Can’t speak for anyone else, but yeah, in the context under discussion I’d agree with this. Somehow knowing what’s really happening, as opposed to what I experience and infer, is not a normal event. If I am under the impression that I know what’s really happening based on theory A, and then later I discard theory A in favor of theory B, there is no requirement that theory B’s account of what’s really happening preserve what I consider my pre-existing knowledge.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but yeah, in the context under discussion I’d agree with this. Somehow knowing what’s really happening, as opposed to what I experience and infer, is not a normal event.
Hmm, I didn’t expect anyone to bite this bullet. I think I’m happy with this conclusion insofar as it gets us a rejection of Egan’s law as an argument that theory A preserves phenonmenon X, where X isn’t a mere appearance (not that you thought otherwise).
The next step (if my karma can withstand it) on my part would be to argue that ‘appearing to be blue’ is logically posterior to ‘being blue’, such that if we arrived at a theory that said that ‘being blue’ was simply nonsense, we would have to throw out ‘appearing to be blue’ along with it. In other words, the dependence of ‘appearance’ style sentences on straightforward fact-stating sentences means that appearances are no less susceptible to attack. The idea would be to show that there’s no possible ‘normal’ that’s in principle immune to attack by a theory, even if there is a battery of everyday observations that aren’t likely to be attacked.
The next step (if my karma can withstand it) on my part would be to argue that ‘appearing to be blue’ is logically posterior to ‘being blue’,
Would one implication of this be that if an object simultaneously appears white to one observer and blue to another, it is both white and blue, even though nobody perceives it as both white and blue?
No, I think that would be a different sort of priority. My claim is that sentences of the form ‘A appears to be X’ are logically posterior to sentences of the form ‘A is X’. So if ‘A is X’ is in some particular case a category mistake or a bit of nonsense (not a mere physical impossibility) then ‘A appears to be X’ will come out nonsense as well. So for example, if it turns out that everyday physical objects don’t really have color (and that this is a category mistake or a bit of nonsense) then ‘appearing to have a color’ will also be nonsense. A clear cut case of such a category mistake would be the claim that ‘the number eight is green’. If this is simply nonsense, then it’s also nonsense to say that ‘the number eight appears green’. Whoever says this (synesthesiacs notwithstanding) is either confused about what a number is, or what a color is.
The concrete examples are helpful, thank you. Can we be equally concrete about what it means for a claim like “the number eight appears green” to be nonsense?
I mean, the number eight certainly doesn’t appear green to me. And when a synesthesiac reports that they experience the number eight as green, I don’t really have a clear sense of what experience they are describing… the closest I can come is imagining that whenever I think about the number eight, I perceive a color shift in my environment similar to putting a green gel on stage lights, which I’m pretty sure is not at all like what they experience.
So, how would I go about establishing whether their report is nonsense?
While I was looking this up, I learned that the sentence…
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
…is both grammatically valid, and not nonsense.
(nods) I’m aware of this sort of data, but it’s not in the least clear to me whether they qualify as evidence that such a report is or isn’t nonsense by Esar’s account, or on what basis they might do either.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but yeah, in the context under discussion I’d agree with this. Somehow knowing what’s really happening, as opposed to what I experience and infer, is not a normal event. If I am under the impression that I know what’s really happening based on theory A, and then later I discard theory A in favor of theory B, there is no requirement that theory B’s account of what’s really happening preserve what I consider my pre-existing knowledge.
Hmm, I didn’t expect anyone to bite this bullet. I think I’m happy with this conclusion insofar as it gets us a rejection of Egan’s law as an argument that theory A preserves phenonmenon X, where X isn’t a mere appearance (not that you thought otherwise).
The next step (if my karma can withstand it) on my part would be to argue that ‘appearing to be blue’ is logically posterior to ‘being blue’, such that if we arrived at a theory that said that ‘being blue’ was simply nonsense, we would have to throw out ‘appearing to be blue’ along with it. In other words, the dependence of ‘appearance’ style sentences on straightforward fact-stating sentences means that appearances are no less susceptible to attack. The idea would be to show that there’s no possible ‘normal’ that’s in principle immune to attack by a theory, even if there is a battery of everyday observations that aren’t likely to be attacked.
Would one implication of this be that if an object simultaneously appears white to one observer and blue to another, it is both white and blue, even though nobody perceives it as both white and blue?
No, I think that would be a different sort of priority. My claim is that sentences of the form ‘A appears to be X’ are logically posterior to sentences of the form ‘A is X’. So if ‘A is X’ is in some particular case a category mistake or a bit of nonsense (not a mere physical impossibility) then ‘A appears to be X’ will come out nonsense as well. So for example, if it turns out that everyday physical objects don’t really have color (and that this is a category mistake or a bit of nonsense) then ‘appearing to have a color’ will also be nonsense. A clear cut case of such a category mistake would be the claim that ‘the number eight is green’. If this is simply nonsense, then it’s also nonsense to say that ‘the number eight appears green’. Whoever says this (synesthesiacs notwithstanding) is either confused about what a number is, or what a color is.
The concrete examples are helpful, thank you.
Can we be equally concrete about what it means for a claim like “the number eight appears green” to be nonsense?
I mean, the number eight certainly doesn’t appear green to me. And when a synesthesiac reports that they experience the number eight as green, I don’t really have a clear sense of what experience they are describing… the closest I can come is imagining that whenever I think about the number eight, I perceive a color shift in my environment similar to putting a green gel on stage lights, which I’m pretty sure is not at all like what they experience.
So, how would I go about establishing whether their report is nonsense?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
This is what I have in mind.
While I was looking this up, I learned that the sentence… Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. …is both grammatically valid, and not nonsense.
Experiments verifying synesthesia.
(nods) I’m aware of this sort of data, but it’s not in the least clear to me whether they qualify as evidence that such a report is or isn’t nonsense by Esar’s account, or on what basis they might do either.