Do you think there’s a difference between saying “I know what green looks like” and “I can identify something that is green”?
If you told me “I know what green looks like”, how do I know what you’re talking about?
My answer to these questions are
the first statement means exactly the same thing as the second statement, so “know” in the first statement is not being used literally and
I can only know what the statement means in the context of people demonstrating an ability to identify green. It would literally be impossible to teach a child the meaning of the sentence without that.
If the problem being addressed here differs on translations into French or German, then perhaps it isn’t so much a bit of metaphysics as a bit of language. At the least, it is now clear that the question “What is it like to be a bat” is ambiguous, as the OP suggested.
Perhaps, again, we might approach this by looking at an agreed formalisation?
Okay. I am sure Russell had some pretty good reasoning attached to that conclusion, even if I don’t know what it is. So let’s say that it’s a meaningful question under whatever Russell’s conception of meaning is in this context. If “nothing” doesn’t denote anything, then it isn’t an important question. It’s a trivial brain teaser that doesn’t inform us about anything that we have reason to care about. Isn’t this the case? Whatever we might glean from considering this question doesn’t give us the sort of information we think it does.
If paint swatches have their colors written on them, will your friend be able to identify which is green? Sure. But not because he knows what green looks like. He does not.
And what if the swatches are labeled incorrectly? I worked with a guy who asked me to hand him his green backpack. He didn’t have a green backpack. It was brown.
“That’s not green?” he asked pointing to it.
“No. It’s brown.”
“Missy told me it was green.”
Missy apparently hasn’t been in the mood to have a conversation about that kind of thing at the moment she told him that.
He doesn’t know what green looks like. He cannot identify green by the color. He can only identify it through other means, and hope those other means are accurate.
Can you be fooled like that? If you ask what color something is, and someone tells you the wrong color, or the wrong color is written on it, or it was replaced sincere last time you saw it with a copy that is exact in all ways but color, will you claim it is the wrong color?
So now the problem becomes one of the complexity of the formalisation. We will lose most of the folk posting here, or more likely a large number will continue on with the discussion but without regard to the documentation. Most folk would prefer to rabbit on about paint swatches and essences than read something a bit difficult.
So how to proceed. I have the main papers by Kaplan and Lewis, each of which probably deserves it’s own thread.
Agreed. His ability to identify green is limited to situations where he has other cues, and he can be deceived or mistaken.
Even people with perfectly good color vision can be deceive or mistaken. Surely you remember the dress that broke the internet? The one that some people saw as blue and black, and others as white and gold?
Why are you bringing this up? It doesn’t present a problem for my account at all. I’m not sure what you think I believe, because you keep telling me things I know as if they should be a surprise to me.
I’ve had an intriguing automatic message suggesting I reply to you privately instead, but I’ll leave it here for now. You’ll love the Russell. I think!
Personally my problems with excessive formalization is not specifically that it is difficult, but that it presents the opportunity to harden or codify the sorts of linguistic traps that we should want to avoid. How many papers refer to qualia when they mean sensory experience? How many refer to phenomenology when they mean personal experience?
I see that there is a place for some formalization, but it seems to me that the least formalization possible would decrease the likelihood that hidden concepts and assumptions get smuggled in.
But that is my answer, that you do not think such formalisation will help your account here. So we might leave it, or possibly move the conversation to other threads.
To my eye this will result is what is now happening - the thread is flapping around in the breeze, trying to address too many different yet adjacent topics without a structure for comparison.
Afaict, your position is that your experience of green does not give you anything that your friend does not have. My position is that it does. I realize you will not agree to any label I give to what you have that your friend does not. Knowledge, information, understanding, whatever. But whatever label you want, or no label at all, you have it, and your friend does not. You know what green looks like, and your friend does not. You can identify green by nothing but the color, and your friend cannot.
Then you misunderstand. That would be an insane position. My experience of green gives me the ability to identify it without other cues, to a very high degree of accuracy. My friend doesn’t have that ability. I’m not really schooled in exactly how color blindness works, but somewhere in the process that occurs when we see things, my brain gets or recognizes more color information than his does.
It just doesn’t give me an extra entirely indetectable and completely inerrant thing called “what it’s like to see green”.
If we cannot agree on whether or not someone who has the typical range of color vision knows something about the color green than someone who cannot see green because of color blindness, how will reading something a bit difficult help?
Up to you, but maybe start a thread using either of the two papers, and hopefully there’ll be people like me who want to learn more about the general topic.
Or carry on here with formalizing “what it’s like” and “know”, and we’ll do our best to follow.