NELSON ON DREAMING A PAIN 43

Alvin Goldman, "A Causal Theory of Knowing," Journal of Philosophy, 64:357-72 (t967); Brian Skyrms, "The Explication of 'X Knows That P,'" Journal of Philosophy, 64:373-89 (1967).

2 Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 154.

Schemer, Conditions ol Knowledge, p. 112. 4 Compare Lehrer, "Knowledge, Truth, and Evidence," p. 174.

See Harman, "Lehrer on Knowledge." See also Nicholas Rescher, Hypothetical Rea- soning (Amsterdam: North-Holland, New York: Humanities, 1964). And compare my review artiete "Hypothetical Reasoning," Journal of Philosophy, 64:293-305 (1967).

See Roderick M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, Chapter I. Compare Roderick Firth, "Ultimate Evidence," Journal of Philosophy, 53:732-39 (1956), and "Chisholm and the Ethics of Belief," Philosophical Review, 68:493-506 (1959); also Herbert Heidet- herger, "On Defining Epistemic Expressions," Journal of Philosophy, 60:344-48 (1963).

7 In contradistinction to my own earlier effort (Analysis, 25:1-8 (1965)), the present analysis is not reeursive. Furthermore, it does not suffer from essential dependence upon an obscure ceteris paribus clause. It should be noted, also, that the definition of a set fully rendering evident a proposition to a subject does not exclude the possibility that such a set be infinite, and hence does not commit us to the view that all knowledge must have a foundation.

81 have in mind particularly the definitions previously offered by Clark, Lehrer, Chis- holm, and myself. See note 1 for the references.

The reader should be warned that my talk of chains of justification and of defective links is only shorthand for the earlier, more careful formulations. I do hope, however, that it gives a not-too-misleading overview of what I have tried to do.

lo Compare Goldman, "A Causal Theory of Knowing," pp. 368-70. Compare Skyrms, "The Explication of 'X Knows That P,'" pp. 381 and 387. I am indebted to Robert Binkley, Joseph Camp, Herbert Heidelberger, and, especially,

Roderick M. Chisholm, for illuminating discussion of the problems I have treated. I wish also to thank Howard Smokler, my commentator when I read an earlier version of this paper at the 1966 annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the A.P.A.

Nelson Pain on reamzng a

by M I C H A E L H O D G E S , umwRsrrY oF TE~mSSEE,

and W . R. C A R T E R , UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

IN A recent article 1 John O. Nelson claims to have discovered an "intrinsic mark" for distinguishing waking and dreaming states. This mark simply is being in pain. He contends that it is logically impossible to "dream a pain," as opposed to dreaming that one exhibits pain-behavior3 Precisely what this is meant to deny is not clear. Nelson seems to use interchangeably the locu- tions "dreaming a pain," "dreaming of a pain," and "dreaming that I have a pain, ''a and to reject all of these as conceptual possibilities.

Perhaps an example will clarify Nelson's position. Jones suddenly wakes and tells his wife: "I just had the most awful dream. Natives were burning me

44 PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

at the stake, the flames licked up at my feet and suddenly I felt the most hor- rible pain." There are at least two plausible descriptions here: (1) Jones simply did experience, though in a dream, the pain which he speaks of; and (2) Jones dreamed of, but was not actually feeling, pain. When Nelson says that "pain is a mark belonging to waking experiences and never to dream experi- ences," he seems to reject descriptions like (1).~ And when he says that "as a logical matter" one cannot dream that one has a pain, he seems to be deny- ing (2).~ If either (I) or (2) is conceptually possible, Nelson's case fails.

If we endorse (1), we are committed to the claim that dreaming I am in pain can constitute a case of being in pain. On this view, we might say that one can have a pain while dreaming just as well as one can have a pain while awake. Both are cases of having a pain, but the former is also a case of having a dream.

Presumably, Nelson would dismiss this account because of "what might be called a definitional difference between waking and dreaming. For ex- ample, when I dream I am pinching myself, I cannot (logically) really be pinching myself; I can only be dreaming that I am. ''8 But in this form Nelson's claim is false. Suppose that a man dreams that he is pinching him- self? Likewise in the case of a man who dreams that he is sleepwalking or that he is breathing heavily. In these cases, it is not logically impossible for the dreamer to dream of doing something and actually do it.

Notice that such cases involve two quite distinct activities, e.g., the sleep- walking and the dream of sleepwalking, whereas dreaming that I have a pain constitutes being in pain. Probably it is this possibility which Nelson's "defi- nitional difference" is meant to deny, the claim being that it is always false that dreaming that one is X-ing constitutes a case of X-ing.

There are cases which might seem to support this last claim, e.g., Williams is observed writhing and moaning in his sleep. He wakes in the morning, exhausted and perspiring, to tell his wife of a terrible dream. She might com- fort him by saying, "But you weren't really in pain, you were only dreaming you were." (Of course, she might also have said that his pain was only in a dream.) Here the denial that Williams was in pain is based on the fact that he was only dreaming that he was, which seems to support Nelson's side of the argument. Were Nelson right, however, Williams's wife could not cor- rectly make the reply she does make, since Nelson denies not only that one can experience pain in a dream, but also that one can dream that one is in pain. This denial is based upon Nelson's claim that "'a necessary condition for saying that a person, A, has dreamed X rather than that he actually per- ceived X is either that X did not exist or that A was not possibly in a position to perceive X, if it had existed." Were this true, then: " . . . to suppose that I might now be dreaming a pain as I pinch myself would be to suppose

NELSON ON DREAMING A PAIN 4~

that the pain I felt did not really e x i s t - I only thought it did; or that it did exist but I was not in a position to perceive it. ''7 And Nelson contends that both of these alleged consequences are impossible, and therefore that it is impossible to dream I am in pain.

Consider the first of Nelson's alternatives--the notion that dreaming a pain implies a pain which does not really exist. Understood in one way, this claim is unexceptionable, for the expression "really exists" is often used so as to be contrasted with "is dreamed." Williams's wife can point out that his pain did not really exist, but was only in a dream. Here, to deny that a dreamed pain really exists is simply to say that the dreamed pain is dreamed, and so far from this being a contradiction, it is a tautology. But it seems clear that Nelson intends to assert more than that a dreamed pain is dreamed when he says that a dreamed pain would have to be a pain which "did not really exist--/only thought it did" (our italics). This suggests that to dream a pain is falsely to believe that one is in pain. In other words someone who dreams a pain must be deceived--must think he has a pain when he does not.

The plausibility of Nelson's case derives from the notion that dreaming that one is in pain implies that one feels something which does not really exist. On this account, dreaming that one is in pain involves actually feeling something, where what is felt does not exist. But were it true that one is deceived by whatever one dreams, it should follow that when one dreams that one is in pain, one is deceived in thinking that one feels a pain. It is not that the pain-feeling is real or actual, though what is felt is not, as Nelson assumes. This supposition contradicts the thesis that one is deceived by whatever one dreams, since if one dreams one is feeling a pain, the feeling is dreamed and, according to Nelson, must be deceptive. Thus Nelson's argument should be modified in such a way that dreaming that one is in pain involves, not actually feeling something which does not exist, but being deceived in the belief that one feels anything at all.

With this revision Nelson's argument ironically turns on what is a char- acteristically Cartesian thesis, namely, that a dreamer is deceived by whatever is dreamed. This in turn depends on the quite dubious claim tha t dreaming that P entails believing that P. It is this thesis which is crucial both to the Cartesian dream argument and to Nelson's counterattack. Unfortunately neither the Cartesian nor Nelson has mustered any convincing evidence for such a claim.

Received October 30, 1967

NOTES 1 "Can One Tell That He Is Awake by Pinching Himself?" Philosophical Studies,

17:81-84 (1966).

46

Ibid., p. 83. * Ibid., pp. 82-83. * Ibid., p. 82.

Ibid., p. 83. e Ibid., p. 82. "¢ Ibid., p. 83.

PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

The Liabilities of Limited Gods

by JOHN KING-FARLOW

UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL

WHAT might it be like to be a limited god? What would be one's due? There is no general answer. If Edward Madden's better arguments are to be be- lieved, 1 and if we draw the appropriate inferences, the amount of evil in the world may be far too great for some kinds of limited gods or God to be worthy of rational people's mora l respect , let alone of their dedicat ion and service. Were such gods' existence well proven, philosophers should refuse to worship them. Unfortunately this restricted but worthwhile ethical thesis (ET) does not content Madden, although it is the sort of thing his stronger grounds seem to warrant. He wants moral liability to generate a much more general metaphysical thesis (MT) : that the evil in the world is incompatible with any limited god's ex i s t ence3

Ethical matters get confused with existential ones, thus crucial questions get begged in MT's favor, when Madden writes: " T h e advocate of a lim- ited god, unless he confuses the concepts of 'god' and 'hero,' will claim, along with the traditional theist, that God is causally responsible for there being any world at all and that the existence of God, while it does not pre- clude evil, ensures that there is more good than evil in the world or . . . in the long run . . ." Madden needs this dubious conceptual capital in order to argue for MT, in effect, that unpromising as it is to think of an admirable being with unlimited power wanting to create a world as bad as this and achieve predominant good at such cost in misery, etc., it is far harder to believe rationally that an admirable, l im i t ed being would want to gamble on achieving predominant good out of such a creation.

This line of argument gets us nowhere toward MT, if we are unhappy about Madden's strange way of dividing gods from heroes and stranger as- sumption that this dichotomy thus drawn covers all the relevant area of