[lit-ideas] Re: Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:25:11 -0400 (EDT)
In his excellent commentary on Geary's repartee, as per subject line -- "Is
it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?" -- McEvoy wonders, in a message
dated 10/15/2013 3:56:36 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
>perhaps someone on the list can give a source for this more general point.
the point being re-read by me as follows:
McEvoy:
"There is a more general point here worth considering".
"When we consider the whole field of ‘experience’, or a subset like the ‘
visual field’, there is nothing in that field that tells us how it is
constituted as philosophers wish to understand this –"
Indeed. Visual field is a good example. I wouldn't know about philosophers,
but poets. Homer (and then again Borges) were blind. Yet Homer uses colour
words. This is meant to corroborate that he was 'echoing' an older bard
than he was (who was not blind) or that he was using words like 'red' -- as
when he speaks of the 'red sea' -- in a way that would have his Greek
audience understand the term -- even if he his self never _did see_ the sea as
red. (He also speaks of Odysseus drinking 'liters of red wine' -- vide,
Chapman, "Colour words in Homer: a comparative approach" -- Chapman fails to
make it clear who the comparison is with -- cfr. Keats, "On first looking into
Chapman's Homer" for a refutation of Chapman).
McEvoy goes on:
"the field is compatible, as experienced, with different philosophical
accounts of its constitution".
And also poetical. There are 5,739 occurrences of colour words in Homer,
for example.
McEvoy:
"This explains why debate about its philosophical ‘constitution’ cannot be
scientifically decided by appeal to the ‘field’ itself i.e. cannot be
decided by ‘observation’."
While 'blind' describes Homer, following Grice in "The objects of the five
senses", it is of course conceivable to conceive an individual who lacks
one or more of the five senses -- not just the one that provides 'a visual
field'. Grice famously referred to Molyneux in "Some remarks about the
senses", and he ventures in "The senses of the Martians" that we should be
careful to be able to distinguish between two 'senses' of 'see'. His example:
"If
Martians have, as indeed they have been portrayed as having, TWO pairs of
eyes, we should be willing to subdivide our sense of 'see' into two
subsenses" -- that Grice calls x-ing and y-ing -- "He x-ed the apple as red"
and
"he y-ed the apple as red", according to whether it is the lower or the
upper pair of eyes that is being used.
---
McEvoy concludes this general point about solipsism:
"For, example, there is nothing in the ‘visual field’ that tells us
whether it is constituted a la the rationalism of Descartes, or the sensory
inputs of Locke, or Kant’s attempt to synthesise rationalism and empiricism.
This also helps explain why there is nothing within the visual field, or the
whole field of ‘experience’, that can be decisive against the determined
solipsist – who may, without “self-refuting”, insist this whole field
resides within his all-encompassing ‘I’ (for what observation could refute his
insistence?)."
Point taken.
Unfortunately, I never met a solipsist, so my 'experience' is what
book-sellers call 'second-hand'.
But then again, to quote from Will Rogers:
good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad
judgment.
Cheers,
Speranza
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