Do We Believe What We Dream? (by guest blogger Jonathan Ichikawa)
I guess it's pretty standard to think that when we dream that p, we believe that p. Why?
To clarify the question: obviously, if I dream that I'm a famous opera singer (when in fact I am not a famous opera singer), it's part of the dream that I believe I'm an opera singer, and it's false that I'm an opera singer. But the question I'm engaging in isn't whether I believe it in the dream; it's whether in fact I believe it during the time that I'm dreaming. (Compare: in the dream I am performing at the Met; in fact, I am in my bed, which is not at the Met.)
If I knew the correct theory of belief, this might not be too hard a question to answer. We'd just see whether my dream state falls under that theory. Unfortunately, I don't know what the right theory of belief is. But it looks to me like most of the candidate theories will make the "you believe what you dream" view problematic. That's good news for me, because I reject that view -- but it also makes me wonder whether I'm missing something, in light of the fact that the dream belief view is so standard.
So are there plausible views about belief on which it turns out that we believe what we dream? Laura is sleeping in bed, dreaming that she is in England. What could make it true that she believes herself to be in England?
Some philosophers hold that beliefs necessarily play a certain kind of functional role; that what it is for a mental representation to be a belief is for it to play a distinctive belief-like role in a subject's cognitive economy. But, dream beliefs do not appear to play many of the same functional roles as do prototypical beliefs. Functionalists are of course free to specify which cognitive functions are distinctive of belief, but I am skeptical about there being a satisfactory specification of the functional role of belief that includes Laura's representation I am in England, but excludes obvious non-beliefs, like the representation Laura has when she fantasizes about being in England while awake.
Likewise, if one is tempted by an interpretationalist or dispositionalist theory of belief, one will have difficulty granting belief status to dream beliefs. Let's observe Laura as she's dreaming. On what basis can we ascribe to her the belief that she is in England? She is not behaving as if she is in England – she is not
looking to the right before crossing streets. Neither does she give us utterances that are best interpreted as expressions of the belief that she is in England, so any kind of Davidsonian radical interpretation is out of the question. Indeed, she's exhibiting very little behavior at all, since she is asleep. What is it about Laura in virtue of which she believes she is in England?
Eric, I think, has defended a view relating beliefs to long-term dispositions -- Laura's I'm in England representation definitely isn't one of those. It'll be gone when she wakes up, if not sooner! Maybe Eric can clarify whether I'm interpreting his view right, and how dreaming could fit in.
So, why would anybody think we believe what we dream?