Abstract

In a collection of notes published posthumously under the title On Certainty, Wittgenstein concludes that the Dream Argument is "senseless". Beginning in the first part of his Philosophical Investigations, and terminating with this denunciation, Wittgenstein mounts a sustained struggle with the type of skepticism that results from the Dream Argument. Though this contest never develops into a clear argument that allows one to escape the soundness of the Dream Argument, Wittgenstein's conclusions about rule following and the necessary conditions for linguistic meaning amount to a blueprint for such an argument. The following essay attempts to erect, in a transparent way, the anti-skeptical argument that Wittgenstein sketches. ;The upshot of Wittgenstein's sortie is that when constructing the Dream Argument , one necessarily relies on the type of knowledge the Dream Argument hopes to ban. At the heart of this accusation is Wittgenstein's determination that linguistic meaning requires knowledge of mind-independent facts. Without access to such knowledge, according to Wittgenstein, there ceases to be any distinction between cases of using a linguistic sign correctly and cases where one believes that one has used a sign correctly, but fails to do so. In the absence of the possibility of such a distinction, the foundation upon which language stands vanishes. ;One who seriously defends the conclusion to the Dream Argument contends that it's possible that one is completely cut off from the material world, and yet one is able to construct or comprehend a skeptical argument like the Dream Argument. Wittgenstein hopes to show that if the conclusion to the Dream Argument is true, and its impossible to gain knowledge by means of one's senses, then it's also impossible to use language to construct or comprehend a skeptical argument such as the Dream Argument. Thus, to cling to the position that the Dream Argument is sound is to forfeit the position that language is possible. It's in this sense that Wittgenstein concludes that the Dream Argument is "senseless"