Abstract
How is it like for you to see the blue sky? Applying Wittgenstein’s distinction between showing and saying to this questions – which plays a major role for example in the philosophy of Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers –, we recognize the priority of showing to saying, of knowing-how to knowing-that, and of subjective ‘experience’ to ‘objective’ facts. Not only Kant’s Ding an sich but also subjective qualia must be understood as merely limiting concepts (Grenzbegriffe) – by which we only vaguely point to well-known limits of intersubjectively reliable distinctions. Moreover, the use of colour-words is highly context-sensitive. They express plastic contrasts by which we (in many cases successfully) split up a manifold and continuum of colour-experiences into ‘discrete’ colours of surfaces of things. We do this in quite different ways, taking situations and relevant interests into account. Hence, assertions about colours are dependent from a generic system of relations and modal inferences – such that Wittgenstein realizes at this example why not only the assumption of logical independent colour-propositions is wrong but also a merely classificatory understanding of one place predicates or concepts altogether.
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Notes
- 1.
Alva Noë, Action in Perception, Cambridge/Mass. (MIT Press) 2004.
- 2.
John McDowell, Mind and World, Cambridge/Mass. (Harvard University Press), 1994.
- 3.
Ralph Schumacher writes in his paper “The content of experience – Descartes and Malebranche on the perception of secondary qualities, (in: Ralph Schumacher, ed., Perception and reality. From Descartes to the present, Paderborn (mentis) 2004, 27–42, on p. 93 FN: “Strictly speaking, only judgments can be qualified as true or false (3rd Meditation, AT VII, 28/CSM II, 26). However, in addition to the ‘formal falsity’ of judgments, Descartes also describes another kind of falsity which he calls “material falsity” of ideas (3rd Meditation, AT VII, 43–44/CSM II, 30). According to him, an idea is materially false, if – due to the fact that it is obscure and confused – it provides material for wrong judgments (Fourth Set of Replies, AT VII, 232–234/CSM H, 163–164).”
- 4.
David Chalmers, The character of consciousness, Oxford (Univ. Press) 2010, The conscious mind: In search of a fundamental theory, Oxford (Univ. Press) 1996.
- 5.
Cf. Friedrich Waismann, Logik, Sprache, Philosophie, Stuttgart (Reclam) 1976, p. 53ff on possible identities of experiences (of colours) in different subjects.
- 6.
Cf. Thomas Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” (The Philosophical Review 1974) and in his book: Mortal questions (Cambridge Univ. Pr. 1979/1995). Cf. also Other minds. Critical essays, Oxford (Univ. Pr.) 1995. The last word, Oxford (Univ. Pr.) 1997.
- 7.
Cf. Friedrich Waismann, Logik, Sprache, Philosophie, Stuttgart (Reclam) 1976, p. 99ff on the question “can the same surface be simultaneously green and red?” Waismann, even more than Wittgenstein in his middle period, grossly overestimates the conventionality or ‘arbitrariness’ of implicit norms and explicit ‘rules of grammar’ (of the form “what is red is not green”) and underestimates the canonization of generic knowledge about basic but general ‘facts’ of the human world: the topic of philosophical phenomenology. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein speaks only about particular and empirical facts ex post and does not allow for generic facts at all.
- 8.
Cf. Ruth Manor, “Only the bald are bald,” in: G. Meggle, A. Mundt, eds. Analyomen 2, Vol. II, Berlin (de Gruyter) 1997, 178–184; “Solving the heap,” Synthese 153 (2), 171–186.
- 9.
Principles of Philosophy, Part I, § 70; AT VIII, 34–35/CSM I, 218.
- 10.
Margaret Atherton writes in her paper ‘Green is like bread. The nature of Descartes’ account of color perception’ (in: Ralph Schumacher, ed., Perception and reality. From Descartes to the present, Paderborn (mentis) 2004, 27–42, on p. 33: Descartes “is asking, if we assume the presence of all appropriate corporeal states and events but no minds, would sensations of green or whatever exist? And the answer is, no. Without the presence of the conscious mind, there are no sensations.” The problem with such a statement is that it is trivial to say that without vision there is no sight of colours and without sensation as a mode of awareness there is no perception and knowledge of the ‘outer’ (or ‘inner’) world.
- 11.
Wittgenstein, PB I, § 1, 519. “Physics is different from phenomenology because of its strife for laws. Phenomenology only states what is possible. Phenomenology thus would be the grammar of those facts, on which physics builds its theories.”
- 12.
Wittgenstein, BF II, § 86 “Can we imagine that other people could have another geometry of colours than our normal one?” BF I, § 14 “There is no generally accepted criterion for what counts as colour if it were not for one of our colours.”
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Stekeler-Weithofer, P. (2017). Subjectivity and Normativity in Colour-Distinctions. In: Silva, M. (eds) How Colours Matter to Philosophy. Synthese Library, vol 388. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67398-1_11
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