Wittgenstein said that we really only know what we have words for. Geary, I
suspect, knows a lot.
I used to ask my students (I'm retired now) what they thought was outside the
walls of our lecture hall. The answer they worked towards was 'my skull.'
Except for the buzz of the game, nobody likes that answer. But it's probably
true.
Ursula,
retiring at the edge of a still-frozen lake
in North Bay, Ontario
On Apr 26, 2015, at 12:49 PM, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Yes, but the blind know the world AS A BLIND PERSON, ditto for the deaf,
ditto for each of us, we know only within the framework of our particular
culture. I'm sure that Omar is familiar with the joke about the 6 blind men
describing an elephant -- we are all such and will always be so even if we
had five thousand senses, still Knowledge -- of which meaning is made --
would always be idiosyncratic and provisional. I know nothing -- except what
I know. And you, my fellow, know no more that what you know. So saith I.
Amen.
On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 11:29 AM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, blind people usually know that they do not see, deaf people know that
they do not hear etc. With the stupid, admittedly, it is more of a problem.
O.K.
On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Mike Geary <jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Blue is the color of my true love's eyes, would I love her were they any
other color? I would hope so, but I've often been suprised at just how
shallow I am. So who knows? Perhaps she's just wearing some
color-correcting contact lenses and that her irises are really orange. I
hope not. My point in the last post was , I think, that all our knowledge
is provisional because intellectually we are essentially just wads of
varied bits of intelligence gathered by our senses which are not
necessarily reliable and woven into supposedly meaningful narratives of
existene. Be we blind, deaf or just plain stupid, our knowledge of the
world is uniquely our own and I maintain that it is highly speculative and
thus provisional. Philosophy is a game of My World vs. Your World. A fun
game, I think, but no more consequential than tennis.
So saith me.
On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 8:41 PM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
It's really nonsense, I mean some people are blind and not just color
blind, so should we then conclude that vision is useless ? Blind people
are dependent on seeing people much or most of the time.
On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 2:57 AM, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Perhaps we might want to know how color is different from some other kind
of visual perception then, since any visual perception can be plausibly
presented as: " the perception of wave lengths of electromagnetic
radiation as reflected onto the retina of a sighted creature." Such
alleged illusions can help to distinguish edible food from inedible e.g.,
or perhaps closer to the concerns of modern materialists, the color of
money. It might help in an 'exigency.'
O.K.
On Sun, Apr 26, 2015 at 2:45 AM, Mike Geary
<jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Omar writes: "If we were to conclude that all ascriptions of color were
a priori false we would have Tarski trying to derive a definition of
truth from an impossible proposition."
I would say that it is not a question of "truth or falsity" but of
assertability. If color is the perception of wave lengths of
electromagnetic radiation as reflected onto the retina of a sighted
creature -- human or otherwise, then I contend that "color" as an ens
realis doesn't exist -- a perception (a biochemical process occuring in
the brain of creature, endered as a response to a specific stimulus
occurs, yes, but we have no way of knowing if each person perceives the
wavelengths in the same way. How one processes stimuli need not
necessarily be the is the same among us all. In fact we know of
instances of "color blindness in which some people perceive colors
differently, such that my green is your red. Who is correct? What other
demensions of reality might we not be receptive of? To make a long
story short, we don't know shit.
