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--Somnio

Ergo

Sum

How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed! At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and perceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking this over I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and on dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clarly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my astonishment is so great that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream. (20)

J.L. Austin has attacked these observations on the grounds that such conflations of waking and dreaming themselves bear the imprint of a necessary distinction. We can speak of waking experiences sometimes having "a dream-like quality," but if waking and dreaming were the same state, such a phrase "would be perfectly meaningless, because applicable to everything." (21) This is the basis of a so-called contrast case; if state A (waking) can be properly understood only in terms of state B (dreaming), both states must exist. (22) Austin and others such as Gilbert Ryle couch the dilemma here as one of (waking) "truth" versus (dreaming) "deception," or the "genuine" and the "false."

But behind the foundationalist assumptions, many will recognize a quite different dynamic here, that of Saussure's model of language in which every element can be defined only in terms of its difference from every other in a system of meaning-making. We are thus confronted here with a conundrum in which an avatar of rationalism seems to accept the negation of his own first principles, but is rebutted by a series of successors who contest the rationalist's anti-rationalism with an apparently foundationalist argument that, on examination, turns out to depend on "the arbitrary nature of the sign" and "a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others ..." -- Saussure's definition of language itself. (23)