I believe that one has to take seriously his discussion in the whole section. — boundless

Indeed, and one should take seriously the point of the whole book. That is to distinguish between what has sense and what is nonsense, what can be said and what is shown. To draw the limits of language and remain silent, to say nothing except what can be said.

“6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct”

So solipsist asserting “they alone exist in the world” or any other such permutation, asserts nothing all at.

As for later Wittgenstein, while his approach differs from his earlier work, would be equally dubious of the solipsists assertions, This was done by showing how the solipsist abuses our ordinary use of language.

Ironically, Wittgenstein's Tractatus can also be invoked to support the view that one can't go outside one's perspective (see TLP 5.6-5.641...here a link). And in fact, one can cite the later Wittgenstein's view that sense can be pragmatic in nature. Even if my picture is wrong, then, if it still has pragmatic use, I don't see why it would be 'nonsense'. — boundless

I think these sections are serving the purpose of putting the implications of Wittgenstein view of language and how we make sense of the world, deciding on what can be said and what can be shown. In these sections, solipsism is not something that can be said, but only shown.

5.64 Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.

In H.O Mounce’s Wittgenstein’s Tractatus An Introduction, puts it nicely when he says, “For the solipsist in wishing to deny the independent reality of the world, in maintaining that only he and his ideas are real, has the idea of his self as an object standing, as it were, over and against an unreal world. But when he realizes the confusion in this, when he sees that there can be no such object as he takes his self to be, the world reappears as the only reality in which his self can manifest itself.”

To add a quote of a much forgotten book, Mill’s On Liberty, he analyzes in Chapter II Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion, “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.”

Quite an ideal to live up to!

I think it is quite clear that those who suggest censorship, de-platforming, the heckler’s veto, cancel culture, etc. are of the intolerant variety, and the tolerant ought not to tolerate their behaviors. — NOS4A2

I think the beauty of a society that has this freedom is the transparency it can offer. You know where your fellow citizen stands and they know where you stand. The risk I see is any attempt to eliminating the voice might send it into hiding, and this poises many dangers to society. So, if both parties are attempting to shut out each other’s voices, what is left? A society uncertain where folk stand or think, paralyze in fear, developing some sort of paranoid suspicion.

So let them have their voice, so at least you know who you have to stand up to.

So what.
the punishment is proportional
— Richard B
An eternal punishment for a transient sin is proportional? Not seeing it. — Banno

I know for a non-believer, yep.

But for a believer, there is a rule given by the creator, and the creator decrees there is one eternal sin that cannot be forgiven.

This is accepted or not. Sort of like accepting Euclid’s axioms and seeing what follows. For example, “A point is that of which there is no part.” What hell is that? O.k. I will accept it and see where this goes.

One commits an eternal sin according to God not a transient sin according to Lewis.

I would characterise the thread quite differently. You can read Lewis' argument and comment on it. The punishment of the damned is infinitely disproportionate to their crimes. — Banno

Well according to the Bible :

Mark 3:28: "Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter".
Mark 3:29: "But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin".

These are the rules of the game for the believer. The believer recognizes the book as authority for their religious life. This sin stated as an “eternal” sin, not a “finite” sin. Thus, the punishment is proportional.

A problem here, I believe, is that you are assuming that there must be some kind of correspondence of our mental constructs of the world and the world in itself. The structure of the model must somehow reflect the structure of the world. But how can we verify this assumption? — boundless

I think Wittgenstein’s Tractatus may offer a solution here. That is in order for us to make sense of the world, that is to avoid speaking non sense, our language, mental construct, and the world must be isomorphic. This is not an outcome of empirical verification but of logical analysis.

God should have hired David as his publicist, since he did such a better job of articulating the process of eternal damnation than the Bible, maybe there would have been less sin in the world. At a minimum, Lewis may have demonstrated the concept of God as a “omnipotent influencer” is not a necessary property.

This is quite counter-intuitive. But imagine it is but it is true theory. This prevents us from substantivizing information and treating it as an entity that passes from one side to the other. Which has many consequences for information theory like the ilusion of transmission. — JuanZu

Quite a claim, that there is an illusion of transmission when we substantivizing information.

If a l wrote a letter to my friend providing information on directions to my house. I can say I have transmitted this information by means of a letter. What was transmitted to him if he arrived at my house? The incorporeal information or material letter? Sending just the paper does not ensure the visit but the information in the letter.

My love for my county was transmitted thru generations by my sacrifices on the battlefield. Do I need a theory to tell me that love cannot be transmitted thru history even though love may not be a substance? Your theory may be true but at the expense of limiting our use of language.

he idea does bug me, the thought that if it's all just chemicals then there would be no real reason to not plug into it. What difference is there if we can just replicate everything? — Darkneos

Interesting criteria for choice, “it’s all just chemicals”. Well putting aside what goes on in your brain for a moment, are those “real objects” in front of you just chemicals as well? Or those “chemicals” got some special ontological status for you? And those “chemicals” in the brain, I guess just, are just chemicals of what? Something unknown?

So I guess you are worried about the causes of the “chemicals” in your brain. You seem to want those causes to be “outside” your brain. But the causes of an experience machine are outside your brain.

Maybe reading Sartre might help when it comes to making a choice in life. But maybe not, thats a choice as well.

Thus, the existence of humans is designed — A Christian Philosophy

Yep, this seems to be making a come back. When we all thought Hume buried the design argument, philosophers are starting to defend it again, see Chalmers, Reality+: virtual worlds and problems of philosophy. Since virtual reality is simulated to resemble our reality maybe we are just simulation ourselves. But now this demands a simulator. While this concept does not resemble the Christian concept of God, it opens the door yet again.

Yep, especially if notions of time and space come into existence and have sense emerging from the big bang. Thus, asking questions of “cause” may have little sense. But our imaginations do not want to be bound by any thing physical, thus we our doomed to ask disguised questions that seem intelligible but are really are distress calls for new conceptions.

quantum mechanics which considers physical quantities at the atomic level as merely random results of measurements — Ypan1944

I think even Einstein would say quantum mechanics is not fundamental given his famous quote, “God does not play dice.” Heisenberg may have even question what sense to call quantum mechanics fundamental when he said “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

Lets explore this idea:

You express the following thought to me, “A circle has four sides.” I may reply, “Not sure what you are thinking here, but a square has four sides.” Is this not doubting what thoughts you may have about “circles.”? You might want to say, “Well privately, I know what I am referring to or thinking about.” Sure, you have thoughts that no one understands, but how could we agree that they are thoughts at all!?

Not everyone agrees with Wittgenstein. If you don't know what red means, how could you use the word "red"? If you are a colour blind, how could you tell red objects? For you being able to use the word red means that you know what you mean by red from your experience of seeing red via your perception, and folks describing red objects as red. — Corvus

Quine, in Word and Object, addresses how folk who are color blind use the word correctly.

“Uniformity comes where it matters socially; hence rather in point of intersubjectively conspicuous circumstances of utterances than in point of privately conspicuous ones. For an extreme illustration of the point, consider two men one of whom has normal color vision and the other of whom is color-blind as between red and green. Society has trained both men by the method noted earlier: rewarding the utterance of ‘red’ when the speaker is seen fixating something red, and penalizing it in the contrary case. Moreover the gross socially observable results are about alike: both men are pretty good about attributing ‘red’ to just the red things. But the private mechanisms by which the two men achieve these similar results are very different. The one man has learned ‘red’ in associate with the regulation photochemical effect. The other man has learned ‘red’ by light in various wavelengths (red and green) in company with elaborate special combination of supplementary conditions of intensity, saturation, shape, and setting, calculated e.g. to admit fire and sunsets and exclude grass;…”

But we do know who the question refers to... Socrates. Yes, there is more that one can learn about Socrates, but that is still about Socrates. Kripke's point, that we do not need a definite description at hand in order for a propper name to function correctly, stand... no? — Banno

“But we do know who the question refers to…God. Yes, there more that one can learn about God, but that is still about God. Kripke’s point, that we do not need a definite description at hand in order for a proper name to function correctly,…no?”

Hmmm, I suppose neither a logical construction that Anselm puts forward.

The nature of living systems is to change themselves in ways that retain a normative continuity in the face of changing circumstances. Cognition is an elaboration of such organismic dynamics. A.I. changes itself according to principles that we program into it, in relation to norms that belong to us. Thus, A.I. is an appendage of our own self-organizing ecology. It will only think when it becomes a self-organizing system which can produce and change its own norms. No machine can do that, since the very nature of being a machine is to — Joshs

Nice passage. Stuck this in Chat Smith to see if it confirms the veracity. And, there was no disagreement. But I guess this is expected based on what is expressed.

Yep. As your asking me that very question implies that you understood my post and what to do about it. Doubt sits in a background of certainty. That's a step beyond the insincere affectation, into the nature of discourse. — Banno

Reaction to this post:

Sometimes in philosophy we show by arranging our concepts into a persuasive paradigms. This is very different than presenting logical arguments from true premises to demonstrated conclusions. Like “cause and effect”, we accept these concepts and enjoy the fruits, not born from logical demonstration but life forces these concepts on us. Accepting the sandwich, our big bang to certainty.

I think that's a wonderful definition even though I have no idea what it means. Sounds all philosophical and stuff. — T Clark

Quine could generalize the general.

Yes, a true sentence is about what is the case. But note that truth is a property of the sentence, not a property of the rain — Michael

If I said “It is the case that it is raining outside”, I do not mention anything about “truth” Would we need to say “what is the case” is a property of “It is raining outside.”? Or just say “what is the case” is neither a property of a sentence nor the rain? Like those who assert “existence” is not a predicate.

“As against solipsism it is to be said, in the first place, that it is psychologically impossible to believe, and is rejected in fact even by those who mean to accept it. I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others. Coming from a logician and a solipsist, her surprise surprised me.”

Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

In summary, the idea of solipsism should not be taken seriously and should be rejected on different soil.

There is a difference between knowing the key is on the desk and being certain that the key is on the desk.

That's kinda the topic of On Certainty.

The justification for a claim to knowledge is the answer to "How do you know?" It will not do here to simple repeat your claim - I know the key is on the table because the key is on the table; I know this is a hand because it is a hand.

This is what is being said in the first few pages of On Certainty. Moore is unjustified in claiming that he knows this is a hand. Yet, it is true that this is a hand; and he is certain that this is a hand. The remainder of the book is an exploration of this oddity. — Banno

Nicely put. How about I know this is a hand because I am pointing to it, we both see it, and we both understand what I am talking about.

You’re making Wittgenstein’s point for him. He sees Moore’s raising of his hand as a performance which is grounded in a picture of the world which cannot be proved more correct than any other. To doubt the truth of this picture is to substitute a different picture, a different language game, just as doubting the picture of the world implied by the rules of chess is to no longer be playing chess. Moore’s demonstration convinces doubters of its certainty by bringing them to look at the world in a different way, not by satisfying them of its correctness. — Joshs

If Moore knows, that would mean there's a sense of "know" that amounts to being unable to doubt. And per Hume, you can't prove what you can't doubt. So Moore would have some kind of unprovable knowledge, which doesn't sound right. — frank

Moore's paper, "Proof of an External World”, is an appeal to common sense. His intuition tells him that a philosophical analysis arriving at a radically skeptical answer is not a source of truth but evidence that something has gone wrong. I believe Wittgenstein would hold the same position as Moore when he says, “I certainly did at the moment know that which I expressed by the combination of certain gestures with saying the words ‘There is one hand and here is another’. I knew that there was one hand in the place indicated by combining a certain gesture with my first utterance of ‘here’ and that there was another in the different place indicated by combining a certain gesture with my second utterance of ‘here’. How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only believed it, and that perhaps it was not the case!” However, Wittgenstein seems to think Moore is in error here in a different way. I believe Norman Malcolm summaries this position nicely when he says:

"But, this insight led Moore into an error. (This is the second layer of meaning.). His perception of the absurdity of saying , in that situation, "I don't know if I have clothes on (or have hands)" drew him into the assumption that it would be correct to say "I know I have clothes on." Yet what Moore had actually perceived was that nothing in that situation made a doubt as to whether he had cloths on intelligible. He should have concluded that both "I don't know" and "I know" were out of place in that context. "I know" is often used to express the absence of doubt. But the absence of doubt and the unintelligibility of doubt are very different things. Wittgenstein says in the Investigations, "I know...may mean "I do not doubt...but does not mean that the words "I doubt...are senseless, that doubt is logically excluded." Wittgenstein is referring here to the way that "I know..." is used in ordinary language. He is saying, correctly, that this expression is not used in ordinary language to make a conceptual, philosophical point. But this is kind of point that Moore needed to make, namely, the point that the statement "It is uncertain that I have clothes on" would be a conceptual absurdity in that situation. I suspect that Moore was misled here by the assumption of Excluded Middle: "Either I know it or I don't know it." He perceived that "I don't know it" couldn't be said, and wrongly concluded that "I know it" must therefore by right and true." (Moore and Wittgenstein on the Sense of "I know")

Some remarks on this summary

I find it strange to not say "I know here is one hand" in the particular context. Would it also be absurd for Moore to say in front of such an audience of skeptical philosophers that "I know it is raining outside" while looking outside the window while it is raining. Malcom says, "Being perfectly certain (i.e. objectively certain) of something in the sense of regarding it as unintelligible that one might be wrong-is an attitude, a stance, that we take towards various matters: but this attitude does not necessarily carry truth in its wake. (Nothing is Hidden)". But in these contexts, are they not carrying "truth in its wake." How is what Moore is doing, by holding up a hand and pointing to it and saying "Here is one hand" making a conceptual point only? Is this not a way of establishing the truth, or the correctness of what he is saying? Moore is not trying to describe the language game "I know", he trying to get the language game of "I know" right. He is responding to the skeptical philosopher that has taken the language game of "I know" and distorting it in such a way that knowledge becomes a logical impossibility. For Moore, in the example he provides, "knowing that" merges with "knowing how". Moore is aware of the truth, understands the fact that he has two hands by demonstrating that he can point to one hand and saying "Here is a hand." Why can't there be other ways of clearing up philosophical confusion other than describing how words are ordinarily use. For example, why not tidy up the concept itself, narrow its scope, broaden its scope, eliminate its absurdities, etc.

assume this is directed toward me, so I'll respond. We know that much of what Witt was saying was directed at Moore's propositions in his papers Proof of an External World and A Defense of Common Sense, so we're referring to specific propositions that Moore says he knows. Moore believes he has a justification for claiming to know "This is a hand (as he raises it to the audience)." Witt resists this notion, although he starts OC with, "If you do know [my emphasis] that here is one hand, we'll grant you all the rest (OC 1)." It seems clear to me that when Witt refers to hinge propositions or Moorean propositions he's saying that you don't know what you think you know, viz., Moore's use of the concept know doesn't apply because these statements don't fall within the domain of JTB. We don't normally justify these basic beliefs or Moorean statements. There are of course exceptions to this general rule (generally we don't justify them) and Witt points these out. — Sam26

I like to provide a brief defense of Moore's Proof of an External World. I don't claim Moore would agree of my defense, but let's just say I use Moore's position as a spring board to explore what I find as limitations to Wittgenstein approach to Ordinary Language. Let's begin where Moore ends his paper with the following:

“I can know things, which I cannot prove; and among things which I certainly did know, even if (as I think) I could not prove them, were the premisses of my two proofs. I should say, therefore, that those, if any, who are dissatisfied with these proofs merely on the ground that I did not know their premisses, have no good reason for their dissatisfaction."

Throughout the paper, Moore painstaking clarifies what it means by ideas such as "internal to our minds", “external to our minds’ and ‘to be met with in space”. After showing how all these ideas make coherent sense he goes on to provide the proof of "the existence of external things.” Moore thinks he has satisfied the conditions to be a rigorous proof. One of those condition being that a premiss which was something he knows to be the case and not something which only believe to be so. The premiss he cites is "I certainly did at the moment know that which I expressed by the combination of certain gestures with saying the words ‘There is one hand and here is another’. I knew that there was one hand in the place indicated by combining a certain gesture with my first utterance of ‘here’ and that there was another in the different place indicated by combining a certain gesture with my second utterance of ‘here’. How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only believed it, and that perhaps it was not the case!”

Moore provides an excellent example where he demonstrates how this is a reasonable example of a proof. He gives the example of someone who is tasked in finding three misprints in a particular book. This individual could be incline to doubt whether three misprints are in the book, but the one giving the task could prove that there is by simply pointing to each one, 'There's one misprint here, another here, and another here.' Interestedly, Moore concludes, "Of course, A would not have proved, by doing this, that there were at least three misprints on the page in question, unless it was certain that there was a misprint in each of the places to which he pointed. But to say that he might prove it in this way, is to say that it might be certain that there was. And if such a thing as that could ever be certain, then assuredly it was certain just now that there was one hand in one of the two places I indicated and another in the other.”

It seems Moore is suggesting that he is not absolutely certain, in some philosophical sense, that "this is one hand and here is another" but nonetheless he knows this to be the case. Does this example need to fall in the domain of "Justified True Belief" to count as knowledge? I believe Moore is showing that we ought to revise this notion of what knowledge should be, what should count as knowledge. Philosophy sometimes can play a normative role, as well as a descriptive role.

Sure, Wittgenstein can look to see how the word "knowledge" functions in our forms of life. But sometimes concepts "evolve". I am sure the notion of "knowledge" has change from the Greeks, to the Medieval period, and to our Modern period. I would think if he explored the use of "to know" during these periods that they may be somewhat different. And did he not say in "The Blue and Brown Books",

"Philosophers very often talk about investigating, analyzing, the meaning of words. But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it."

Well, maybe we can view Moore as trying to "evolve" the notion of knowledge. But like all things competing for our attention, may lose out to more appealing notions.

:lol:

Things capable of being seen as red are those with physical surfaces reflecting the appropriate wavelengths of the visible spectrum. A capable creature is one capable of detecting and/or distinguishing those wavelengths. — creativesoul

I would say something else as well. A human community who has a general consensus in color judgment. Without this general consensus, there is no language game of colors.

If Gellner's criticism is that Austin and Wittgenstein are using a term without antithesis, then he has simply failed to read and understand what is going on in each case.

Which is, indeed, the usual response to his work. — Banno

I find Gellner is more complaining than arguing in this book. Ordinary language philosophers are like the parent telling the child you can’t just do anything with language and make sense. Gellner, the child, throws a temper tantrum and thinks he should be able to do anything he wants.

There is no color in light. Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus. This distinction is critical for understanding neural representations, which must transition from a representation of a physical retinal image to a mental construct for what we see. Here, we dissociated the physical stimulus from the color seen by using an approach that causes changes in color without altering the light stimulus. We found a transition from a neural representation for retinal light stimulation, in early stages of the visual pathway (V1 and V2), to a representation corresponding to the color experienced at higher levels (V4 and VO1).

Yep, is “color in a perceiver”? Well, sure if you open the skull to see the brain, it may appear grayish. But I suspect they are saying something rather metaphysical here, unverifiable. And now we are in the “Private Theater” realm. Imagining all sort things we wish we can describe with a private language. But I will agree they are talking about physical stimulus, neurons, and reports of color, a scientific way to describe how a human experiences color.

I don't know what you're talking about. — Michael

Science studies stuff like brains, nerves, cells, molecules, etc… Not sensations and mental percepts. But scientists certainly are free to talk about sensations and mental percepts, anyone can be a philosopher.

With regards to “grammatical fiction”, this is one of Wittgenstein ideas he expressed in PI 307,

“Are you not really a behaviorist in disguise? Aren’t you at the bottom really saying that everything except human behavior is a fiction?” - If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.”

That's it. You are reading something into my words that just isn't there. — Michael

Feel free to keep your grammatical fiction, it may serve you well.

When Michael says that colors are percepts or that we only ever see percepts and never colors, he is in a very real sense committing himself to the position that we only ever see colors indirectly. — Leontiskos

I would say Michael, and others, are committed to a particular metaphysical worldview I like to call “The Private Theater.” In this worldview, they imagine they are in a theater where they alone are watching a series of images being projected onto a screen. Based on their memory, they have been in this theater all their lives. With time they have learned to use language and logic from rather useful pedagogical images. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this language and logic has revealed a rather uncertain existence. Ideas of cause and effect have made them realize that these projected images have some kind of cause of some unknown nature. What could be these images “really” be like they wonder. If only their scientific laws could remove this doubt, but unfortunately no matter how many times they predict future images, the next one could undermine everything. Doubt creeps in again. But if one thing they can gain comfort in is the certainly that what appears to them in the theater is always certain.

This is based on Searle's ontological distinction between modes of existence. Entities like mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates have an existence independent of any experience. They are ontologically objective. Entities like pains, tickles, and itches exist only insofar as they are experienced by a subject (for Searle this is either a human or an animal). They are ontologically subjective.

Yep, I often thought if Wittgenstein wanted to theorize instead of just describe he might have moved in the direction that Searle has.

I will have to take your word about Aquinas as I am only familiar with his arguments for the existence of God.

I will start off with a quote from W.V. Quine from his seminal work "Word and Object." He says, "There are however, philosophers who overdo this line of thought, treating ordinary language as sacrosanct. They exalt ordinary language to the exclusion of one of its own traits: its disposition to keep on evolving." Of all of the criticisms of ordinary language philiosophy I have read, I find this one to be the most compelling. Another criticism often brought up of ordinary language philosophy is that of defining philosophy's role as merely description. For some, this is too narrow of a definition and ignores the fact that philosophy can, should, and/or does have a normative function as well.

I believe these two ideas are essentially what Gellner is ultimately worried about in this book, however, he does not do a great job in expressing it in a succinct manner. For example, pg 78 (section 6 The Contrast Theory of Meaning) he says "In fact, contrast often overlay presuppositions which are worth bringing out, and sometimes worth denying: the contrast between good and bad witches is worth ignoring for the sake of denying that either kind exists. Far from thought generally moving within a tacitly determinate system of contrasts, it often happens that by refining a concept which at the time is contrast-less, a new contrast, a new concept is brought into being." And, pg 78 "The error springs in each case from the failure to realise that thought is not bound and enslaved by any of the language games it employs, but on the contrary that a most important kind of thinking consists of reassessing out terms, reassessing the norms built into them and reassessing the contrast associated with them." Here I believe are a good examples of language evolving, new ideas being created. Additionally, pg 267 (section 4 Failue of Normativeness) he say, "What is conspicuous about Linguistic Philosophy is its abdication of any kind of normative role, both in its practice and in its programmatic announcements." Or pg 72, "Yet this is precisely what philosophy is and should be: The asking, not of specific questions within a category, but of questions about categories as whole, about the viability, possibility, desirability, of whole species of thinking." Here Gellner is speaking of the normative role pf philosophy.

I don't have a copy of Searle, but according to this:

Searle presents the example of the color red: for an object to be red, it must be capable of causing subjective experiences of red. At the same time, a person with spectrum inversion might see this object as green, and so unless there is one objectively correct way of seeing (which is largely in doubt), then the object is also green in the sense that it is capable, in certain cases, of causing a perceiver to experience a green object.

This seems to be arguing that colours are mental phenomena and that the predicate "is red" is used to describe objects which cause red mental phenomena. — Michael

I little more exposition on Searle's view of colors:

From Seeing Things as They Are:

"Color is a bit tricky because of such phenomena as spectrum inversion and color constancy, and we will get into those issues in the next chapter. Let us now examine our visual experience of the red ball. Is the visual experience itself red? Emphatically, visual experiences are not colored. Why not? Colors are observable to all, and visual experiences are not. The color red emits photons of about 6500 angstrom units and the visual experience emits nothing. So it is wrong to think of the visual experience as itself colored. Also, to think that visual experiences are colored is almost inevitably to commit the Bad Argument because one has to ask who is seeing the color."

(The Bad Argument Searle refers to is any argument that attempts to treat the perceptual experience as an actual or possible object of experience.)

He continues, "First, for something to be red in the ontologically objective world is for it to be capable of causing ontologically subjective visual experiences like this. The fact of its redness consists at least in part in this causal capacity (with the usual qualifications about normal conditions and normal observers) to cause this sort of ontologically subjective visual experience. There is an internal relation between the fact of being red, and the fact of causing this sort of experience. What does it mean to say that the relation is "internal"? It means it could not be that color if it were not systemically related in that way to experiences like this. Second, for something to be the object of perceptual experience is for it to be experienced as the cause of the experience. If you put these two points together, you get the result that the perceptual experience necessarily carries the existence of a red as its condition of satisfaction."

Newton: "For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour." — Michael

Alternatively, Newton, From Opticks, said,

“From what has been said it is also evident, that the Whiteness of the Sun's Light is compounded all the Colours where with the several sorts of Rays whereof that Light consists, when by their several Refrangibilities they are separated from one another, do tinge Paper or any other white Body whereon they fall. For those Colours ... are unchangeable, and whenever all those Rays with those their Colours are mix'd again, they reproduce the same white Light as before.”

The topic is about perception, not grammar. — Michael

Again from Russell’s Analysis of the Mind Lecture VII The Definition of Perception

“The notion of perception is therefore not a precise one: we perceive things more or less, but always with a very considerable amount of vagueness and confusion.”

Russell’s analysis is a conceptual one, not experimental.

“When a mental occurrence can be regarded as an appearance of an object external to the brain, however irregular, or even as a confused appearance of several such objects, then we may regard it as having for its stimulus the object or objects in question, or their appearances at the sense-organ concerned. When, on the other hand, a mental occurrence has not sufficient connection with objects external to the brain to be regarded as an appearance of such objects, then its physical causation (if any) will have to be sought in the brain. In the former case it can “be called a perception; in the latter it cannot be so called. But the distinction is one of degree, not of kind. Until this is realized, no satisfactory theory of perception, sensation, or imagination is possible.”

From what I gather, Russell is reluctant in calling “mental percepts” perception at all. And seems to want to move in the direction of Quine and just be concerned with brain activity. Again Russell is not performing science here, but has a lot to say what perception is all about in a general sort of way.

On colour, Quine has said this:

But color is cosmically secondary. Even slight differences in sensory mechanisms from species to species, Smart remarks, can make overwhelming differences in the grouping of things by color. Color is king in our innate quality space, but undistinguished in cosmic circles. Cosmically, colors would not qualify as kinds.

Your quote of him is him arguing for eliminative materialism, which I have previously accepted is a possibly correct account of so-called mental phenomena (e.g. pain just is a type of brain activity, and so colours just are a type of brain activity.

Indeed, Quine goes even further say that colours are “neither natural kinds nor any significance to theoretical science.” But if this is the case, why not eliminate this talk of mental percepts of colour, this is not what science is investigating.
— Michael

Russell is not saying what (I think) you think he's saying. When he says "the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour" he is saying that colour just is that sensation. — Michael

The point of this example is to show that Russell is concerned about the grammar of colour, so we can get it right about what science is actually investigating.

I don't care about how Wittgenstein viewed perception and colours. He was not a physicist or a neuroscientist and so he didn't have the appropriate expertise. To think that somehow an examination of language can address such issues is laughable. Do you want to do away with the Large Hadron Collider and simply talk our way into determining how the world works? — Michael

Since this is a philosophy forum, I will provide some interesting nuance views of color and mental percepts from for philosophers who were admirers of the achievement of science.

From the Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell:

“If there is a subject, it can have a relation to the patch of colour, namely, the sort of relation which we might call awareness. In that case the sensation, as a mental event, will consist of awareness of the colour, while the colour itself will remain wholly physical, and may be called the sense-datum, to distinguish it from the sensation. The subject, however, appears to be a logical fiction, like mathematical points and instants. It is introduced, not because observation reveals it, but because it is linguistically convenient and apparently demanded by grammar. Nominal entities of this sort may or may not exist, but there is no good ground for assuming that they do. The functions that they appear to perform can always be performed by classes or series or other logical constructions, consisting of less dubious entities. If we are to avoid a perfectly gratuitous assumption, we must dispense with the subject as one of the actual ingredients of the world. But when we do this, the possibility of distinguishing the sensation from the sense-datum vanishes; at least I see no way of preserving the distinction. Accordingly the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour, an actual constituent of the physical world, and part of what physics is concerned with. ”

From Word and Object by W. V. Quine:

"If there is a case for mental events and mental states, it must be just that the positing of them, like the positing of molecules, has some indirect system efficacy in the development of theory. But if a certain organization of theory is achieved by thus positing distinctive mental states and events behind physical behavior, surely as much organization could be achieved by positing merely certain correlative physiological states and events instead. Nor need we spot special centers in the body for these seizures; physical states of the undivided organism will serve, whatever their finer physiology. Lack of detailed physiological explanation of the states is scarcely an objection to acknowledging them as states of human bodies, when we reflect that those who posit the mental states and events have no details of appropriate mechanisms to offer nor, what with mind-body problem, prospects of any. The bodily states exist anyway; why add the others?"

From Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer:

"To determine, for instance, whether two people have the same color sense we observe whether they classify all the colour expanses with which they are confronted in the same way; and, when we say that a man is colour-blind, what we are asserting is that he classifies certain color expanses in a different way from that in which they would be classified by the majority of people. It may be objected that the fact that two people classify color expanses in the same way proves only that their colour worlds have the same structure, and not that they have the same content; that it is possible for another man to assent to every proposition which I make about colours on the basis of entirely different colour sensations, although, since the difference is systematic, neither of us is ever in the position to detect it. But the answer to this is that each of us has to define the content of another man's sense-experiences in terms of what he can himself observe."

And Lastly, from Seeing Things as They Are by John Searle:

"Question 2 How does the account deal with color constancy and size constancy? I will consider these in order. Imagine that a shadow falls over a portion of the red ball so that part of it is in shadow and part not. Did the part in shadow change its color? Well, obviously not, and it is obviously not seen as having changed its color. All the same, there is a difference in the subjective visual field. The subjective basic perceptual properties have changed. The proof is that if I were drawing a picture of what I now see, I would have to include a darker portion of the part in shadow, even though I know that there has been no change in its actual color. It is extremely misleading to describe this phenomenon as "color constancy", because of course the experienced color is precisely not constant. It is because of my high-level Background capacities that I am able to see it as having the same color even though at the lower level I see it as having in part changed its color. I want to emphasize this point. At the basic level, the color is precisely not constant, neither subjectively nor objectively. It changes. It is just at the higher level that I know, because of my Background abilities, that it still keeps the same color."

Notice no mental percepts needed
— Richard B

Of course they are, else you wouldn't be seeing anything; you'd just have light reaching your eyes and then nothing happening, e.g. blindness or blindsight. — Michael

I think the following two passages provides some insight on how Wittgenstein viewed perception and colors:

From Wittgenstein's "Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology The Inner and the Outer Volume 2",

"Psychology describes the phenomena of color-blindness as well as those of normal sight. What are the phenomena of color blindness'? Certainty the reactions of the color-blind person which differentiate him from the normal person. But certainly not all of the color-blind person's reactions, for example not those that distinguish him from a blind person. - Can I teach the blind what seeing is, or can I teach this to the sighted? That doesn't mean anything. Then what does it mean: to describe seeing? But I can teach human beings the meaning of the words "blind" and "sighted", and indeed the sighted learn them, just as the blind do. Then do the blind know what it is like to see? But do the sighted know? Do they also know what it's like to have consciousness?"

"Indeed he might be astonished when he sees the object, but in order to 'be astonished about the colour', in order for the colour to be the reason of his astonishment and not just the cause of his experience, he needs not just sight, but to have the concept of colour."

We don't learn concepts of "color" and "seeing" by only experiencing colors and seeing. We don't teach children what colors are by sharing are experiences of mental percepts of color, but by using the words under particular circumstance and seeing if the child can do the same. We don't teach what "seeing" means by describing what seeing is, but by using the word in the form of life humans typically engage in. By using these learned words and acting in the appropriate ways, we demonstrate to our fellow humans we do experience such things as colors and seeing.