There's an excellent essay on this very topic by Galen Strawson, called Red and 'Red'. It's available online, but it's very expensive, so not worth it. I wish I could find it online somewhere for free. I'll keep trying.

EDIT: Nevermind, found it. It's quite tough in some areas, but it covers the topic pretty well.

https://www.academia.edu/397789/Red_and_Red_1989_

:cool:

Interesting question. John Locke developed some theories about colours and then how is in our vocabulary. He tried, somehow, explaining in a empirical thesis if my red is equals to your red.
I guess you would like the following examples to debate with and explain it.

If we block a child in a room all of his childhood teaching him the green colour while is actually yellow. Will he name all of his life “green” when he would actually see yellow? In this topic John Locke answered this is a perfect empirical experiment so he put the following sentence:
What you are trying to say is that complex terms like colours are not innate because we can teach children to misunderstand mixing them. I guess this is the same example of fearness. You can feel the fear because previously someone taught you what is darkness, witches, demons, etc... — John Locke.

If we match up the color wheel with the electromagic spectrum of light, it passes through all the colours, but not through purple. Violet may look a bit like purple, but it has nothing to do with red. What is going on?

The eye has certain receptors on the retina that detect color, the "cones." These come with three different sensitivities. Hence the three "primary" colors. True purple, for which there seems to be no place in the physical spectrum, is something we see when the cones sensitive to blue and red are both stimulated, giving us something like an imaginary color. — John Locke.

Conclusion and personal opinion: I guess it is just upon us the criteria of red and their significance. Nevertheless, it is something we put rules on just to provide an order. Red is a very important colour because it reflects a lot of signs. We can say here and debate if it is equal but somehow has to be one red just to promote order

respond to (or otherwise experience) in a distinct manner roughly the same set of external stimuli that we call red, independently of learning the word? — bongo fury

I think there may two overlapping aspects to experience. One is direct and lacking clear boundaries between me and other. The other is rational, reflecting, explaining, and naming.

This explains how I can tell you I experienced redness, but I wasn't conscious of the word. I remember the direct experience and channel it into metaphors. Like a dream that slips through my fingers as I try to explain it, I'm aware that something is lost as I try to put it into words.

Words are about remembering. Words shape what we remember because direct experience only has those blunt forms to flow into. Without the words, you'd experience red, but wouldn't remember it.

One at a time, please. — bongo fury

Seeing color is difficult to untangle from our philosophical perspective because we need to ignore physical, physiological, and psychological approaches to color as irrelevant to our direct model of reality. We only need to start with rational thought and its public language which above all the scientific minutia that might be raised as objections to what we do.

Having said that I'm not objecting here to any philosophy, I'm just pointing to a couple of very anti-intuitive yet on second thought perhaps obviously correct facts.

Physically we can only see light which comes in many shades of grey.

Our three 'color' sensors at the back of the eye record three slightly different black and white image frames every 1/25th of a second or so. One is brighter, more sensitive, in the higher wavelengths, one at the lower, and one in the middle range. Each 'pixel' records nothing but intensity in its range. Analogously, this is like using three connected black-and-white movie cameras, each with a different filter, RBG. The input is amazingly simple with subtle differences that are transmitted through the simplest chemical channels, much like copper wires, for complex computational processing by the brain.

What the brain does with this 'sensation' is 'perception'. The two are not distinguished in direct realism resulting in a simpler more manageable model.

So, external stimuli are only red if we say so, preferably based on universal, if not then cultural agreement.

I think the question of whether one person perceives red the same way another one does exposes a vast, monstrous, unfathomable oversimplification of how experience works. But, I'm not interested in discussing that. I have a couple of questions.

If I did magnetic resonance or positron emission testing of brain function and found that my brain reacts similarly when I see something I call "red" as yours does when you do, would that answer the question? What if the testing showed significantly different brain response?

"Is my red your red"?

I don't know. Show me your red.

Cut the red wire!

Is my red your red?!

Boom!

Yeah, I don't know about red or green or blue, not to mention chartreuse, beige, or puce! Very black and very white are more certain, and even then... Is your red better because of a touch orange? Is my blue a bit too pale, or too deep? The bland color I painted my office turned out to be extremely unstable, in one light it looks great; 5 minutes later it looks drab.

I'm a pragmatist. I paint everything white.

Thank you for the link. The article begins in a faltering fashion, but is well worth reading. There is a clarity in Strawson's exposition that I found most refreshing.

"Red" does not refer to any particular phenomenal quality.

There is no "my red".

Hence, "Is my red your red?" is a question without sense.

I'm glad you liked it. I find that it causes me some considerable mental anguish :rofl: It's like what the heck am I even talking about?

It's very hard to break away from common sense. But it's certainly fascinating.

I've always viewed semantics as a distraction from real philosophy. No more than the concept of viewing one of two people arguing the same premise in two different languages, being any more or less correct or incorrect.

If I cut both of you, and you bleed, whatever word, phrase, or as it really is "sound" you assign to the color we all see, is not relevant. The lone exception being if the conical rods in your ocular system (eyes) are deficient or otherwise altered.

Perhaps as a cultural or social custom certain colors are either darker or lighter as far as common appearance. Then, of course, "your" color, that is to say your idea and preconceptions of said color, will be either of a slightly darker or slightly lighter hue than mine. That is about all there is to it.

Alas, that article isn't about innateness at all, in what I took to be the implied respect of its possible role in determining the extension of 'red' e.g. the border between red and, say, yellow; but about, rather, the relationship between internal and external extensions, where both are freely acknowledged.

On the other hand, that may have been what @magritte meant, too. "Innate" as in, our agreement as to the external extension happening to result from a corresponding agreement as to the internal extension.

And @Galen Strawson's argument does bear on the presumed innateness of a "colour-space". Just not the issue of the alleged inevitability of a particular "rainbow", the issue explored on the wiki page linked above. At least, not clearly.

The different issues deserve separating. Happy to discuss the article. His internalist definitions are confusing, and I'm not sure it's our fault.



I guess you are quoting your thread, not Locke? By all means edit.

I think you are on the side of the extension of "red" (the things it refers to) being a recognisable class of things independently of learning the word? Would that be an internal or external class of things?



You're like @Galen Strawson in not only accepting internal sensations but also an internal experience (or experiencing subject) distinct (or varyingly distinct) from those sensations?

Do you think the red type of internal sensation is determined innately, and/or independently of learning the word?

Physically we can only see light which comes in many shades of grey. — magritte

In what sense of "comes"? Not "reflects", I take it... Unintuitive indeed. I'm willing to learn some physics, though.

record three slightly different black and white image frames — magritte

In what sense "record"? In what sense "frames"?

So, external stimuli are only red if we say so, preferably based on universal, if not then cultural agreement. — magritte

Ok, and how universal, how innate?

would that answer the question? — T Clark

Choose a question?

I don't know. Show me your red. — Fooloso4

You're saying I can't, because it's private?

Or that we should compare samples of red objects?

Boom! — counterpunch

So, innate?

The different issues deserve separating. Happy to discuss the article. His internal definitions are confusing, and I'm not sure it's our fault. — bongo fury

I've read that article many times in the past, it was part of my thesis and yet I still have some problems with it, in that, I find that although I think he is correct that the word "red" does not refer to phenomenal, manifest experience, we assume that when such a word is used the other person understands us, and they usually do, as he admits.

We just can't prove that we are having the same experience. Then again, we can't prove almost anything. It's just a useful assumption about other people's experience. So I'm also confused, but I guess I like being confused at times.

Do you think the red type of internal sensation is determined innately, and/or independently of learning the word? — bongo fury

I know it was not issued to me, but I'd just like to say, that I think it's determined innately. I don't think learning the word tells us anything about the experience.

Yes, all rainbows are fuzzy going from colour to next colour. But funnily enough (as you may have noticed) each colour can act as a buffer making its neighbours mutually distinct!

I don't know. Show me your red.
— Fooloso4

You're saying I can't, because it's private? — bongo fury

I'm saying there is no way to compare. Anything that you show me would be something that I see.

If I cut both of you, and you bleed, whatever word, phrase, or as it really is "sound" you assign to the color we all see, — Outlander

... and is that one colour, or one each?

I'm saying there is no way to compare. Anything that you show me would be something that I see. — Fooloso4

Ok. So it's not that I can't show you? It's that you can't compare things you are shown? Not getting it.

... and is that one colour, or one each? — bongo fury

Assuming everyone's senses are calibrated the same.. it's one color. Merely different names or words (sounds) to describe it. And even if they weren't, it still is the same properties of what makes what we can perceive as different colors.. so would still be semantics. Kind of like how a door can be both an entry and exit while still never not being a door. It would seem as if you or the viewpoint your espousing attempts to argue that if someone uses a door for a single purpose (entry or exit) it is somehow not a door?

I think it's determined innately. — Manuel

Fair enough. I think innatism, which is usually assumed, and not even nuanced as indicated on the wiki page (allowing for a number of different sized rainbows) reinforces the belief in mental furniture. Contra Witty, of course. Also, more salient for me, Goodman.

Assuming everyone's senses are calibrated the same.. it's one color. — Outlander

Your views have been found acceptable, and you are free to go.

Goodman is fascinating, his Starmaking is very thought provoking to me, though I wouldn't go as far as Goodman does.

You are correct, innatism is not nuanced, I think, because so little is known. I don't see how one can get around it, unless one adopts a quasi Lockean or Humean approach to the mind. It's assumed to be true for all other animals: dogs, turtles, lions, etc. Why would we be the exception?

Yes, but with the nuance, you get to talk about the extension of the word as a (very) fuzzy set of externals (stimuli), in our case controlled largely by language.

Dogs have cones, but do they have a "rainbow" of distinct colours?

Starmaking — Manuel

Yes, paradoxical when set against his (seeming) eliminativism about mental entities (previous link).

Suppose you show me a sample of a red paint chip. I agree that this is what I call red, but this does not get us any further. What I am seeing, what it looks like to me is not something I can show you. We have learned to call this sample 'red' but this is as far as we can get.

Dogs have cones, but do they have a "rainbow" of distinct colours? — bongo fury

We'd have to assume that what the science tells us about dog vision is accurate, in the sense that if we had some device put in our brains, that could simulate dog vision, we'd see as they see.

They can't see red, apparently: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/200810/can-dogs-see-colors.

Yes, paradoxical when set against his (seeming) eliminativism about mental entities (previous link). — bongo fury

It is. He was an empiricist of sorts. He even got so mad at Chomsky for believing in innateness that he stopped talking to him for life. And prior to that they were friends.

Do you think the red type of internal sensation is determined innately, and/or independently of learning the word? — bongo fury

Innately. If you and I are looking at a chair, are their two chairs? One for each of us?

What I am seeing, — Fooloso4

In front of you, or inside you?

what it looks like — Fooloso4

The other things it is (colour-wise) like?

but this is as far as we can get. — Fooloso4

Because we can't see inside each other's head? But we can infer that what goes on in there is the same confusing of inside and outside that makes our own thoughts so interesting.

Your views have been found acceptable, and you are free to go. — bongo fury

Oh, if only! A molecule of plague left untreated is as good as an entire world of it, removing circumstantial factors such as state of being and time. No, I'm in it for the long haul I'm afraid. And so are you now, whether knowingly or not.

They can't see red, apparently — Manuel

And of course they aren't able to confuse their thoughts with pictures.

And prior to that they were friends. — Manuel

Yes, Chomsky still talks very fondly. (In at least one interview, googleable. You probably read it.)