There is something blind folk cannot do, not something they cannot say. — Banno

Yes. Per my example, it is something they cannot do, and we (sighted) cannot say, to them. We cannot say the experience of sight, it is ineffable.

Indeed, surprisingly apropos. However experience suggests caution. Let's consider an example - the diagonal argument, perhaps. So do we say that transfinite numbers were ineffable prior to Cantor's contemplations? Or that they were unknown, undiscovered? Or that Cantor constructed them?

Seems like that would be the logical query to follow, “only the unknown cannot be put into words”. — Mww

Cantor gave us the language to put what was previously unknown into words. Do we use "ineffable" for things we might say, but so far haven't? Isn't "ineffable" reserved for stuff that we cannot in principle say?

Only that which is unknown cannot be put into words. — RussellA

Beyond 's quite valid criticism of that phrasing, Cantor shows that what was previously unknown can indeed be put into words; putting it into words is the act of making it known.

So it might be more astute to say that what is known can be put into words, and what is unknown becomes known by putting it in words.

Yes. Per my example, it is something they cannot do, and we (sighted) cannot say, to them. We cannot say the experience of sight, it is ineffable. — hypericin

You seemed to miss the point. What is ineffable cannot be said. Yet a blind person can talk of colours. by that very fact, colours are not ineffable to them.

It would be an error to say that what is ineffable is what cannot be done, or that what cannot be done is ineffable.

(An error in grammar)

If we were playing ball, I’d have to concede a score. — Mww

Was there some sense in that scrambled post? I'm surprised. Cheers.

Only that which is unknown cannot be put into words. Only that which is unknown is ineffable. If it is known, it can be put into words and is expressible. — RussellA


All well-said.

Do we….or do we not….still need to stipulate the criteria for determining how the unknowable isn’t a mere subterfuge? Seems like that would be the logical query to follow, “only the unknown cannot be put into words”. — Mww

It depends on what you mean by "know". I know what my friend looks like, but I can't put that "knowing" into words that could communicate what she looks like such that you could, on the basis of what I told you. recognized her on the street. For me our whole experience is ineffable, since we speak only in generalities, whereas experience is particular. But again, it depends on what you mean by "ineffable"; on how you conceive its range and application.

Merely mouthing words is not enough. By your logic this thread is a non-starter, for as soon as anything purportedly ineffable is merely mentioned, it is no longer ineffable.

You can endlessly verbalize about the experience of color. Moreover you can endlessly use color words. Nonetheless, the experience of color cannot be communicated. That is what makes it ineffable.

Merely mouthing words is not enough. By your logic this thread is a non-starter, for as soon as anything purportedly ineffable is merely mentioned, it is no longer ineffable. — hypericin

Yep. You got it. Enough rope.

the experience of color cannot be communicated. — hypericin

Yeah, it can. The cup is red.

This has support when we consider that sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to feel a certain way about a certain thing, e.g., doesn’t make sense to cry over beautiful music. — Mww

:grin: Am reminded of "tears of joy" ... could happen ... but your point is well taken.

Doesn’t the unknown in practice still require an explanatory principle? I should think that if it is the case that knowledge is only possible in conjunction with principles, the criteria for the unknowable must be either the negation of those, the validity of its own, or the absence of any. But principles at any rate. — Mww

I’m unclear as to how to best interpret this. But in addressing principles, what comes to my mind are epistemological principles. To address a relatively concrete example that we could all relate to: The future is uncertain.

Because we know this via experience-laden inference, we can thereby express that the future is “uncertain”. That we know the future to be uncertain then implies that we know - hold JTB - that much of the future is unknown to us - i.e., that we don’t hold JTB regarding some of what will be - usually, and in general, this in correlation to how distant a future we’re addressing. Of course, we have our best inferences of the immediate future, that tomorrow will most likely resemble today to a significant extent, etc., but in terms of what we clearly know the be unknown aspects of the future:

We can speculate as to possible alternatives of what might be, and these will be know to us as such, and thereby expressible by us. Example: a year from now it might rain or not rain at the location I’m currently at. That said, while it may be true that some might presume to know and thereby express what the case will be, for those who know they don’t know what will be what will be is quite technically inexpressible.

This is a relatively challenging example because alternative expressions can be used: the future might be X, or is likely to be X. Still, if we hold JTB that we do not hold JTB regarding what the future will be in a certain respect, then, for those who so hold a known unknown, this aspect of the future will be ineffable.

This roundabout line of reasoning to my mind will then apply to any inferred known unknown.

When it comes to experience, it gets far trickier to express, but there is - and some here might be very appalled by this - a certain form of meta-cognizance regarding what one is consciously experiencing: a non-inferential knowing that one knows. The clearest simple example of this that currently comes to mind is in our tip-of-the-tongue experiences. Here, we know the word’s meaning we want to express and likewise know that we, at least momentarily, don’t know the phenomenal word itself. Furthermore, maybe most poignantly, we non-inferentially know that we have knowledge-by-acquaintance of the phenomenal word although we can’t for the life of us recall what it might be.

Then, in a similar, but far more complex, way, we could non-inferentially know that we don’t know how to articulate that emotive state of being we are knowledgeable of via direct experience (via a kind of knowledge by acquaintance).

Don’t know if this helps any. But that’s my best take so far.

I can't put that "knowing" into words that could communicate what she looks like such that you could, on the basis of what I told you. recognized her on the street. — Janus

To your personal subjectivity, your experience is unrelatable to me. But you’re not relating an experience, you’re relating a certain understanding of the properties you have already thought as belonging to an object I will eventually perceive. If our intelligences are sufficient congruent, which they very well should be, I should be able to transpose your words back into my standing intuitions, such that I will perceive exactly what you are enabling me to do.

As for generalities, the more properties you relay to me, the less general the description becomes, hence the easier to recognize the person.

Still, in one respect, you’re correct, in that merely perceiving the correct person in a crowd is very far from knowing the person. But, technically, that wasn’t the knowledge you enabled me to acquire with a mere descriptive appearance.

So I submit that you can put your knowing into words, at least for that which you want me to do with it.

Isn't "ineffable" reserved for stuff that we cannot in principle say? — Banno

I’m gathering that’s the consensus opinion, yes. Just seems rather silly to overburden what was already impossible, with another word that doesn’t change anything.

Anything at all, that cannot follow from principles, is impossible. So why does it need to be ineffable too?

Anything at all, that cannot follow from principles, is impossible. — Mww

I don't understand that. What are "principles"?

HA!!! Nice try.

Aww, won't play.

don't understand that. What are "principles"? — Banno

Principles are ineffable.

the experience of color cannot be communicated.
— hypericin

Yeah, it can. The cup is red. — Banno

:rofl: :roll:

This says the cup is colored red, but nothing about the experience of the color red.

Ah - you edited your reply.

This says the cup is colored red, but nothing about the experience of the color red. — hypericin

The ineffable is about what cannot be said, not what cannot be done.

A blind person cannot see that the cup is red. But your claim was that there is something they cannot say - something sighted folk can say but not blind folk.

What is it that sighted folk can say, but not blind folk?

It would not help your case to argue that neither blind nor sighted folk can talk about the experience of red.

But also, that is also just plain false - we do talk about the experience of red.

You can take it as frustration at what must be a mental block of some kind.

I'm blind. Please explain to me in terms I can understand what it is like to see red. If you cannot, you must concede that the experience is ineffable.

don't understand that. What are "principles"? — Banno


Principles are ineffable. — Tom Storm

… until they aren’t.

Hence: Nietzsche’s principle of will to power, Freud’s principle of will to pleasure (in fairness, together with his reality principle), Frankl’s principle of will to meaning, and the one which I find most important, Enigma’s principles of lust.

It might take a whole lot of reasoning to make me change my mind on this stance:

Hence: Nietzsche’s principle of will to power, Freud’s principle of will to pleasure (in fairness, together with his reality principle), Frankl’s principle of will to meaning, and the one which I find most important, Enigma’s principles of lust.

It might take a whole lot of reasoning to make me change my mind on this stance: — javra

Given neither of us arrived here by reasoning, it ain't gonna be reasoning that gets us out. :joke:

You can take it as frustration at what must be a mental block of some kind. — hypericin

You have my sympathy. Try reading Austin's Sense and Sensibilia, or Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations...

I'm sighted. Please explain to me in terms I can understand what it is like to see red. I don't think you can, and again, that's because seeing red is something that we do, not something that is sayable. So saying that "the experience of red" is ineffable is making a sort of category mistake. That's the sort of grammatical problem that comes from supposing that seeing red is some sort of private experience, as opposed to learning to use the word "red"

It can't be said, but it can be shown.

(Edit: This post was done too rapidly and is inconsiderate. I am honestly surprised that a blind person would suppose themselves to be unable to enter into a conversation about colour, since I have had such conversations with blind folk. Doubtless I am misunderstanding your position. )

Hmm. Isn't unprincipled lust more... interesting?

the experience of color cannot be communicated.
— hypericin

Yeah, it can. The cup is red. — Banno

Listing properties communicates experience? Only if speaker and listener have common ground. Hypericin is correct wrt congenitally blind listeners.

That's just the way it is.

Hmm. Isn't unprincipled lust more... interesting? — Banno

Nah. Too anarchistic.

Hypericin is correct wrt congenitally blind listeners. — frank

Ok. It might help if you stated what you think he is claiming.

Ok. It might help if you stated what you think he is claiming. — Banno

I think he's claiming that you can't teach someone what red is. You can only point to it. If they have the anatomy and physiology that allows them to have that experience, you can help them attach the word "red" to it.

Plus there's a Meno's paradox situation here. All speech ever does is point, and then we hope they got it.

I think he's claiming that you can't teach someone what red is. You can only point to it. If they have the anatomy and physiology that allows them to have that experience, you can help them attach the word "red" to it. — frank

Well, teaching is showing.

I say in addition that a blind person may enter into a conversation concerning colours, using colour words accurately, for all sorts of purposes, and yet what they cannot do is to provide the colour of something by looking at it.

What think you?

The first target here is blanket statements such as "blind folk cannot understand the meaning of colour". Blind folk do make use of colour words.

See Making sense of how the blind ‘see’ color


(Edit: I reneged on my agreement with what I quoted from you. Learning what red is just is being able to pick the red flowers, describe the sports car, stop at the lights and so on. Meaning is not a thing in one's head but what we do. But that's the big picture. Small steps first. )

That is, do you also agree with:

What the blind cannot do re color words is know what they are talking about. — hypericin

Thanks for minimizing the philosophical jargon, this helps to improve the dialogue.

When you face the world with understanding, it is not that the world is sitting there telling you what it is. — Constance

Not exactly, another human being is part of this world and they can tell me who they think they are.

What makes the world the world is your history of experiences, and this is what separates your world from a "blooming and buzzing" infant's world. But if it is education that informs the understanding, then how is it that the this education can ever access the "out there" of the world as it really is, given that the understanding is all about this stream of recollection? Sure, there is something before me, a tree or a couch, but isn't this recognition of what these are just the occasion for memories to be brought to bear in the specific occasion, and the palpable things of the world in their "really what they are" ness just an impossible concept; impossible because to have it as an an object at all is to be beheld AS a kind of regionalized set of memories, you know, memories about couches kick the moment you see a couch and there is no "in between" time to catch the couch in all its "pure presence". — Constance

I do not share your causal commitment here. We don't have a world because I have memories of it, but I have memories of it because there is a world.

I don't find there is much sense or value talking about "out there" of the world as it really is. If Husserl came to this concern through thinking of the metaphysical implications of illusions or hallucinations, I am not sympathetic to this worry. Talk about "real" loses its meaning because those who theorize never put forward what we are suppose to confirm, verify, detect to determine what it real and what is not. As for its value, I think CS Peirce said it best when he ask readers what would be wrong with a metaphysical theory that claimed a diamond is actually soft, and only becomes hard when it is touched. "Peirce argued that there is "no falsity" in such thinking, for there is no way of proving it. However, he claimed that the meaning of a concept is derived from the object that the concept relates to and the effects it has on our senses. Whether we think of the diamond as "soft until touched" or "always hard" before our experience, therefore, is irrelevant. Under both theories the diamond feels the same, and can be used in exactly the same way. However, the first theory is far more difficult to work with, and so is of less value to us." (from The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained)

But it goes directly to the issue of ineffability, for what is really on the table here is whether it makes sense to talk like this at all. — Constance

And yes, it makes sense to talk about the table, its shape, size, color, etc and to doubt the sense and value of such talk is foolhardy.

memories about couches kick the moment you see a couch and there is no "in between" time to catch the couch in all its "pure presence". — Constance

Just because I name that object "couch" and a teach a child to call that object a "couch" it is quite a reach that we both don't detect the "pure presence" of the "couch". But how would you know anyway, it is not like you have any privilege access to my experiences to characterize the presence as "pure" vs "impure."

Banno sort of beat me to the punch a little, but I’m going to join in for a second anyway.

It’s to be acknowledged that words for colors have meaning to blind people: expressions such as, “I’m seeing red”, “I’m blue”, or “it’s not all black and white” can be readily meaningful. Likewise can other associations between colors and properties be made: green is generally a cold color; yellow warm; purple is beyond the light spectrum and can signify some form of spirituality (these are examples taken from personal experience interacting with one or two people blind from birth). I never asked, but it’s also at least possible that people blind from birth could hold some form of color scheme that could be seen by them with the mind’s eye.

That said, what a concrete red apple perceptually looks like will not be a shared experience. And its particularities will not be expressible.

More interesting to me, I’ve read of blind people being very pleased at touching the surface of heavily impastoed paintings of the ocean’s waves and crests. It helped them get a tactile sense of what the ocean looks like. They held descriptive understandings of this, but, obviously, had no visual experience of it. And the tactile feel of the painting helped them form an image - however accurate or inaccurate it may have been - in their mind’s eye.

As to expressability, my take away is that much of the meaning of color words can be cognized via language by those who can't see - but not the direct experience of perceptual color. This anymore than we know what a color blind person experiences when looking at the world day in and day out, or else what a fully blind person experiences via heightened sensitivity to tactile feelings and sounds, and the mental mappings resultant from this.

Sure there’s a difference, but there’s nothing ineffable about it. The word representing a universal conception won’t refer to a particular example of it. — Mww

The issue though is why, or how. Suppose I write here, the word "box", and I tell you that this word signifies something, it stands for something. How do you know whether it signifies a particular which I have named, or whether it is a concept which the word refers to. You say it can't be both, but why not? I think that in most common usage it actually would refer to both. If I say "get me the box", I refer to a particular, but you know what thing to get me because of the concept. So I must be using the word to signify both. Now we have no dichotomy of one or the other, we have both. The word actually signifies a sort of unity of particular and universal. How can we describe this unity? Is it even correct to call it a unity?

True enough. Herein is the limit of metaphysical reductionism. Conceptions represent thoughts….but there is no justifiable hypothesis for the origin of thoughts. If one wishes to call the origin of thought ineffable, insofar as there are no words to describe it, that’s fine, but we’ve already understood we just have no idea from whence come thoughts, so why bother with overburdening the impossibility with ineffability? — Mww

The issue was that there is a difference between the representation and the thing represented. But this led me into a problem with boundaries, so perhaps "difference" was not the right word. In the above paragraph I described a "unity", and this is probably a better word than "difference". Now it's not a difference between the representation and the thing represented, but a unity of the two. The issue of "ineffability" is evident because I can use these words freely, "difference", "unity", "boundary", or whatever, and it really doesn't matter. I'm just choosing a word to talk about something which doesn't already have a word for it. That's common in philosophy. But some would say that if there is no word for it, we cannot talk about it. That's not true though, we just get a more free choice in our words when we approach the supposed ineffable. There aren't any words for the thing to be talked about, making people think that it can't be talked about, but really we're just free to make the words up.

Truth be told, I don’t agree that’s what we’re doing. You say the problem is we try to do this thing we can’t do, I say we can’t even do, in any way, shape or form, what you say we’re trying to do, so the problem itself you say we have, should just disappear and along with it, the very notion of ineffability. — Mww

Sure, trying to do something I can't do is a problem, but it can be overcome. That's the point with learning, advancement of knowledge, and practise. So, I can often do at a later time what I could not do at an earlier time. And this is an issue with the concept of the ineffable. What is ineffable at one time may not be at a later time. But some people do not see that language evolves, and we learn to overcome problems, and that's how knowledge advances. For them, the ineffable might appear like a wall which we cannot get past, or a problem which cannot be overcome. I see it as a temporary inconvenience, and a good reason to use words very freely.

This is just as much fun as trying to fathom why some of us are right-handed and some are left. Why some of us like spinach and some of us gag on it. Only product there can be is fun; we ain’t gonna solve anything here, are we. — Mww

For some of us, using words freely is fun, so the ineffable presents us with a good source of entertainment.

This from a gentleman who questions 1+1=2 is a surprise. — jgill

Yes, I do question this phrase, "1+1=2". And I just state the obvious, that "1+1" does not say the same thing as "2" does. So those who claim that "=" means the same as, are mistaken.

This sign, "=", actually gives us a lot of freedom of expression. We are allowed to, arbitrarily point to two distinct things, assign them the same value as each being "one", and make the conclusion that each, as one, is equal to the other. Of course they are not the same as one another, but by designating them as equal to each other, we can perform all sorts of magic tricks of transposition. I don't practise math, but I bet that's fun.