuchsia meerkat on the radiator.
Reformulating this supposition in linguistic terms, we might consider the sentence,
S1: "You dreamt there was a mauve armadillo on the dresser."
Crucially, we might notice that S1 is (seems to be) true
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This crystallizes our problem: in virtue of what is S1 true, if it is? What makes it true? What is -and perhaps equally interestingly, where is- the stuff of which your dreams are made?
Compare this to the question we might ask as to what would make true the mundane sentence,
S2: "There was a hairbrush on the dresser".
In this latter case, we are apt to think, there is some unremarkable bit of personal grooming equipment which more or less trivially fulfills the brief
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And so we have set ourselves an impossible task. Our question about the dream, juxtaposed with the hairbrush question, impels us to look for some thing responsive to our philosophical or scientific curiosity. But, because dreams are, by their nature, exclusive to their experiencer, anything which we, who are not the experiencer of your dream, might happen upon in our quest, is bound to come up short. Any candidate thing we might find, being something we all can look at, will by its nature not be your dream
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My claim about the Model is that it solves this problem, among others. The solution for dreams is the same as for the phenomena of consciousness, but the main challenge -namely, its admitted counter-intuitiveness- is particularly vivid where dreams are concerned. Here, briefly, is the case in its favour.
The Familiar View
The Model's main job is to explicate the concepts of semantics. Its innovation is to turn the tables on the familiar thinking about truth exemplified by the sentence about the hairbrush. The familiar thinking is that we, as rational selves, stand in some non-trivial knowledge relation to things like hairbrushes. We generally know them when we see them, but a bumblebee would not, nor even, in some sense, would a dog. There's something going on there which, it seems, needs investigation and explanation. We bring this knowledge -whatever it amounts to- to our understanding of language, including to our knowledge of the meanings of words like 'hairbrush'. This knowledge and understanding then jointly equip us to evaluate sentences like S2 when we encounter them. This all transpires in sub-cutaneous mental and/or biological machinery which philosophical and possibly scientific investigation are meant to inform. There is, in short, real philosophical work to be done to explain such things as how we can be justified in believing to be true, S2 and S1.
Turning the tables
The Model takes a different view. Its starting point is to acknowledge that there most definitely is a purely scientific problem to understand how our brains, conceived as nothing more than vastly complex, recursive pattern-recognizers, come to have their hairbrush-correlated neural patterns actuated in the presence of hairbrushes
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It equally has no trouble acknowledging that our everyday, common-sense hairbrush reports, which work amazingly reliably, are doing just fine without any help from philosophy. The investigation of the scientific problem here will, we assume, one day give us a good understanding of what happens in the brain of someone who sincerely utters a sentence like, "I dreamt there was a mauve armadillo on the dresser", including an understanding of the brain-pattern-level connections to waking armadillo-stimulations and mauve-thing-stimulations. But that investigation will not issue in an answer to our opening question, any more than it will afford an understanding of the subjective self which any having of a dream presupposes. It will not give us for consideration somebody's dream itself, that we may deem it to make true (or not) her or his dream-report sentence
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The Model posits that there is in fact no work for philosophy to do, to explicate our understanding of English speakers' ability to understand and judge the truth of sentences like S2 or S1 (and similarly for any language, naturally). There is no coherent explanatory idiom which adverts to sub-states or internal processes or faculties of a person as such
,
no idiom (beyond common sense) which would complete an explanation beginning, "Tim judged the statement, 'The hairbrush is on the dresser' to be true because ...", nor, for that matter, an explanation beginning, "The oneirologist judged Tim's statement, 'I dreamt there was a mauve armadillo on the dresser.' to be true because ..."
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Demurring from Explanation
So, what are the forces which push us to think there must be an explanation, and how do we resist them? There is a mountain of established philosophical thinking to which to try to do justice, here. But I will (try to) cut to the chase
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The details involve language. If we ask how one goes about judging the truth of something like S2, the normal answer would be that one has at a minimum to know the meanings of the words 'dresser', 'hairbrush', and so on, and the grammar of English. These bits of knowledge jointly conjure up an understanding of S2. And philosophers have long (mostly) thought that there must be a systematic, non-trivial story to tell about what's involved in this process. The keys here are that knowledge of word-meaning is taken to be more basic than understanding of sentence expressed, and that there is important work to be done to understand what exactly they (knowledge of word-meaning and understanding of sentence expressed) are. If this is so, and if we are able to judge the truth of what we have understood, then there will need to be some story to tell about the connection between the word 'hairbrush' and material hairbrushes somehow independently apprehended. Our thoughts about the world can be rational only if they can be tethered to non-linguistic reality, somehow grasped. This is not an unreasonable thought, I acknowledge. And so we have arrived at the familiar picture just referred to. The decisive move in the conjuring trick has been made.
Although this is the normal picture, it is not ineluctable. The Model proposes instead to begin by giving an account of sentence-truth without saying anything at all about word-meaning. This is the schism from traditional philosophy. How it does this is something I have talked about at length elsewhere. In a nutshell, it shows that we can model the exchange of sentences a bit the way game theorists might model the exchange of potentially valuable but arbitrarily easily reproducible tokens of some variety. Doing this, and making certain plausible assumptions, it shows that conversants would naturally come to ascribe a property just like truth to these tokens. This all happens completely independently of the particulars of the non-linguistic world. With truth in place, the Model is able to give us rewardingly accurate concepts of word-meaning and the propositions expressed by sentences. It is a deeply unorthodox way of conceiving of semantics, but not one which is obviously more fraught than any of the many theoretically challenged mainstream ways.
Back to Dreams
I've said I will provide a solution to the problem about dreams, but have talked instead so far about language. There is an evident danger of exacerbating the undeniable philosophy-fatigue among regular visitors to this intellectual terrain. The first, bottom-level point to make is that what generates the problem about dreams in the first place is a misconception of our relation not just to nocturnal fabulations but to hairbrushes and everything
. It's our thought that we have some kind of language-independent grasp of the ordinary objects of experience which we can press into theoretical service, which sets us in the wrong direction. What I am denying, in the first instance, is not specifically dreams and their subjective ilk, but a certain conception of direct acquaintance with all things.
The second, bottom-level point is that the reconception of language and our relation to the world creates an existential crisis specifically for necessarily private things, like dreams. Things, reconceived, are bits of stuff, or abstracta, about which we (emphasis on the plural) potentially all can talk usefully about. Owing to the Model's reliance on communication to ground truth and meaning, dreams and the like just don't qualify in this respect
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As I said, this account may seem unsatisfactory because it's talking about language and concepts rather than the things they're about or of, but its ultimate point is that the philosophical thoughts you believe yourself to be having about dreams and the like have no content. It feels like the thoughts you have on this subject are about something real and undeniable, the problem is that you are being misled by your own (mis)understanding of the world.
Compare: the speed of light is (let's pretend exactly) 1 080 000 000 km/hr. If a car is travelling 100km/hour and turns on its headlights, you would expect someone by the road measuring the speed of the light coming out of them to report 1 080 000 100 km/hr. But they would not - it would still be 1 080 000 000 km/hr. It seems wrong, but that's because our intuitive concepts are wrong - fixing them is what Relativity Theory is about. Fixing our concepts can dissolve problems, but sometimes at the cost of head-scratching counter-intuitiveness.
The Rub
As promised, the outcome is counter-intuitive. What exactly am I saying? Dreams don't exist? Not exactly. To get to dreams we need first to have true sentences containing the word 'dream'. And properly to qualify as true, a sentence has to matter - it has to make a difference whether it's true or not. This is where dream-reports fall down. As detailed in the discussion of consciousness here, although sentences reporting dreams may be in a weak, degenerate sense, true, in a more important sense they do not really qualify. It makes zero difference to me - and will in every case make zero difference- whether what you say you dreamt, you really did dream. People lying about their dreams matters not a whit. In this sense, dream reports are completely idle, and their objects ineffable beyond the surface. So dreams do exist, but only in this weak, degenerate sense, a sense which puts them beyond the reach of science or philosophical elucidation. This seems to me what should, on consideration, look like the right outcome.