ABSTRACT
‘THERE are recognized ways of distinguishing between dreaming and waking (how otherwise should we know how to use and to contrast the words?) . ..’ (Austin, p. 133). I think Austin says this, not because he knows of any ‘recognized ways’, but because he assumes he can know he is awake and so must have some way of doing it. His question, ‘How otherwise should we know how to use and to contrast the words?’, assumes we do know how. This is partly right and partly wrong: we know how to use the words ‘I am awake’ but not the words ‘I am dreaming’. To speak more exactly, we know that ‘I am dreaming’ is the first person singular present indicative of the verb ‘dream’, and that dreaming and waking are logical contraries, and therefore that ‘I am dreaming’ and ‘I am awake’ are logical contraries. In this sense we know how to use the sentence ‘I am dreaming’. On the other hand, considerations previously mentioned bring home to us that it can never be a correct use of language to say (even to oneself) ‘I am dreaming’. In this sense we do not know how to use those words. Yet we know that it is sometimes correct to say ‘I am awake’, and our inclination is to suppose that there must be some way, therefore, of telling that oneself is 115awake. In discussing the impossibility (or so he thought) of proving that he was holding his two hands up before him, as he stood in front of his audience at the British Academy, Moore says:
