What Happened Next in Rip Van Winkle ? :: Rip Van Winkle Essays

What Happened Next in Rip Van Winkle ? Rip Van Winkle acquired a belief the day he fell asleep---July 3, 1766, say---a belief that that day was a fine day. He held this belief under the character ``Today [the day of this thought] is nice.'' Then he slept for twenty years and two days, until July 5, 1786, and walked back to town.   What happened next? The possibility that struck Kaplan and Evans is that Rip merely updated his belief. On July 3rd he never forms any explicit belief other than ``Today [the day of this thought] is a nice day''. When he awakes on July 5th, the belief is updated, due to his awareness of having slept through a night, and his lack of awareness of having slept twenty additinal years, to ``Yesterday [the day before the day of this thought] was a nice day.'' He falls out of epsitemic contact with the current day when he falls asleep, but has a ready-made character in mind for when he wakes up. But then what is there left of the original belief except the false one about July 4th? But the false belief can not be the true belief, so hasn't Rip lost the belief in question? This seems to be the argument that threatened Kaplan and appealed to Evans. But even in the case of such thin updating, there are backup characters for Rip to hold his belief under. When Rip believes, towards evening, as it grows dark, ``Today [the day of this thought] was a nice day,'' he has memories of seeing the flowers and feeling the sun, and so forth. So the character, ``That day [the day I remember] is or was a nice day'' is available to sustain his belief, when the attempt at updating goes awry. Even if these memories fade, there is the character, ``That day [the day this belief was acquired] is or was a nice day.'' So my view is this. When he awakes on July 5th, Rip updates his belief according to his view of how the context has changed. His view about the change of context is mistaken, and the new character, ``Yesterday [the day before the day of this thought] was nice'' is not a way of believing the original content. But that is no reason to say that Rip has lost his original belief.