Wittgenstein said loads of stupid things, viz. that he knew that nobody went to
the moon. He did not know what branes were.
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Ursula Stange
Sent: 26 April 2015 19:33
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: The King is not a subject.
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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto: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.
