Disjunctive Dreams: An Analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre's Influence on the Modern Imagination Model of Dreaming and Why Modern Disjunctivism Would Improve the Case
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a debate as to whether dreamed experience is similar or different in kind from perceptual experience. Proponents of the latter view, imagination model theorists like McGinn and Ichikawa, draw their arguments from Jean-Paul Sartre who argues that perception and imagination are sui generis mental activities. However, these proponents accept Sartre’s arguments without subjecting them to critical analysis. As such, they reproduce what I argue is a methodological problem that makes Sartre’s and his proponents’ argument vulnerable to critique. Sartre seeks to add aspects of relationalism to his phenomenological account of perception and imagination. He argues that perception is distinguished from imagination because only the former involves an encounter with a present and existing object. However, in making this case, he adheres to the phenomenological epoché which precludes an appeal to mind-independent reality and requires that he make his case solely upon subjective experience. As a result, his theory struggles to explain the phenomenology of presence in dreams, a point opponents of the Sartre-inspired imagination model use against it. Rather sticking with the phenomenological epoché, I propose that imagination model proponents fine-tune Sartre’s account of dreaming to include modern disjunctivist arguments. Disjunctivism distinguishes between two kinds of experiences, ones where the subject perceives her environment, and ones where she is imagining (hallucinating, dreaming, etc). It grants that an imaginative experience can be subjectively indistinguishable from perceptual experience while maintaining that perception and imagination are sui generis, something Sartre and his proponents struggle to account for. However, disjunctivism requires an appeal to mind-independent reality to make its case and is thus incompatible with the phenomenological epoché. Sartre offers a robust account of dreamed experience in contrast to perceptual experience. However, his attempt to combine a relationalist theory of perception with the phenomenological epoché presents serious challenges to his account of dreamed experience. While Sartre himself would be loath to abandon the epoché, I argue that modern imagination model proponents need not be. Adopting disjunctivism gives the view’s proponents a more solid foundation from which to defend the Sartrean claim that dreamed experience is different in kind from perception.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".