[lit-ideas] Gricean Synaesthesia

From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2009 18:06:53 EDT
In a message dated 7/6/2009 10:58:12 A.M.  Eastern Daylight Time, 
pastone@xxxxxxxxx writes:
> Other than that, I  always found otiose that humans should have two, 
rather
> than, like the  cyclops of Ancient Antiquity, only one eye.

"Other than that"? The  parallax view is essential to human experience.


-----

Well,  but surely a man whose only (left) eye works we still call a 'man'.

Grice  noted, the problem with non-philosophers is, sometimes, their lack 
of  imagination.

Grice considers it "a contingent matter" ('Some remarks  about the senses', 
WoW googlebooks) that we cannot see a smell. 

"Had  things been different," Grice writes (p. 153), 'we might well have 
been able to  see smells'.

Or, to use another of his examples, to 'hear the size of a  nearby 
mountain'.

As Grice noted, following Price,

it's all a  matter of

M x-ed P to S

i.e. the material  object M, seemed ('sensousness') Property P, e.g. blue, 
to a subject.

We  only have five senses:

olfactory
visual
tactile
aural
gustative


--- Sometimes, the problem is in the combination. As Grice  notes, 
following Molyneux, if you don't make your nose work, and you taste 'a  piece 
of a 
potato', it will 'taste' as a 'piece of apple': sweet. Only with the  
addition of the nose, do the taste buds of the tongue operate  properly.

---- Aristotle's references to the common sense were  otiose.

Ditto, any reference to a _sixth_ sense in humans.

In  1964, Milne suggested that humans have 38 'senses', not just five. But 
Grice  said, 'do not multiply senses beyond necessity'.

For each sense we need a  PRIMARY qualities which is mono-determinable (as 
opposed to pluri-determinable:  e.g. size by touch and sight)

But we also need an organ. For each sense,  there is a sense organ (five of 
them -- vide Urmson, The Object of the Five  Senses.

Plus, we need to have _control_ over the organs: we close our  eyes, and we 
don't see. This way we "investigate" the world, rather than be  'struck by 
it'.

When the senses combine fruitfully we get  _reality_.

Cheers,

J. L. Speranza
Buenos Aires,  Argentina  

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[lit-ideas] Gricean Synaesthesia

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