Jonathan Ichikawa asks an interesting question about belief in dreams. I am certainly a functionalist. Since encountering it, I've been rather fond of Daniel Dennett's Joycean model of consciousness, and since it is conscious beliefs specifically which are at issue, considerations from that theory seem relevant.
On the Joycean model, consciousness is a story we tell ourselves. So a conscious belief would be analyzed on the same model as any other belief in a claim made by a story. I'm inclined to think that this would likely be different from the model on which implicit beliefs would be analyzed, though admittedly one simple option would be to take conscious belief to consist merely in entertaining in consciousness a story making a claim which matches the implicit belief structure.
I'm not sure why that doesn't feel right, but it doesn't, and if indeed believing a claim according to a story is different from having an implicit belief, then it may be harder for Jonathan to make his argument that what we do in dreams is different from believing a claim according to the dream story; the kinds of dispositions he notes we plausibly lack in dreams seem more relevant to implicit believing than to believing according to a story.
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