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> If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you

> If you had no idea what animals look like and you saw a sculpture of a dog and a dead pigeon, would you be able to tell which one used to be alive? Or if you saw a living cockroach and a robot vacuum, would you be able to tell which one is alive? Well, yes, and if you took away everything we know about the things in the world, we would not know anything about those things!

fluoridation 3y ago
The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.
- mannykannot 3y ago
  What we have here are competing over-generalizations. There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn. The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    But, again, you are determining whether something is a sculpture or not based on your knowledge of what sculptures look like and/or where the object in question is when you find it. Without that knowledge you are not able to make that determination. Without that knowledge you can only make much more basic statements, such as tell which one is heavier or larger, or what they're each made of. That's because those properties are intrinsic to the objects, unlike whether they're sculptures. You can't change those properties without changing something fundamental about the object.
    - mannykannot 3y ago
      We are not talking about a situation where we don't have any knowledge, which brings us right back to my original reply to you.

fluoridation 3y ago

The GP used the fact that we tell apart sculptures from rocks as a key point in their argument. The fact that removing knowledge eliminates the ability to tell them apart means that there's nothing intrinsic that we're observing when we say that something is a sculpture. There's nothing about the object itself that makes it a sculpture; it's a sculpture to the observer because it looks like what they understand sculptures look like. If the observer thought sculptures look like something different they would say the object is not a sculpture, even when nothing about the object changed.

mannykannot 3y ago
What we have here are competing over-generalizations. There are many sculpture-like artifacts from prehistoric sites. In most cases, we have no proof that they are sculptures, just strong evidence, and there's a long tail of increasingly vaguely sculpture-like forms where no strong conclusions should be drawn. The existence of this tail does not invalidate the strong conclusions about the clearly artificial sculptures, and the analogous conclusion follows for RagnarD's main point about the fossil record.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  But, again, you are determining whether something is a sculpture or not based on your knowledge of what sculptures look like and/or where the object in question is when you find it. Without that knowledge you are not able to make that determination. Without that knowledge you can only make much more basic statements, such as tell which one is heavier or larger, or what they're each made of. That's because those properties are intrinsic to the objects, unlike whether they're sculptures. You can't change those properties without changing something fundamental about the object.
  - mannykannot 3y ago
    We are not talking about a situation where we don't have any knowledge, which brings us right back to my original reply to you.