[lit-ideas] Re: Do ideas exist before being articulated?
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:11:35 -0500
You're implying (at the very least) that language creates ideas. Is that a
fair assessment? If the tribe which does not have a word for the colors red
and green, but only "dark", were confronted with 3 red apples and 1 green
apple in a row on the table and asked which of the apples were different --
are you telling me they would see no visual difference?
Julie Krueger
On 10/15/07, Andreas Ramos <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >> John -- if you didn't have a word for "red" would you still see the
> >> colour
> >> of an apple, a tomato, blood? Or, because you didn't have the word for
> >> it,
> >> would your brain simply stop processing data?
>
> There are a few tribes that don't have names for colors. They distinguish
> colors in two groups: bright or dark. Red is dark. Green is dark. To them,
> red and green are the same "color", or better said, they are both dark.
>
> So they don't "have a word" for the color red and don't see red. They see
> dark.
>
> This isn't an odd idea. It happens in our world all the time.
>
> If I show (for example, Julie) a long page of computer code, she only sees
> random characters (many of which are misspelled), lots of "<" and ">", and
> so on. Her brain sees alphabetical characters, but not the meaning. To me,
> I
> see the structure of the code and what it does. Julie doesn't have "a word
> for it" (actually, she probably does have a word for it, but it's not a
> polite word) and "can't see" it.
>
> yrs,
> andreas
> www.andreas.com
>
>
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