dream argument See DESCARTES. Dretske, Fred (b.1932), American philosopher best known for his externalistic representational naturalism about experience, belief, perception, and knowledge. Educated at Purdue University and the University of Minnesota, he has taught at the University of Wisconsin (1960–88) and Stanford University (1988–98).
In Seeing and Knowing (1969) Dretske develops an account of non-epistemic seeing, denying that seeing is believing – that for a subject S to see a dog, say, S must apply a concept to it (dog, animal, furry). The dog must look some way to S (S must visually differentiate the dog, but need not conceptually categorize it). This contrasts with epistemic seeing, where for S to see that a dog is before him, S would have to believe that it is a dog.
In Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981), a mind-independent objective sense of ‘information’ is applied to propositional knowledge and belief content. ‘Information’ replaced Dretske’s earlier notion of a ‘conclusive reason’ (1971). Knowing that p requires having a true belief caused or causally sustained by an event that carries the information that p. Also, the semantic content of a belief is identified with the most specific digitally encoded piece of information to which it becomes selectively sensitive during a period of learning.
In Explaining Behavior (1988), Dretske’s account of representation (and misrepresentation) takes on a teleological flavor. The semantic meaning of a structure is now identified with its indicator function. A structure recruited for a causal role of indicating F’s, and sustained in that causal role by this ability, comes to mean F – thereby providing a causal role for the content of cognitive states, and avoiding epiphenomenalism about semantic content.
In Naturalizing the Mind (1995), Dretske’s theory of meaning is applied to the problems of consciousness and qualia. He argues that the empirically significant features of conscious experience are exhausted by their functional (and hence representational) roles of indicating external sensible properties. He rejects the views that consciousness is composed of a higher-order hierarchy of mental states and that qualia are due to intrinsic, non-representational features of the underlying physical systems. Dretske is also known for his contributions on the nature of contrastive statements, laws of nature, causation, and epistemic non-closure, among other topics. See also INFORMATION THEORY, NATURAL- ISM , PHILOSOPHY OF MIND , QUALI. F.A.