Re: Of colorful scepticism
Re: Of colorful scepticism
- Subject: Re: Of colorful scepticism
- From: Henrik Holmegaard <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 08:47:02 +0200
More idle navel gazing
I wouldn't say that. It does not help the sceptic out of the dead
end. I would rather point to the door.
The sceptic's problem is that of confusing an issue that can only be
settled conceptually with an issue that can only be settled
experientially.
As science cannot look into someone's head, science is not able to
determine what colour any person sees.
The word 'cannot' is used here in the sense of, 'I cannot lift this
weight, I do not have the strength or the machinery'.
'OK, so wait until you can, whether because you gain the strength or
invent the machinery' ... that might be an answer.
But in what sense would we have to wait for an invention to be made
before the color sceptic 'can look into my head'?
The color sceptic has a vivid verbal metaphor and tries to follow it,
as if it were not a verbal metaphor, but a causal relation that links
events in time.
The metaphor runs something like this, as a child I learn the word
red by having something red pointed out to me, I store this sensation
as a digital original (to stay in our own language) in my mind, and
when I correctly utter the word 'red', I first recall the sensation
of red, then associate it with the word, and finally speak the word.
The events of evocation and association must precede the utterance,
or I am not justified in saying that the word 'red' has been used the
same as it was used before. So the meaning is the chain of internal
events, because that is how I justify that the word is used the same
way every time. Or in other words, the 'meaning' is a mental
mechanism, and only a mental mechanism.
Now human understanding hinges on introspection and on mental
mechanism. Does every word I say evoke an image? No. Does every image
invoked result from introspection? No. Is introspection and mental
mechanism necessary for me to say a word has been applied the same
this time as it was the last time? No. The notion that 'meaning' is
an event, an internal pointing as it were, is just a notion. Do I
have to be able to introspect your mind and see your mental mechanism
at work before I can truthfully say that we both understand the word
red the same? No. So it doesn't matter what happens before you utter
the word, and what happens after you utter the word ? The context and
how the word changes the context doesn't matter ? Of course it does.
Relax, there is nothing extraordinary you are compelled to find out
before you can REALLY take part in ordinary human discourse, whether
of color or music or ... -:). Or in other words you don't need to put
human understanding on a scientific footing before human
understanding is possible. We all manage quite well every day of the
week -:).
'There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses' ...
there you have Locke and the English empiricists. Locke had the same
problems in his theory of science, his theory of language and indeed
in his theory of political society that the color sceptic has. It is
an atomistic concept of human understanding.
One of the Optical developers had a beautiful passage from St Thomas
in his mail signature for a while. St Thomas followed the Greeks in
arguing that human understanding is possible in the first place
because the mental mechanism of 'digital originals' is rooted not
fully inside the individual mind, but in a greater mind out of which
all thought and all being emanate. This is also why St Thomas speaks
of memory of things and events not as in the past, but as in the
future as they flow out of God's eternal thought.
Hey...this should have been written on a Sunday -:).