4 ms·

What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’

What Chomsky is arguing is that, yes, in an important objective sense there is such a thing as “faciness” that our brains recognize. In the same way, I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red—even accepting that it’s the structure of our optical and neural systems that are the basis for this fact.

dsego 3y ago
Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?
- botanical57 3y ago
  To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to be discovered, it must have already existed - in the abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an involved epistemological argument for why the human process of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but I would fail to do it justice. Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly, as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological reasoning.
ajuc 3y ago
The only definition is "most people recognize it" and there are people who disagree about it or don't recognize it at all. How does it differ from something that exists subjectively then? I'd say arguing that colors are like morality is pro-relativism stance.
roenxi 3y ago
> I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red. Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.
- twoodfin 3y ago
  This is exactly Chomsky’s point. Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic condition might produce a human who experiences escalating hunger as an escalating degree of pleasure. But as humans making our way through the real world, we are forced by physical and anatomical reality to see the causes and consequences of human hunger as objective truths.
  - roenxi 3y ago
    > ... Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. ... You didn't consider what I wrote - colourblind people get through life without considering the colour of traffic lights at all. They have to. They are colour blind. The colour of a traffic light as a practical matter is a subjective fact. In fact, the practical colour of a traffic light is more subjective than the philosophical take because at least philosophers can be convinced with a wavelength argument.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    Hunger is subjective. Starvation isn't.
    - chromoblob 3y ago
      Hunger is pretty objective if your body isn't malfunctioning (and it never is logically, "malfunctioning" body isn't yours). If your body works correctly, you are not free to choose whether to consider yourself hungry, and this is what I understand as objectivity.
      - ajuc 3y ago
        What I consider hunger someone else can consider the norm or vice versa. If you define something that depends on the person as objective - then subjective loses meaning.
ducharmdev 3y ago
It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of something objective, since so much about perception is subjective. Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with red being defined as having a dominant wavelength approximately 625–740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624, objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still observe it as red considering how close it is to red. Or someone with protanopia won't see anything in those bounds as red either.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something and then using the concept and rules of color in our language. We might see something as a particular color through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for instance. You could ask me which one is red and I could simply point). We, of course, might disagree, but color-blind people learn which traffic lights are red, green, or yellow, regardless of their perceptual faculties. Because the color is not just what you see, but what you say.
  - ajuc 3y ago
    I use f.lux - it changes the screen color temperature through the day to make it easier to sleep. If I sit late at night my desktop walpaper (which is a regular photo with a lot of blue sky) becomes basically all red if you look at rgb values. But I still perceive the sky in it as blue because other things are "more red" so it looks blue, and because I know sky is blue, and because I remember how it looked before and the change happened slowly. All of these scream "relativism" to me, in fact the mapping to common moral fallacies is surprisingly direct :) When law changes around you you might not recognize when it got evil. Obeying the law is good because it's the law. When everything around is evil - small evil seems good. As for language and law - these are arbitrary. "Yellow pages" can be any color, so can "blue screen of death". Green traffic lights are actually blue in some countries.

dsego 3y ago

Does that relate to Plato's world of ideas?

botanical57 3y ago
To his doctrine of the Forms, yes I think it does. He seemed to think that when humans gain knowledge, they do not generate it, but rather discover it. For knowledge to be discovered, it must have already existed - in the abstract, non-material world of the Forms. Plato had an involved epistemological argument for why the human process of gaining incrementally less partial knowledge of a subject fundamentally must be a process of discovery - but I would fail to do it justice. Chomsky seems to imply that in a moral context, similarly, as humans learn abstract concepts and boundaries from sparse data, we are also carrying out a process of discovery. He seems to skip over the epistemological reasoning.

ajuc 3y ago

The only definition is "most people recognize it" and there are people who disagree about it or don't recognize it at all. How does it differ from something that exists subjectively then? I'd say arguing that colors are like morality is pro-relativism stance.

roenxi 3y ago

> I hope we’d all agree there’s objectively a color red We don't. For starters there are colourblind people, for seconds there is no specific colour that can be called "red". There is a large and fuzzy category of red-ish colours like blood-red or rose-red. Even if there is some academic "these light wavelengths are the ones" definition of red that is arbitrary. Aliens might have drawn the lines elsewhere.

twoodfin 3y ago
This is exactly Chomsky’s point. Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. To pick an example closer to the morality case: Hunger could equally be called a subjective phenomenon. Aliens may not experience anything like hunger. A rare genetic condition might produce a human who experiences escalating hunger as an escalating degree of pleasure. But as humans making our way through the real world, we are forced by physical and anatomical reality to see the causes and consequences of human hunger as objective truths.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > ... Try to get through life considering the color of the traffic light you’re approaching as a subjective rather than objective fact. ... You didn't consider what I wrote - colourblind people get through life without considering the colour of traffic lights at all. They have to. They are colour blind. The colour of a traffic light as a practical matter is a subjective fact. In fact, the practical colour of a traffic light is more subjective than the philosophical take because at least philosophers can be convinced with a wavelength argument.
- ajuc 3y ago
  Hunger is subjective. Starvation isn't.
  - chromoblob 3y ago
    Hunger is pretty objective if your body isn't malfunctioning (and it never is logically, "malfunctioning" body isn't yours). If your body works correctly, you are not free to choose whether to consider yourself hungry, and this is what I understand as objectivity.
    - ajuc 3y ago
      What I consider hunger someone else can consider the norm or vice versa. If you define something that depends on the person as objective - then subjective loses meaning.

ducharmdev 3y ago

It's odd to me that you chose color as an example of something objective, since so much about perception is subjective. Even if we think about it in more quantitative terms, with red being defined as having a dominant wavelength approximately 625–740 nanometres, it's a bit of an arbitrary definition isn't it? If we observe a wavelength of 624, objectively we might say it's not red, but someone may still observe it as red considering how close it is to red. Or someone with protanopia won't see anything in those bounds as red either.

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
Color relies on ostensive definition. It's a public part of language whether someone is color-blind or not. When we say "that car is red" we are, in a sense, pointing to something and then using the concept and rules of color in our language. We might see something as a particular color through perception, but when we see "that --->" we are, in a sense, "seeing" in language (including body language, for instance. You could ask me which one is red and I could simply point). We, of course, might disagree, but color-blind people learn which traffic lights are red, green, or yellow, regardless of their perceptual faculties. Because the color is not just what you see, but what you say.
- ajuc 3y ago
  I use f.lux - it changes the screen color temperature through the day to make it easier to sleep. If I sit late at night my desktop walpaper (which is a regular photo with a lot of blue sky) becomes basically all red if you look at rgb values. But I still perceive the sky in it as blue because other things are "more red" so it looks blue, and because I know sky is blue, and because I remember how it looked before and the change happened slowly. All of these scream "relativism" to me, in fact the mapping to common moral fallacies is surprisingly direct :) When law changes around you you might not recognize when it got evil. Obeying the law is good because it's the law. When everything around is evil - small evil seems good. As for language and law - these are arbitrary. "Yellow pages" can be any color, so can "blue screen of death". Green traffic lights are actually blue in some countries.