Just fucking Google it.

The question is interesting, but is it that sort of question that we (humans) cannot answer, — Pattern-chaser

Except by talking to the deaf-blind...

Ableism at work.

@Banno
Thanks for video. Very informative.

@Banno; @Pattern-chaser

I meant, more specifically, a person born completely blind and completely deaf. Anyway, the point I wanted to make was that the mind processes images. It conveys all information into its particular brand of imaging. The images may be forms, configurations, structures, descriptions, etc. Words also fall in that category. People who've learnt words in school (they have seen those words in written form) hold different images from those who've learnt the same words only from spoken language.
I think, also, it's why sight is the most depended-on mode of sensation - because it captures images.

The question is interesting, but is it that sort of question that we (humans) cannot answer, — Pattern-chaser


Except by talking to the deaf-blind...
Ableism at work. — Banno

Not quite. I don't know the 'medium of thought' that *I* employ, although I can speculate. Trying to analyse some object, using that object as the tool with which the analysis is carried out, seems fraught with problems to me. Deaf-blind or not.

If all of this is true, then it follows that Wittgenstein's beetle example demonstrates that if we talk about something that is totally private, i.e., it not only has no referent, but there is no way for us to establish a rule of use that can be publicly said to be correct or incorrect. — Sam26

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/6

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/26

That's funny. :grin:

That was funny!

An obvious rejoinder to the beetle-in-the-box is that we talk about our dreams, whose content is inherently private, since nobody else can experience what we're dreaming. The content of our dreams is epistemically closed off from others unless we talk about them.

If that doesn't count as private, then I don't know what does.

Consider this dream anecdote from Oliver Sacks regarding one patient:

Patient is a user of cocaine, and PCP to get high. Vivid dream one night, dreamt he was a dog, in a world unimaginably rich and significant in smell. Waking, he found himself in just such a world. "As if I had been totally colour-blind before, and suddenly found myself in a world full of colour." He did, in fact, have an enhancement of colour vision (" I could distinguish dozens of brown where I'd just seen brown before. my leatherbound books, which looked similar before, now all had quite distinct and distinguishable hues") and a dramatic enhancement of eidetic visual perception and memory (" I could never draw before, I couldn't "see" things in my mind, but now it was like having a camera lucida in my mind - I "saw" everything as if projected on paper, and just drew the uotlines I "saw". Suddenly I could do the most accurate anatomical drawings.") But it was the exaltation of smell which really transformed his world: "I had dreamt I was a dog - it was an olfactory dream - and now I awoke to an infinitely redolent world - aworld in which all other sensations, enhanced as they were, paled before smell." And with all this there went a sort of trembling, eager emotion, and a strange nostalgia, as of a lost world, half-forgotten, half recalled.
"I went into a scent shop", he continued "I had never had much of a nose for smells before, but now I distinguished each one instantly - and I found each one unique, evocative, a whole world." He found he could distinguish all his friends - and patients - by smell: "I went into the clinic, I sniffed like a dog, and in that sniff recognised, before seeing them, the twenty patients who were there. Each had his own olfactory physiognomy, a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, of any sight face". He could smell their emotions - fear, contentment, sexuality - like a dog. He could recognise every street, every shop, by smell - he could find his way around New York, infallibly, by smell. — Oliver Sacks from The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Now I don't know what it's like to experience the world in such a sensory state, but I can understand the story. So again, there's something wrong with saying that we can't talk about the beetle in our own box.