Does it matter? The important distinction is between appearance and reality. Whether "red" means the same thing in each instance, or whether in one instance it means something different but related to the other, my point stands: the two phrases are not equivalent in meaning. You can replace "red" with X in both instances, or with an X1 in one instance and an X2 in the other, and my point still stands. The key words are those I pointed out: "appears" and "is". — Sapientia
Of course it matters. — Michael
If they mean/refer to the same thing and the "red" in "X appears red" refers to a type of appearance then either "X is red" and "X appears red" mean the same thing or "X is red" claims that having an appearance is a perception-independent thing such that something can have an appearance even when it isn't being seen or that something can have one type of appearance but appear a different way, neither of which make sense and so make for "X is red" to be a category error. — Michael
And the statement in question is: "X appears red, but X is not red". That only commits one to what X is not, and leaves open the question of what X is. I'm saying that it isn't necessarily how it appears. If you deny that, you run into problems. Do you really want to defend full blown idealism, where there's no distinction between appearance and reality? — Sapientia
The point is that if the "red" in "X appears red" doesn't mean/refer to the same thing as the "red" in "X is not red" then there's no necessary conflict here. You might being saying something like "X appears red but X isn't a chicken".
So if there's to actually be a conflict – if it appearing red is an error, given that it isn't red – then it must be that the "X" in "X appears red" means/refers to the same thing as the "red" in "X is not red". And that's where I believe your distinction between appearing red and being red falls apart, given that the thing referred to by "red" in "X appears red" just is a type of appearance, and not some mind-independent property of external stimulation. — Michael
Okay, let's say that it's the same meaning. It still makes sense to say that X appears red, but X isn't red. It's just saying that X isn't how it appears. If your philosophy can't handle that, then there's a problem with your philosophy. — Sapientia
Saying that it isn't how it appears with respect to its colour is like saying that it isn't how it appears with respect to its taste. — Michael
If it tastes sweet to you then it really is sweet, and if it looks red to you then it really is red. — Michael
The how it appears is a feature of the appearance itself and not a property that external stimuli have on their own. — Michael
Your philosophy sounds like naive realism, where things are said to look like what they look like to us even when they're not being looked at, which is nonsensical. — Michael
It may appear red, but that doesn't mean that it is red. That it appears red means nothing other than that it appears red. — Sapientia
No, I'm allowing for that possibility, but my position here is closer to indirect realism. Your philosophy sounds like naive idealism, which faces the same problem as naive realism.
Again, unless all instances of "red" here mean/refer to the same thing, this is no different in kind to saying "it may appear red, but that doesn't mean that it is a chicken".
And if they do mean/refer to the same thing, then to say that it isn't red even though it appears red is nonsensical, given that the "red" in "X appears red" refers to a property that only appearances have, and not perception-independent stimuli. — Michael
You're blaming me for a problem with your philosophy, which stems from artificially creating a logical connection between appearance and reality. That's not my problem, it's yours. — Sapientia
There's no problem with my philosophy. There's a problem with your claim that "X appears red but X isn't red" is sensible, where both instances of "red" mean/refer to the same thing. And that is your problem. — Michael
I'm accepting the existence of perception-independent stimuli that are causally covariant with our perception, so I'm not arguing for idealism. What I'm rejecting is the claim that the word "red" in "X appears red" refers to some perception-independent property that perception-independent stimuli have. — Michael
Saying that it isn't how it appears with respect to its colour is like saying that it isn't how it appears with respect to its taste. If it tastes sweet to you then it really is sweet, and if it looks red to you then it really is red. The how it appears is a feature of the appearance itself and not a property that external stimuli have on their own. Your philosophy sounds like naive realism, where things are said to look like what they look like to us even when they're not being looked at, or taste like what they taste like to us even when they're not being tasted, which is nonsensical (even if a fiction that we ordinarily engage in).
So given that the thing referred to by "red" in "X appears red" is an appearance-property (e.g. qualia), and given that we're assuming that the "red" in "X appears red" means/refers to the same thing as the "red" in "X is not red", it must be either that "X is not red" is a category error or that "X appears red but X is not red" is a contradiction. — Michael
The problem, as I said earlier, is when you conflate "appears" and "is". I'm not sure where you currently stand on that. You seem to have accepted it, then denied it, then accepted it again. I stand by my criticism. — Sapientia
If the "red" in "X is red" means/refers to the same thing as the "red" in "X appears red" then either "X is red" and "X appears red" mean the same thing or "X is red" (where this is understood as saying that being red is a perception-independent property of X) is a category error. — Michael
So as I've said before, it really depends on what you mean by "red". — Michael
The problem is that your account seems to conflate two different meanings, as you want for "X appears red" and "X is not red" to be consistent, and yet for the there to be a genuine conflict – for the appearance to be an error. — Michael
I am not saying here what the Gestalt psychologists say: that the impression of white comes about in such and such a way. Rather the question is precisely: what is the impression of white, what is the meaning of this expression, what is the logic of this concept 'white'? — L. Wittgenstein, in Remarks on Colour, p 46e.
The object of perception is blue pixels arranged in strawberry shapes. You see red strawberries rather than blue ones because the act of seeing inheres that transformational aspect in this case. — Baden
EDIT: the strawberries only appear red but in reality the colour red isn't present in the picture. — Benkei
As I pointed out earlier, to define "red" as a particular range of wavelength is unacceptable, because the vast majority of instances of seeing a particular colour, are instances of a combination of different wavelengths. So the fact that a particular wavelength of light is not present, does not mean that the strawberries are not red. — Metaphysician Undercover
Human eyes can see millions of different shades of colour. This is not because there are millions of different wavelengths between 400 and 740. — Metaphysician Undercover
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