I Introduction

The skeptical Dream argument appeals to the possibility of dreaming. The skeptic holds that states of being awake are subjectively indistinguishable from possible dream states and that this means that we do not know that we are awake. This, the skeptic then claims, means that we have to accept that we do not have external world knowledge.

It is natural to assume that there must be a connection between the Dream argument and epistemic internalism, the view that a belief is justified for a given person if and only if the person has cognitive access to all the factors that are needed for the belief to be justified. The problem, the skeptic thinks, is that in order for my belief that I am awake to be justified I have to have cognitive access to something that establishes that I am awake. But according to the skeptic, even if I am awake, this is not something I have cognitive access to. However, the more precise connections between internalism and the skeptical argument are not so clear. The ideas of cognitive transparency and cognitive access have been understood in different ways, and epistemological internalism has often been discussed in philosophical contexts that are not directly relevant for the Dream argument.¹

One possible strategy for showing that the skeptic presupposes a more robust idea of epistemic internalism is to start out with various attempts to elucidate the requirement of cognitive access and then seek to understand which alternative, if any, the Dream argument invokes. This would obviously require a comprehensive analysis. A less complex strategy for understanding how internalism is relevant in the context of the Dream argument is to start with the argument and then clarify the internalist assumptions it makes.

The aim of this article is to locate an internalist assumption implicit in the Dream argument, and then use this assumption as a basis for an objection to the argument. This objection will not be an attempt to provide an independent argument against epistemic internalism. Such attempts have been made, but no argument has received widespread acceptance among philosophers.² I will argue that there is a greater possibility of using the internalist assumption in a convincing objection to the Dream argument if one focuses on the coherence of the argument. As with arguments against versions of internalism, there is no incoherence argument against the Dream argument that many philosophers have thought of as convincing. But incoherence arguments have not focused on epistemic internalism as I will do here.³ I will argue that the premise of the argument that links the possibility of dreaming to the claim that I do not know that I am awake is plausible only if a version of internalism is correct. I will then argue that in order for the initial premise about the possibility of dreaming to be plausible the same version of internalism has to be rejected.

The reason why the first premise has to reject the relevant idea of epistemic internalism is, I will argue, that the relation between the initial premise and our ordinary beliefs about what it is to dream is not merely conceptual: on the basis of an interpretation of the argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction I will argue that it is possible to understand the first premise but be agnostic about its truth. If one thinks that the first premise is plausible, then that is because one has beliefs about what it is to dream and be awake that provide reasons for accepting it. The problem for the skeptic is that as long as he has to accept that I can have these beliefs in a dream, he is also forced to accept that the internalistic condition of justification presupposed by the second step of his argument is violated.

The paper ends by...