It’s definitely harder to reconcile two sets of conflicting beliefs when you’re dealing with abstractions—maybe even intractable in some cases—but I don’t think it’s impossible in principle. In order for an abstraction to be meaningful, it has to say something about the sensory world; that is, it has to be part of a network of beliefs grounded in sensory evidence. That has straightforward consequences when you’re dealing with physical evidence for an abstraction; when dealing with abstract evidence, though, you need to reconstruct what that evidence means in terms of experience in order to fit it into a new set of conceptual priors. We do similar things all the time, although we might not realize we’re doing them: knowing that several languages conflate parts of the color space that English describes with “green” and “blue”, for example, might help you deal with a machine translation saying that grass is blue.
This only becomes problematic when dealing with conceptually isolated abstractions. Smells are a good example: it’s next to impossible to describe a scent well enough for it to then be recognizable without prior experience of it. Similarly, descriptions of high-level meditation often include experiences which aren’t easily transmissible to non-practitioners—not because of some ill-defined privileges attached to personal gnosis, but because they’re grounded in very unusual mental states.
Thank you for your reply! It’s certainly helped to clarify the matter. I wonder now if a language used in a hypothetical culture where people placed a much higher value on sense of smell or meditative states might have a far broader and more detailed vocabulary to describe them, resolving the problems with reconstructing the evidence. It’s almost Sapir-Whorf—regardless of whether or not language influences thought, it certainly influences the transmission of thought.
I think on reflection that most of my other objections relate to cases where the evidence isn’t in dispute but the conclusions drawn from it are (see: much of politics!) Those could, in principle, be resolved with a proper discussion of priors and a focus on the actual objective evidence as opposed to simply the parts of it that fit with one’s chosen argument. That people in most cases don’t (and don’t want to) reconcile the beliefs and view the situation as more complex than ‘cheering for the right team’ is a fault in their thinking, not the principle itself.
It’s definitely harder to reconcile two sets of conflicting beliefs when you’re dealing with abstractions—maybe even intractable in some cases—but I don’t think it’s impossible in principle. In order for an abstraction to be meaningful, it has to say something about the sensory world; that is, it has to be part of a network of beliefs grounded in sensory evidence. That has straightforward consequences when you’re dealing with physical evidence for an abstraction; when dealing with abstract evidence, though, you need to reconstruct what that evidence means in terms of experience in order to fit it into a new set of conceptual priors. We do similar things all the time, although we might not realize we’re doing them: knowing that several languages conflate parts of the color space that English describes with “green” and “blue”, for example, might help you deal with a machine translation saying that grass is blue.
This only becomes problematic when dealing with conceptually isolated abstractions. Smells are a good example: it’s next to impossible to describe a scent well enough for it to then be recognizable without prior experience of it. Similarly, descriptions of high-level meditation often include experiences which aren’t easily transmissible to non-practitioners—not because of some ill-defined privileges attached to personal gnosis, but because they’re grounded in very unusual mental states.
Thank you for your reply! It’s certainly helped to clarify the matter. I wonder now if a language used in a hypothetical culture where people placed a much higher value on sense of smell or meditative states might have a far broader and more detailed vocabulary to describe them, resolving the problems with reconstructing the evidence. It’s almost Sapir-Whorf—regardless of whether or not language influences thought, it certainly influences the transmission of thought.
I think on reflection that most of my other objections relate to cases where the evidence isn’t in dispute but the conclusions drawn from it are (see: much of politics!) Those could, in principle, be resolved with a proper discussion of priors and a focus on the actual objective evidence as opposed to simply the parts of it that fit with one’s chosen argument. That people in most cases don’t (and don’t want to) reconcile the beliefs and view the situation as more complex than ‘cheering for the right team’ is a fault in their thinking, not the principle itself.