I was taking a bath and had a philosophical thought about bathing, my cat did not agree.
I really think it is you that is using “know” in an unconventional way here. I am trying to use it as being synonymous with “experience” and I can’t make a sentence sound right. I might say “I know Jay”, and the implication isn’t that I read about you, but that I interacted directly with you, but “I know Jay” doesn’t mean “I experience Jay”. They are not semantically identical sentences. Isn’t this correct? If I say “I know what a banana tastes like”, it might be the case that the only way we could imagine attaining this knowledge is through direct experience, but it is still a semantically different sentence than “I experience what a banana tastes like” (which is still a little awkward, because “experience” and “taste” are a little redundant). Isn’t this an accurate account of how the language is used? Doesn’t it lead to sensible and meaningful dialogue?
I am not fluent in French, so I really can’t speak to the distinction in that language.
If there is some reason to make the distinction between different types of sources of knowledge, then we can absolutely adopt language that denotes that, but I don’t see any particular need in this context.
There is simply not two types of knowledge here. Regardless of the source of information, to say we know something is to say we have enough information to have a meaningful model of the thing we know. That’s why I can say something like “I don’t know what I heard”. It’s not that I didn’t attain the audible information, it’s that I don’t have a meaningful way to cognitively organize the sound. I can’t make it useful in understanding the world. In the sentences “I know what I heard”, “I know differential algebra” and “I know Jay”, “know” all means the same thing. It’s not different types of knowledge.
Isn’t this so? Doesn’t this capture the use of the word in natural language? If you don’t think it does, can you at least provide a natural sentence that doesn’t parse the way I am suggesting?
Frankly, I don’t see the problem you’re trying to solve with the distinction your attempting to make. Even if we were to ignore natural language use, or we couldn’t agree on it, I don’t see any taxonomical or explanatory benefits of making the divide at type of knowledge rather than types of sources of knowledge.
The problem is that we can break sources of knowledge down lots of ways, not just “direct/experiential” and “indirect”. We can say a source is “second hand”, or “anecdotal”. The way we can divide this up is really only limited to our contextual needs and our imaginations. Do we then need to create different kinds of knowledge to capture all of these distinctions? That seem like a bad idea to me.
What an odd question. I really don’t know. He seems to care less about the topic of perception, so probably not. He does do film editing professionally, so maybe in some contexts he does understand color better than I do.
I think what you are trying to do is point out that I have the functional ability to recognize green where he doesn’t. That isn’t a function of my level of understanding though, it’s a function of not being color blind. I can’t imagine a world where we would have the conversation
Dobbler: That car is green
Dobbler’s friend: I don’t understand
D: The car, it is green
DF: Hmm, that doesn’t really make sense to me
“Understanding” isn’t a sensible way to frame our difference.
I guess that’s where we differ. They don’t mean the same thing to me – but again, this is why the problem can’t be resolved at the level of epistemology.
This is more fruitful, if you were looking further into it. We know that other languages have found the distinction useful at the level of “type of knowledge,” but in the Philosophy Room, there might be good reasons for preferring a different distinction. Not a debate I really want to have in this context, but that would be the right direction, I think: What does preserving something like the savoir/connaitre distinction get us, philosophically?
Well yes. Do you think it serves any purpose in this context? If not, I’m not sure why we’re talking about it.
Right, I was gently suggesting that it might not serve any purpose here. I like the savoir/connaitre distinction because it gives us a way to understand (or at least characterize) subjectivity; you don’t think it does. Fair enough. There are many other approaches to that problem, including where you started, when you questioned whether ambiguity about “what it’s like” might be the culprit.
While it might not be required for your larger point, I disagree with this framing. The bat doesn’t have the content of its experience, it just has its experience… and I guess a memory of its experience. The experience doesn’t reside in a container within the bat, the experience occurs between the bat and its environment. The distinction I’m making might seem pedantic, but I think it is exactly a thing that comes back and bites us.
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Certainly not that conversation. But people who are color blind and people who are not have conversations about it that are not so obviously designed to make the idea of any conversation on the topic seem silly.
I agree. I would not have chosen that word. But, “understanding”, “knowledge”, or whatever word anyone would like, you can have as much of it as your friend does if you choose to study it as he did. But he can never have as much as you have, regardless of what or how much he studies, because he cannot experience the sight of it.
Seriously though, more or less of what? All I can say that I have “more” of is potential colors seen. I guess that with that I have the ability to remember more colors, or conjure an imagination of more colors (although my imagination isn’t very visual, so maybe not. That appears to differ among people). The salient point I’m making is that there isn’t an extra thing, a unit of greenness, that resides in me, or that I possess, that he doesn’t.
The question uses a word, “nothing”, as a subject that doesn’t denote anything. It’s semantically equivalent to asking something like “What color is your ______?”
I didn’t choose these words. I keep blatantly rejecting them, and people keep chiming up and insisting on them. My account of color blindness seems complete to me, and not missing anything, and doesn’t require ““understanding”, “knowledge”, or whatever word anyone would like”. It just lets the sensory experience be what it is, and lets knowledge and understanding be what they are, and doesn’t try to make them the same thing.
So if you are trying to say “But Dobbler, there is clearly something else happening that you’re not accounting for!”, you really need to make that case clearly and explicitly. You need to show me what’s missing from my account, and how we know it’s really there. I’d advise giving it some real self reflection though, because to my eye the thing that feels like it’s missing was never there in the first place.
I think it might help me lay out why I have problems with going from the structure and semantics of language to the structure and semantics of a lived stream of consciousness without a clear theory.
Let me first say that I’m Austrian, and my mother tongue is German. German makes roughly the same distinction as French (as far as I can tell; I don’t know French). So, there’s savoir, which seems to be “wissen” in German, and “connaitre”, which seems to be “kennen” in German.
The fun thing is that I’d translate “I don’t know what it’s like to be a bat,” with “wissen” – the savoir branch. But does that mean the sentence is about factual knowledge? Here’s my rule-of-thumb: if a word causes problems rephrase and see where that gets you:
a) I don’t have the facts about what it’s like to be a bat.
b) I’m unfamiliar with what it’s like to be a bat.
However, I don’t feel the distinction touches on what @Dobbler means to say. I think Dobbler would strike out the “like”-part here:
c) I don’t have the facts about being a bat.
d) I’m unfamiliar with being a bat.
We then have a difference of sort: (a) vs. (c) ~ (b) vs. (d).
But the rephrasing changes the problem on another level. (a) vs. (b) =/= (c) vs. (d). Here the problem changes. That’s why I used “~” above, rather than “=”. So it seems the relevant difference is better treated on the savoir-branch than the connaitre-branch, because that’s where a difference seems to appear.
But my problems run deeper. This is just the word-level, and it’s not clear to me how words relate to thought. There’s what we want to say, as yet unformulated, and there’s the words we have at hand, the tools to say it with. And we still try. That’s normal. That’s how language works. So I don’t think we can rely on word-choice alone.
That’s why usage matters a lot. When we say “I know what that’s like,” we don’t usually have a comparison at hand, and we don’t go deeply into analytics either. We tend to express familiarty with a situation; but we do it with the word that expresses facts (at least in German). Usage is complex, and I think @Dobbler is right to spot a potential pitfall here, but on the same level, I think it’s wrong to psychologise people over word-choice.
If you don’t understand a problem, it’s likely because the way you organise your experience has no room for it, and it’s not easy to “open up” without risk of damage. The what-it’s-like part, hard problem, and such all make sense to me; free will, life after death, etc. don’t. I imagine we all have certain “big” questions that seem like non-questions to us. It’s just that we don’t agree what they are.
I’m a structural relativist about this: at some point our operation systems are up and running, and the best we can do to understand others is to run emulators - which takes up significant resources. Thus we’re tempted to see prgrams that won’t run as junk data.
Hence threads like this one.
What I’m suggesting is a little more than the questions not making sense to me personally. If you showed me an electronic schematic, it wouldn’t make sense to me, but I would assume that my lack of knowledge was the problem, not the schematic.
I am suggesting that these questions are structurally flawed in identifiable ways.
Oh, so you were going to argue that the question is meaningless or mal-formed?
I don’t agree. But, again, if you’re right I think that would be interesting, and not too obvious for words, as you seem to insist?
You’re aware of Russell’s On Denoting?
You started me off on a merry chase here Banno. I think it boils down to this… Lewis is a physicalist and a functionalist who wants to explain experience as an emergent phenomenon in a world of matter and energy. James is a radical empiricist who wanted to explain matter and energy as disturbances (relations) in an experiential field. Both views entail a ‘given’ – matter/energy or experiential field – so I think I can see both sides of the argument which makes it difficult for me to express a preference, except to say that both views might ultimately be misconceived. I find this a strangely liberating prospect, so thanks for the nudge.
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. Too obvious for words?
I’m curious on what grounds you disagree? What to you think the word “nothing” denotes in this formulation. In common formulations, it denotes the absence of something we might imagine or expect. It’s a way to express an aspect of our imagination or expectation. That’s what the word points to. When we remove all context, it fails to have meaning.
I haven’t read any Russell for a very long time. If I did, I don’t specifically recall it.
You experience something he does not. Because of that experience, you know what green looks like. He does not. He only knows it is another color, but it is not one of the colors that he ever experiences. He doesn’t know what it looks like. You do.
This isn’t a controversial idea. The term “color-blind” exists. It’s a real condition, whether you want to call it “understanding”, “knowledge”, “experience”, or any other word.
This leads to a fascinating discovery. I plugged that sentence into my French translator because, though I read French pretty well, I didn’t know the idiom for “what it’s like.” Here’s what came out:
Je ne sais pas ce que ça fait d’être une chauve-souris.
So we see that, just like your choice in German, a Francophone would also choose the savoir branch. But here’s what’s really cool – look at the idiom for “what it’s like”. The French express this with a “doing” verb: faire. So, ce que ça fait: literally, in English, “what it does.” There’s no comparison involved whatsoever, no “like”!
So @Dobbler is certainly right to take a look at how this works in English, but in French we discover that the whole issue is non-existent.
What about German? What is the idiom for “what it’s like” in German, and how might you translate it into English?
And if you’re curious, the Nagel article was translated into French as “Quel effet cela fait-il d’être une chauve-souris ?” or “Qu’est-ce que ça fait d’être une chauve-souris ?”
William James? I’m quite disinclined to treat “pure experience” as a substance; that sort of reification is problematic, and quite different to the sort of approach seen in Lewis.