He can't know my beetle — Hanover

The point is, colour is not a beetle. @Lionino cannot see your beetle, by definition, but you both see the red pen. You both see red.

so long as we use the words in a consistent way — Hanover

Indeed. And if colour is only in your head, then how is it that Lionino is able to use the word in a way that is consistent with what is in your head? Could it be because there is a shared pen that is red?

This is about words. — Hanover

Well there's progress. Small steps.

...dualistic theism... — Hanover

There's your problem right there then. That and that all variations of idealism have trouble avoiding solipsism.

It’s still writ large in current philosophy of mind. Search for ‘eliminativism’ in this thread and there are half a dozen returns, most of them advocating it. — Wayfarer

Here's that search.

I'm not seeing it. Distinguishing primary and secondary qualities is mostly of historical interest - perhaps except for you and maybe @Michael.

We measure them! — Wayfarer

So the list of primary qualities includes electric current, speed, pressure, torque, potential energy, luminosity...

Ok.

And oddly, roughness moved from being a secondary to a primary quality when the invention of X-ray diffraction permitted it to be measured.

But is seems it needs to be pointed out that when a notion such as primary and secondary qualities is superseded, it does not thereby disappear.

...Kant showed that knowledge of the categories of primary qualities is apriori. — frank

And that was uncontroversial? I think it stoped being useful when folk found themselves doing more work on what the difference was than on how it explained anything.

Cutting to the chase, I don't see that it helps here.

We do not simply leave it at “we agree that tomatoes are red.” — Michael

It doesn't have to be left there, if you like. So long as it is noted that we do agree that tomatoes are (sometimes) red, and that a theory which cannot account for this is thereby inadequate.

So any theory that claims colour to be a something in an individual's head, and no more, is inadequate.

John Locke did a pretty good job. Kant showed how he was wrong, but Kant isn't exactly our worldview, is he? — frank

There's an entry in SEP on "Primary and Secondary Qualities in Early Modern Philosophy", but no follow up with more recent comment. The interest is mostly historical. There are however entries on colour, touch and olfactory and auditory perception, addressing more specific issues.

So the notion of primary and secondary qualities has faded somewhat, and we can ask if this is because it has become so ubiquitous as to be taken as granted, or if it has been shown to be too wanting to be of much use. I think it's the latter.

There are a few problems with the distinction. I commented earlier how "quality" dithers somewhat between "property" and "predicate" Perhaps this dithering gives it some faux respectability. Is the quality of brownness a property had by the table or merely a predicate in a description of the table?

There are issues in sorting things into either the primary or the secondary box.Take heat for example, which might appear to be a secondary quality, only felt, and unlike temperature. The illusion that a piece of metal feels colder than a book at the same temperature lends credence to this. But then heat will melt steal. Which box, then? Is heat only something we project onto the world, or is it something out there in the things around us?

And if primary qualities are understood as those that we can measure, is air pressure a primary quality? Electric current?

And if the idea is that secondary qualities are only perceived, while primary qualities somehow inhere in the object, why and how is it that we only know about primary qualities through our perception? Is there a vicious circularity in the definition of primary and secondary qualities?

It's not that these criticisms are definitive, since each might be answerable, but that such considerations have led to more recent work bypassing the primary/secondary distinction, and the troubles they cause, in favour of more detailed analysis.

All this by way of showing that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities might not be as foundational as suggests.

If...

Not following you here. Bringing together primary and secondary qualities, eliminativism, subjectivism, or subjective qualities, needs more than hand waving.

And if you were arguing for one of them then we could have a meaningful discussion. — Michael

Well, if you see no meaning in this discussion, you are welcome not to participate.

"do objects like tomatoes, strawberries and radishes really have the distinctive property that they do appear to have?" — Michael

Well, there are red tomatoes, and one way of saying that is that some tomatoes have the property of being red. Not sure what what it means to further ask if they really have the property of being red...

But that's kinda my point.

Unconsciously... — Wayfarer

Oooh goodness.

...but you never say why... — Wayfarer

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11175/philosophical-plumbing-mary-midgley/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9453/midgley-vs-dawkins-nietzsche-hobbes-mackie-rand-singer/p1

Hmmm.

Sure, all that. It's mostly an historical distinction, with little place in more recent discussions, for various reasons.

But the point is, that the division between primary and secondary qualities is basic to Galileo and to early modern science and philosophy generally. — Wayfarer

So you can explicate and maintain the distinction between primary and secondary qualities? I'm not so confident.

I spent time with Tibetan Buddhists and did a fair bit of introductory meditation, but was put off in the end by the stories and metaphysics. I'm not the person to talk to if you want a reinforcement of Buddhist ideas. Have a chat with @Wayfarer, maybe.

Yep. One might note three stages here. The first is unreflective belief that colour is a part of the thing; the second, the realisation that what we see is in some way an interpretation or projection, and the third, that despite this colour remains an aspect of our shared world.

Hypostatisation. Another case of folk mistaking a way of talking for a thing.

You changed what I said to salvage what you said. — Hanover

I changed it to show that language is more central to this issue than you seem to hold. To say that 'all we do with words is to say them' is to trivialise the way our world works.

It leads to silly, solipsistic statements such as

The definition of "red pen" is that thing that is out there that appears in my head as red. — Hanover

How does @Lionino know how the pen appears in your head? Your definition doesn't even get to stand up, let alone take a step forward.

If you like.

I'm not sure what your view is. Too many posts to keep track of.

This is one of those seemingly innocuous topics that finds itself to be a pivot between quite different philosophies, and indeed between quite different philosophical methods.

The thing that stands out to me is how few folk are addressing the actual argument I presented, in any more than a trivial fashion. I like to bring in to question the notions of subjectivity and objectivity, the division of the world into internal and external things, and the notion of private and public concepts. Your OP gave me that opportunity. So many folk take these divisions as central, even undeniable. but due consideration shows that they cannot be maintained in a coherent way.

If we were able to divide the world into subject and object, internal and external, private and public, and to put colours firmly in the subjective, internal, private zone, then all would be good for many folk here.

But colours are demonstrably a part of the objective, external, public world.

Hence the question: If "red" is just in your mind, when you ask for a red pen, how is it that the person you are asking hands you what you want?

And despite the pages of protestation, I think it still stands.

A flick through the pages will show many arguments directed towards me as if I had maintained that colour is nothing but an objective, external, public notion. That is not what I have been maintaining, so those arguments miss the their target.

I have not offered a substantive account of the nature of colour. I do not need to, in order to show the poverty of the scientistic view. Indeed I think there is reason to doubt that any theory of colour will be complete.

So there remain philosophical puzzles here. It is just that they are not answered by understanding the physics.

Good thing I never made that claim then. — Lionino

Yes, but unfortunately there are many who take this view, that dreams cannot be identified, as proof of something metaphysical, even if they rarely state what. It's one of the most repeated memes hereabouts, usually followed by an ellipsis rather than a conclusion...

Someone once commented privately that you have a mind like a freight train, powerful but incapable of considering anything to the side of its tracks.

You see colour realism and colour eliminativism and nought else.

Again, take a look at the SEP article, which sets out a few of the problems with eliminativism and some of the alternatives — seven main theories each with many variants.

So again, I am not rejecting the physiological account. I am rejecting the nothing but in "colours are nothing but mental phenomena". And doing that leaves "Colours are mental phenomena, at least in part".

And a perusal of the article will show that I am in good company.

You say you use words in some way other than saying them? — Hanover

This seems telling. Yes, we all use words in ways other than to simply make statements. You know that. We use them to do all manner of things, from making promises to declaring war.

So we can't, in all circumstances, tell when we are dreaming. — Lionino

Perhaps. But that is very much not the same as the claim that we can never tell the difference between having a dream and being awake.

You are thinking of Lucid dreams? I've had them a few times. No, I'm talking generally - we differentiate between dreams and wakefulness.

Since use is determined by whatever the community says it is... — Hanover

Odd.

Use is determined by... well, what we do. Not by what we say we do.

The realest dream of a cow is, by definition, indistinguishable from actually seeing a cow. It is the dream when taken as a whole, and arranged temporally with the experiences that came after or before it, that is rationally determined to be a dream or reality. But if the dream is simply the realest dream of a cow and nothing else, and it is so long ago that we forgot about what came before or after that experience, there is nothing telling us whether we dreamed that cow or actually saw it — false memories, deja vu's, may sometimes come from dreams. — Lionino

So in summary, if we could not tell when we were dreaming, then we could not tell if it's a cow or a dream cow.

Well, yes.

But we can tell when we are dreaming.

So. Not very convincing.

Here's the paragraph from which you cherry-picked a couple of words: — Wayfarer

Hey, careful - you cherry-picked those words, not me. Here:

That ties in with the role that I see in 'the observer' generally. As that video Is Reality Real? says 'of course there's an external world. We just don't see it as it is.' Our brain/mind is constructing reality on the fly at every moment. — Wayfarer

So you can tell when you are dreaming and when you are awake. Good.

Not what I said, and not what the source said. — Wayfarer

Well, it's the quote you used. There is a tendency to take the argument just that bit further than is valid.

It is the things, which may be coherent or incoherent in respect to each other, that come before waking up to the thing that is always coherent in respect to itself every single time we wake up. In other words, induction. — Lionino

You lost me here.

OK.

How do they lean what dreams are?

Roughly, Ayer's argument is that:

* When we see something, there is always a thing that we see.
* There are instances where what we see is a different thing to what is "really" there; a thing philosophers call "sense data"
* This account must be generalised, so that in all instances, what we see is sense data.

So far we have watched Austin carefully dismantle the first two steps. The first in Lecture II, the second in Lecture III and IV. Now we are moving on the finishing step.

Before looking at Austin, let's consider Zhuang Zhou. You will no doubt be familiar with the story. As a butterfly, he did not know he was Zhuang Zhou. When he was Zhuang Zhou, he wondered if he was a butterfly.

It's a stimulating story, throwing one's considerations off-centre, and I do not wish to detract from it, but to add to it, since I think it can give us some insight into the approach Austin takes in Lecture V. We do know the difference between dreaming and being awake. We understand the nature of dreams, that they occur during sleep, usually at night, and may involve various otherwise impossible things. We understand what it is to dream and what it is to be awake - we must do, because we have the language around dreaming. If we could really not tell our dreams from our more lucid states, we could have no such language. We could not even have the word "dream".

We know also that the story is told from the point of view of Zhuang Zhou, and not from the point of view of the butterfly. If we did have the story from the perspective of the butterfly, the world would be a very different place. But the symmetry on which the story depends must be broken in order for the story to be told.

Considerations such as these have a close parallel in the final writings of Wittgenstein on certainty. The story can only take place if the very things it brings into doubt are held firm. And the story, being constructed of words, has to take it's place in a community of human beings.
— Banno

Have you had the realest dream of a cow, or just the realest-1% dream of a cow? — Lionino

A child learns to differentiate between dreaming and being awake. How? It's partially to do with their interactions with others.

This reduces to what we just think are one another's idiosyncratic uses of language. I say the pen itself isn't red, which is consistent with how the neuroscientists define it. Reliance upon experts to define terms in an intellectual setting such as this is reasonable. What do you suggest, a democratic vote? — Hanover

You show signs of recognising differing uses. Progress. The physiology is not the whole story.

Perhaps we are destined to throw this at each other forever :) — AmadeusD

No.

...you've missed my point completely — AmadeusD

Perhaps there was no real point for you to make.

Example: the realest dream of a cow is indistinguishable from actually seeing a cow. — Lionino

If this is so, how is it that we have the distinction between dreams and lucidity?

I've argued that 'red pens' are not 'Red'. — AmadeusD

I'll leave you to it. For my part, I don't think you have understood something here. Try going into a shop and asking for the red pens that are not red and see how far you get.

You've done absolutely nothing to support this. — AmadeusD

If you wish to present a case that there are no red pens, be my guest.

This seems consistent with what I have been arguing — Michael

Again, the physiology is correct, just incomplete.

If Witt is correct, then the engagement in language games is inescapable. — Hanover

Quite right.

So, to the extent Michaelargues the pen is not red and you say it is, the dispute per Witt is over proper usage. Since our community of speakers does typically defer science to scientists, it is proper to argue the pen is not red based upon best scientific theory. — Hanover

Not quite right. A simple appeal to science would probably not appeal to Wittgenstein. The game in hand is that of making special provisions for pens which write with red ink.

But of course you grossly misrepresent the argument I've presented. I am again obliged to repeat that the physiological account is correct, but incomplete. I'm pointing to the absurdity of your "we should deny the pen itself is red". There are red pens.

And yes, I understand the special place you have for "itself". It's this infatuation that leads you into the scientistic view. You want to say that the pen is red but the pen itself is not red. I want to say that "the pen itself" is a nonsense.

Thanks for the link to the journal. Might be useful.

To be sure, what I object to is stuff such as:

...of course there's an external world. We just don't see it as it is. — Wayfarer

It seems to me odd that Wayfarer accepts this, since it is implicitly a scientistic notion - that there is a proper way to describe how the world is, given by physics, and other ways of describing the world are wrong. That the only true description of the world is that given by physics.

It now looks like Wayfarer wants to buy in to scientism.

"the colour red" is not anything but the experience of Red. — AmadeusD

The absurdity of this should be plain. How do you tell that you are experiencing red? Well, because you know what "the colour red" is. So what is the colour red? Well, it's the experience of red. And what is the red in your experience? Why, it's the colour red, of course...

Let's just say that this is not amongst those things from which I would expect to learn much, and leave this silliness behind.

The colour Red is not anything else but hte experience of hte colour — AmadeusD

Again, this is blatantly false. Your gears are spinning but not making the connection.