Today I was in a shop and a young mother came in with her stroller and a handbag with an image of a sleeping rabbit in a forest of mushrooms. The rabbit had a thought bubble that read, “A rabbit in a forest of mushrooms.”
I told her I liked the bag… I don’t think she realized that it had reminded me of the last paragraph of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty:
676. “But even if in such cases I can’t be mistaken, isn’t it possible that I am drugged?” If I am and if the drug has taken away my consciousness, then I am not now really talking and thinking. I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says “I am dreaming”, even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream “it is raining”, while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain.
The rabbit had created a visible dream-thought bubble that had correctly identified his actual situation, though the rabbit was asleep.
Does the rabbit’s dream-thought count as justified true belief? It may well be justified because the rabbit could be observing it’s surroundings within the dream (and those images could be connected to reality through memory), it is apparently true, and the rabbit believes it (according to the rules of thought bubble attribution). So the dream-thought of the rabbit seems to qualify as Justified-True-Belief, but I don’t believe we normally count dream-thoughts as knowledge.
