Damian asked:

When I dream, is that considered knowledge? Would the Empiricist or the Rationalist think so and
why?

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There are several reasons why we might claim that the contents of dreams are not knowledge and I
think that the best one is that no-one else can know what happens in our dreams, so no-one else can
verify or confirm the events. We might remember our own dreams but memory is not a ground of
knowledge because once again, it cannot be confirmed. This is why there is scepticism about the
past. So, firstly, reidentification by oneself or others, or at least the possibility of this, is missing.
Another reason is that, if you take perception either as causal, or as reliant upon a certain state of
affairs such as a being's having sense organs in a world of objects and events, dreaming doesn't
occur in the right circumstances.

If we go by the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief it might be held that dreaming
is not true nor is it a state in which you are justified and dream events do not constitute beliefs. We
can only say dreaming is not true or justified on the assumption that we are not dreaming, but if we
are dreaming we might say that any beliefs about events going are not coherent with waking beliefs
or what we would take to be true if awake.

On the other hand, the psycho-analytical view is that dreams provide knowledge of ourselves, our
unconscious desires and wishes, so dreaming can bring forth hidden subjective knowledge.

As to the second part of your question, Descartes held that we cannot know anything if we are
dreaming since this was the ground for his doubt of the senses. For Locke, we do not possess or use
knowledge when we dream because he thought knowledge was direct awareness of some fact.
Hume held that knowledge was "assurance arising from comparison of ideas" and that "the sciences
of quantity and number" are the only "proper objects of knowledge", and so he might have held that
dreaming about pure geometry was to use knowledge, but if geometry was applied so that it involved
empirical impressions, this would not be using knowledge since there can be no comparison between
empirical impressions because all our impressions are distinct and different from one another.
Berkeley held that dreaming was more akin to imagining or thought rather than perception, so
dreaming is to make use of perceptual ideas but is not knowledge any more than imagining is. When
thought occurs in a dream, if logical, it might be knowledge, although Berkeley did not say this. Kant
may say that even if we make a judgement that something is true in a dream it is not so because
dreaming falls outside causality seen as succession in time: No relevant causal representation occurs
prior to the beginning of a dream sequence so we could not understand a dream as objective
cognition of phenomena.

Rachel Browne