ABSTRACT
Descartes here makes several natural but substantive assumptions about the nature of dreaming. Most fundamentally, he assumes that dreaming is or involves a kind of experience – there is something it is like to dream. Obvious though it seems, this assumption is at least substantive enough to have been denied by some influential twentieth-century philosophers, most notably Norman Malcolm (1962).2 But let us follow Descartes and contemporary orthodoxy in this first assumption. Dreaming involves a kind of mental experience while asleep. Descartes’s second assumption is more contentious. Notice the move from the observation
midway through the quote above – Descartes sometimes dreams that he is by the fire, when he is really in bed – to the characterization at the end, according to which he is misled. To be misled is to have a false belief; so Descartes is supposing that when one dreams that one is by the fire, one thereby believes that one is by the fire. Although this assumption continues to enjoy orthodoxy, it has been contested on various grounds, many of which I shall lay out below. One might think instead that although dreaming that one is by the fire involves some kind of representation that one is by the fire, the propositional attitude in question needn’t be belief. Perhaps, for instance, dreaming that one is by the fire involves imagining that one is by the fire, and so no more constitutes being misled than would desiring that one is by the fire, when one isn’t. Dreaming doesn’t merely involve propositional attitudes. When Descartes dreams that he
is by the fire, he’s not merely representing to himself (whether via belief or some other
attitude) the content that he is by the fire; there are sensory modalities involved, too. For instance, he undergoes some sort of vision-like experience, similar in at least some respect to the experience of seeing a fire. Perhaps there is some auditory experience as of crackling, or tactile experience as of warmth, as well. Perceptual experiences have imaginative correlates, just as belief does – the experience of seeing a fire is a different experience from that of imagining what a fire looks like. So another important question one may ask about dreaming is whether the perception-like experiences are the same kinds of experiences that occur during waking perception, or instead whether they represent another kind of experience – perhaps that of visual imagery.
