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> In that regard, blue—one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white—historically encompass
by gjm11 9y ago
> In that regard, blue—one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white—historically encompassed items that other cultures would describe as green—creating the concept of “grue,” the portmanteau of blue and green first coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman in 1955.
Maybe this is mere pedantry, but Goodman's "grue" and "bleen" did not mean anything like "bluish-green" or "colour ambiguous between blue and green".
His definition was something like this: an object is grue if it is green and it's not yet 2000-01-01, or if it's blue and it's 2000-01-01 or later; "bleen" is the other way around. What's the point of these silly-sounding definitions? Goodman was thinking about empirical induction, the process where you see lots of ravens, observe that they're all black, and decide "hmm, looks like ravens are generally black". So, suppose it's the year 1990, and you've seen lots of grass in the springtime and it's always been green. It's equally true that it's always been grue. So why is it that we're so confident in concluding "grass is generally green" rather than "grass is generall grue"?
If this strikes you as interesting rather than stupid (reasonable people could jump either way), see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#GruParNewRidInd https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#GruPar... for more.
... Hence an email-signature joke I've seen from time to time. "It is dark and after the year 2000. If you proceed, you are likely to be eaten by a bleen."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lisper 9y agoJust for the record, Goodman's problem was solved by David Deutsch who profoundly observed that languages are theories. The grue/bleen theory has embedded within it the unmotivated (and false, though that's a detail) hypothesis that there is something special about some particular date which has been picked out of a hat and embedded into the theory in order to make Goodman's pedantic point. It is this arbitrariness and lack of motivation that invalidates the grue/bleen theory (which is actually a whole family of theories parameterized by the magic date) from a scientific point of view. There are examples of words that have times embedded in them that are actually reflective of natural phenomena and hence constitute valid theories, like "main-sequence" (with regard to stars).
- wickawic 9y agoI like that response, but to me it raises the question as to what incorrect theories might be embedded into our daily (or even scientific) language.
- JadeNB 9y ago> There are examples of words that have times embedded in them that are actually reflective of natural phenomena and hence constitute valid theories, like "main-sequence" (with regard to stars). Of course one shouldn't expect the philosophy of science to hold to the same rigour as science itself, but this seems just to be shifting the goalposts. Of course, you and I know that the definition of 'grue' is arbitrary and unmotivated, because it is made to be so; but how can one define when a hypothesis in a seriously propounded scientific hypothesis is arbitrary and unmotivated? If the test for whether a theory is a good description of natural phenomena is whether it is a good description of natural phenomena (to take your exact words, whether it is "actually reflective of natural phenomena"), then it seems that we have substituted a tautology for a paradox to no particular gain in understanding.
- lisper 9y agoNo, because language itself can be empirically and even mathematically grounded. The fact that I can say to a shop-keeper, "Please give me an apple" and with odds much greater than chance end up in a particular state that I call "having an apple" is evidence that the word "apple" really does correspond to something meaningful in the physical world. Here's a more detailed explanation: http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/03/why-some-assumptions-are-better-than.html http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/03/why-some-assumptions-are-...