Does one's working definitions of Waking and Dreaming reduce to immediate empirical contents, to non-immediate empirical implications, to both or to neither? — sime

I'm not quite understand the question, but the basic idea is that a waking experience is a state where you experience reality as it really is (so if you are awake and see a tree, then it follows that there's really a tree in front of you and so on). Dreaming experience on the other hand is a sort of counterfeit waking experience - everything looks as if you are having a waking experience, when you really aren't.

Do the sets of experiences referred to by one's working definition of waking and dreaming overlap, or do waking and dreaming refer to disjoint sets of experiences? — sime

Yes and no. They differ in that in the one you experience reality as it is, while in the other you don't. On the other hand, they are indistinguishable on the subjective level as the skeptic maintains (but on my account, they still differ in their epistemic significance, which is how I purport to block the skeptical conclusion).

I would say that my criteria for distinguishing reality from fantasy are only local criteria that are tailored for making specific distinctions, such as determining whether or not harry potter is real or not. All distinctions must rest upon a process of empirical validation that lies outside of the distinction one is trying to make.

I'm therefore tempted to say that it is meaningless to regard everything as being either real or fictitious in an absolute sense, since there isn't in that instance any room left for an independent process of empirical verification that is needed to make the distinction.

Therefore refuting the non-skeptic as well as the skeptic.

However, as regular lucid dreamers well know, present psychological judgements of what is real or not is largely a function of how coherent one's present experiences are to one's remembered past.

When a certain class of skeptics insist that everything could be a dream, I believe they are referring only to the possibility that the future renders their present memories and perceptual judgements as incoherent. Since this definition of "unreality" is only in terms of the mental state of the individual it is obviously a very different form of epistemic uncertainty to that related to truth-by-correspondence.

It seems to me that what you are proposing is some form of anti-realism, but that would be to surrender to the skeptic, rather than answer him. Because it looks like that you essentially agree with his main contention - that what we can know, or what is cognitively accessible to us (or even meaningful) is bounded by the limits of our consciousness, and there's no such things as going beyond it (or going beyond all evidence). And if we accept that assumption, it would be of little comfort to go on and define truth in terms of 'internal coherence' of mental states, or something of that sort. Obviously there's something right about the common sense idea that what we believe to be the case and what is really the case are two different things (at least conceptually, though they can sometimes coincide), and that there are no foolproof methods to ensure for 100% that we cannot go wrong in what we believe. And so in my opinion giving up this natural idea is just a too high price to pay.

On the other hand, I do agree that there's something right in anti-realism or verificationism, and it is in the basic idea that cognition cannot go 'outside of itself', and therefore it is right to say that cognition does in some sense has a limit, but - and this is the crucial point - it is limited from the 'inside' and not by something from the 'outside' (and I'm alluding here to Wittgenstein's discussion of limits in Tractatus, e.g. the preface). The wrong idea would be to think about the limits as psychological limits (like our mental states), that is, contingent limits that only happened to be placed on us by nature (and are discoverable by philosophical reflection). But what I mean by an 'internal limit' is simply to say that (trivially) what is thinkable is limited by what is thinkable, and by "thinkable" I don't mean merely a psychological phenomenon, but the limits which are set by our concepts or logic, which define what makes sense to us. This however is not to give up the common sense idea that I've described earlier, of the distinction between how reality is and what we believe it to be, but it does mean that we have to radically rethink what it amounts to (and by that I mean that the picture which accompanies thinking about 'realism' in philosophy is confused, and doesn't give us what we think that it gives).

So on this alternative conception, what is confused in skepticism is the idea that 'reality in itself' and our knowing reality in itself' are conceptually completely different things. But on the alternative conception that I'm proposing, how things are 'in themselves' is not different from that which we know, or can know, or at least imagine ourselves of knowing. That is, there's no other perspective on reality available to us, different from the perspective which is made available to us in successful instances of knowing (or at least what we take to be successful instances of knowing). So the confusion in the skeptical argument lies in the fact that the skeptic thinks that asking what is really the case independently of us, is a completely different question from asking what we take ourselves to know to be the case. And this is what I tried to bring out in my distinction between 'waking' and 'dreaming' states. The contrast between the two is logically dependent on what we take to be available to our experience in successful waking states. But if successful waking states were not at least conceptually conceivable, then neither dreaming or illusory states would, since the letter are simply defined in contrast to the former (and this just follows from how the skeptical argument itself is set up structurally).

So I'm not trying to obliterate here the distinction between appearance and reality (or knowledge, and the facts that we know), since it doesn't follow on my account that if we think that we know that p, then it must be the case that we really know that p. But what I am saying is that what reality is (in the strong metaphysical sense of 'things-being-in-themselve-independently-of-our-minds') is precisely that thing which we imagine ourselves to know if indeed we know it and are not mistaken (and I want to strongly emphasize here the 'if' clause, which is what sets my position apart from anti-realism).

(I apologize for the rambly comment)

But what I mean by an 'internal limit' is simply to say that (trivially) what is thinkable is limited by what is thinkable, and by "thinkable" I don't mean merely a psychological phenomenon, but the limits which are set by our concepts or logic, which define what makes sense to us. — Fafner

We have the same position here, i meant empirical verification only in the internal sense of methodological solipsism - as opposed to epistemological solipsism. In other words what is not cognizable in terms of first-person experiential phenomena is judged to be meaningless and lacking truth-value as opposed to being transcendentally right or wrong but unknowable.

But what I am saying is that what reality is (in the strong metaphysical sense of 'things-being-in-themselve-independently-of-our-minds') is precisely that thing which we imagine ourselves to know if indeed we know it and are not mistaken — Fafner

Unfortunately "mistakes" and "knowledge" in ordinary language are usually interpreted in terms of Truth-By-Correspondence, and this commonly held background assumption in conjunction with your "if" clause makes your paragraph read as if you at least concede to the dream-sceptic that the dream/reality distinction is logically conceivable in terms of T-B-C.

But I understand that isn't what you mean, as I understand you to be a deflationist about mental representation when taken as-a-whole. In other words, Truth-by-correspondence about everything as a whole is neither right or wrong, but meaningless because it is unthinkable, so that neither skepticism nor non-skepticism in this sense is strictly meaningful. Isn't that the case?

As i previously suggested, i suspect that some dream skeptics, possibly most of them, are implicitly defining the "dream vs reality" distinction in terms of the coherence and cohesiveness of their experiences - which is of course an entirely internal notion to experience that is both understandable and doesn't involve any Cartesian notion of transcendental truth-bearers beyond the individual's experience.

It is an interesting fact of accidental experimental psychology that virtual-reality gaming and fantasy-proneness are correlated with increased incidents of lucid dreaming, thus indicative of the importance of experiential structure in our private classification of our own dream states.

Yes, we do, but it doesn't follow from that that we're right. You're welcome to just commit to this acceptance and carry on with your life, but that hardly counts as a good philosophical defence of the position against alternatives (anti-realism, idealism, phenomenalism, etc.). — Michael

On the one hand you seem to agree that our perceptions are grounded without need for a justification, but then you add that "...it doesn't follow that we're right." It sounds contradictory. To show that one is right,is to have some kind of justification, otherwise what would being right in this context mean?

Basic beliefs (bedrock beliefs or hinge-propositions) are not the kind of beliefs that need any justification, i.e., it's not a matter of being right. They form the substrata of all of our epistemic justifications, i.e., without them we couldn't talk about being right or wrong. In a sense bedrock beliefs are like the rules of chess, i.e., without them one couldn't play the game. Reality is just there as a backdrop, similar to the rules of chess. Moreover, there is a causal link between our sensory perceptions and these very basic beliefs. A causal link between the world and our sensory perceptions that form bedrock beliefs. These are beliefs that are formed prior to language, and prior to our ability to talk about them in epistemic ways. They form the backdrop of all linguistic beliefs. You were right when you said that they are just beliefs, but they are very different from other kinds of beliefs, they are states-of-mind that are foundational to everything that follows from linguistic beliefs (knowledge, truth, etc). This is why they are outside the scope of what these questions of justification or being right are about.

These theories of reality that philosophers like to play with are worthless. There is no theory of reality that will capture the essence of what reality is, no more than one can capture the essence of what a game is in a definition. In a sense one would have to get outside of reality, or outside of ourselves to understand some of these questions, or to make sense of the questions.

Propositions about reality are understood by understanding how these words are used, but it would be a misunderstanding to assume that use always drives meaning. Philosophers are notorious for using words in ways that violate normal usage.

We have the same position here, i meant empirical verification only in the internal sense of methodological solipsism - as opposed to epistemological solipsism. In other words what is not cognizable in terms of first-person experiential phenomena is judged to be meaningless and lacking truth-value as opposed to being transcendentally right or wrong but unknowable. — sime

This cannot be right, because obviously not everything intelligible (having truth conditions) can be experienced from a first-person perspective, e.g., the past, elementary particles, very distant regions of space and so on. Sense experience is of course important, but I didn't say that everything should be defined relative to experience. I spoke of cognition and knowing in much broader terms. We shouldn't repeat the mistakes of the positivsts. And this is why I said that the idea of 'limits' to thought should not be thought of as trying to exclude something, or putting a-priori conditions on what does and doesn't make sense. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of language show themselves in language, but cannot be expressed or described by propositions. It is not a piece of knowledge that 'thought has limits', no more then 'p or not-p' is a piece of knowledge about something.

Unfortunately "mistakes" and "knowledge" in ordinary language are usually interpreted in terms of Truth-By-Correspondence, and this commonly held background assumption in conjunction with your "if" clause makes your paragraph read as if you at least concede to the dream-sceptic that the dream/reality distinction is logically conceivable in terms of T-B-C. — sime

What's 'T-B-C'?

There's nothing wrong on my view to talk about 'correspondence', as long as it is understood to be a metaphorical talk. It's perfectly fine to say that there are things outside our minds that we can get either right or wrong, but only we should remember that it doesn't mean that we have here two different conception of reality (thinking about things 'from inside' our minds, and thinking about them as they really-are-in-themselves), but only one which is cashed out in different words (but it doesn't mean that we have to choose either of them, and declare the other as false or nonsensical, but rather we must seek a middle way here).

In other words, Truth-by-correspondence about everything as a whole is neither right or wrong, but meaningless because it is unthinkable, so that neither skepticism nor non-skepticism in this sense is strictly meaningful. Isn't that the case? — sime

I'm not sure that I understand what you mean.

As i previously suggested, i suspect that some dream skeptics, possibly most of them, are implicitly defining the "dream vs reality" distinction in terms of the coherence and cohesiveness of their experiences - which is of course an entirely internal notion to experience that is both understandable and doesn't involve any Cartesian notion of transcendental truth-bearers beyond the individual's experience. — sime

To tell you the truth, it doesn't strike me as very plausible to say that skeptics are in fact closet coherentists. In fact, probably the most popular argument against coherentism (both as an epistemic theory and a theory of truth) precisely exploits the idea that coherence is not a guarantee of truth. You can imagine a subject with a maximally coherent web of beliefs, which nevertheless are all systematically false, which means the two concepts can't amount to the same thing.

Of course it is true that we often judge what is true and false on the basis of internal coherence with the rest of our beliefs, but attempting to define the distinction between appearance and reality simply in terms of coherence seems to me wrong.