Sosa’s dream

Ernest Sosa has lately posed a new skeptical problem and a solution. Setting out a novel account of dreaming, Sosa worries that ‘‘the possibility that we dream now threatens not only our supposed perceptual knowledge but even our supposed introspective knowledge, our supposed takings of the given’’ (2007, p. 9). In what follows, we outline Sosa’s dream argument and evaluate his solution. According to the ‘‘orthodox’’ model of dreaming, waking states are intrinsically just like dream states (2007, p. 1). In contrast, Sosa claims that there is an intrinsic difference between waking and dreaming: ‘‘in dreaming we have no real beliefs’’ (2007, p. 9). On Sosa’s ‘‘imagination’’ model, ‘‘[d]reams seem more like imaginings, or stories, or even daydreams, all fictions of a sort, or quasi-fictions’’ (2007, p. 7). Dreamers are, says Sosa, more like moviegoers than hallucinating subjects. With the imagination model in play, Sosa reveals his new dreaming problem: ‘‘I may ask: do I now think I see a hand? Well, might it not be just a dream? Might I not be only dreaming that I think I see a hand?’’ (2007, p. 9). Indeed. For ‘‘[a] vivid and realistic dream is ... subjectively very much like its corresponding reality’’ (2007, p. 11). However, ‘‘[i]f I am only dreaming, then I do not really think I see a hand ...’’ (2007, p. 9). Sosa’s solution to this problem takes two steps: first, to secure unreflective animal knowledge (2007, pp. 9–13); and to then acquire reflective knowledge (2007, pp. 13–19). Animal knowledge consists in true belief that is safe: ‘‘[a] belief that p is