Well, the question arises of whether a phrase like “that color my synesthesia occasionally generates, for which there isn’t really a word in English” qualifies as talking about the color. I would say it does.
It does, but the fact that there are cases that are borderline with regards to being able to talk about things implies that there might be cases that are on the other side of that border.
It may be more obvious with some of the ‘impossible shape’ cases—I can’t describe those at all, but I can say that a particular ‘shape’ is visible in both concept X and concept Y and that it relates to trait Z. (This is mostly interesting in practice because ‘seeing’ the ‘shape’ is often the first way I notice that a concept has a particular trait—for example, I recently noticed that ‘colorblind anti-racism’ is often a form of belief-in-belief because I was considering the concept and noticed that it shared a shape and color with other instances of belief-in-belief.)
So, I agree that some things are easier and harder to talk about, and that the existence of something X hard to talk about is evidence in favor of things X+epsilon hard to talk about. But I don’t quite get what real thing the metaphorical “border” corresponds to here.
Perhaps I’m conflating ‘talk’ and ‘communicate’ in a non-useful way. A significant part of my point is that I can’t communicate these qualia—there’s no way to render green-and-purple or yellow-in-grey in such a way as to actually get the sensation across, that I know of, and if I tried with some things in most situations I suspect I’d just come across as crazy. But if I’m talking to someone who assigns the idea that I may experience qualia that they don’t a sufficiently high prior compared to the idea that I am crazy, and I explicitly take steps to bridge the inferential gap (like saying ‘synesthesia’), I can probably communicate that I am experiencing something unusual, even if I can’t communicate what. But this assumes that I have the relevant skills, and a sufficiently sympathetic or open-minded person to communicate with, and it’s fairly easy for me to imagine someone experiencing qualia that are far enough from the things that we have words for that the inferential gap is too wide to cross and they always come across as crazy if they try to talk about it. (We wouldn’t actually notice such cases, I expect, because people in those situations would learn at a fairly young age that talking about the relevant classes of qualia is not useful.)
If we’re just talking about talking itself, though—if you’re simply asking whether I can say some arbitrary word when I experience a particular quale or group thereof—then yes, that’s much simpler. Strictly speaking I’d suspect it’s subject to a degree of false-positive, though. I don’t think it’s all that uncommon to get caught up in a conversation and blurt out something that’s useful, true, and entirely surprising on a conscious level, for example.
Well, as I think about it I realize I’m not really sure what we’re talking about, as the initial context was established by the OP, who was making a point about relationships between talking about experiences and being conscious of those experiences that I’m still not quite sure I understand, and I seem to be keeping one foot in the closest approximation of that context I can manage, which in retrospect is not very helpful of me. I apologize.
So, dropping that context altogether: absolutely agreed that it’s possible for me to have an experience E1 but to not be able to communicate E1 to person X in a way that inspires an imaginative experience E2 in X that we are both confident shares salient properties with E1. And absolutely agreed that when that happens, X may lack confidence that I’m actually having E1 at all… they may think I’m describing E3 in a strange way, or they may doubt that I had any experience at all, etc.
I have a few of those experiences from when I was in the ICU after my stroke that not only can I not readily communicate to others, but don’t even make any sense to me when I recall them.
Come to think of it, that happens all the time, though the most common cases are so conventional that we’ve evolved social standards around them… the experience of holding your child for the first time is one so routine as to be cliche, for example. (There are many other traditional “firsts” in the same vein.) If I try to express those experiences to someone whose life doesn’t include something roughly comparable, I’ll likely fail… but that failure is routine and no big deal. (The traditional wrapper for it is “You’ll understand when you’re older.”)
Agreed that it’s pretty common for me to say things that, prior to my saying them, I wasn’t conscious of knowing, and after I say them, it’s clear I’ve known all along. (This is one reason the “talk about”/”conscious of” equation that started this whole garden path is problematic for me.)
Upvoted for the possibly-frivolous reason that I’ve never met anyone else whose synaesthesia works this way, and you’re putting words to a basic feature of life experience I can scarcely explain to others.
Well, the question arises of whether a phrase like “that color my synesthesia occasionally generates, for which there isn’t really a word in English” qualifies as talking about the color. I would say it does.
It does, but the fact that there are cases that are borderline with regards to being able to talk about things implies that there might be cases that are on the other side of that border.
It may be more obvious with some of the ‘impossible shape’ cases—I can’t describe those at all, but I can say that a particular ‘shape’ is visible in both concept X and concept Y and that it relates to trait Z. (This is mostly interesting in practice because ‘seeing’ the ‘shape’ is often the first way I notice that a concept has a particular trait—for example, I recently noticed that ‘colorblind anti-racism’ is often a form of belief-in-belief because I was considering the concept and noticed that it shared a shape and color with other instances of belief-in-belief.)
So, I agree that some things are easier and harder to talk about, and that the existence of something X hard to talk about is evidence in favor of things X+epsilon hard to talk about. But I don’t quite get what real thing the metaphorical “border” corresponds to here.
Hm.
Perhaps I’m conflating ‘talk’ and ‘communicate’ in a non-useful way. A significant part of my point is that I can’t communicate these qualia—there’s no way to render green-and-purple or yellow-in-grey in such a way as to actually get the sensation across, that I know of, and if I tried with some things in most situations I suspect I’d just come across as crazy. But if I’m talking to someone who assigns the idea that I may experience qualia that they don’t a sufficiently high prior compared to the idea that I am crazy, and I explicitly take steps to bridge the inferential gap (like saying ‘synesthesia’), I can probably communicate that I am experiencing something unusual, even if I can’t communicate what. But this assumes that I have the relevant skills, and a sufficiently sympathetic or open-minded person to communicate with, and it’s fairly easy for me to imagine someone experiencing qualia that are far enough from the things that we have words for that the inferential gap is too wide to cross and they always come across as crazy if they try to talk about it. (We wouldn’t actually notice such cases, I expect, because people in those situations would learn at a fairly young age that talking about the relevant classes of qualia is not useful.)
If we’re just talking about talking itself, though—if you’re simply asking whether I can say some arbitrary word when I experience a particular quale or group thereof—then yes, that’s much simpler. Strictly speaking I’d suspect it’s subject to a degree of false-positive, though. I don’t think it’s all that uncommon to get caught up in a conversation and blurt out something that’s useful, true, and entirely surprising on a conscious level, for example.
Well, as I think about it I realize I’m not really sure what we’re talking about, as the initial context was established by the OP, who was making a point about relationships between talking about experiences and being conscious of those experiences that I’m still not quite sure I understand, and I seem to be keeping one foot in the closest approximation of that context I can manage, which in retrospect is not very helpful of me. I apologize.
So, dropping that context altogether: absolutely agreed that it’s possible for me to have an experience E1 but to not be able to communicate E1 to person X in a way that inspires an imaginative experience E2 in X that we are both confident shares salient properties with E1. And absolutely agreed that when that happens, X may lack confidence that I’m actually having E1 at all… they may think I’m describing E3 in a strange way, or they may doubt that I had any experience at all, etc.
I have a few of those experiences from when I was in the ICU after my stroke that not only can I not readily communicate to others, but don’t even make any sense to me when I recall them.
Come to think of it, that happens all the time, though the most common cases are so conventional that we’ve evolved social standards around them… the experience of holding your child for the first time is one so routine as to be cliche, for example. (There are many other traditional “firsts” in the same vein.) If I try to express those experiences to someone whose life doesn’t include something roughly comparable, I’ll likely fail… but that failure is routine and no big deal. (The traditional wrapper for it is “You’ll understand when you’re older.”)
Agreed that it’s pretty common for me to say things that, prior to my saying them, I wasn’t conscious of knowing, and after I say them, it’s clear I’ve known all along. (This is one reason the “talk about”/”conscious of” equation that started this whole garden path is problematic for me.)
Sounds like we’re on the same page after all, then. ^.^
Upvoted for the possibly-frivolous reason that I’ve never met anyone else whose synaesthesia works this way, and you’re putting words to a basic feature of life experience I can scarcely explain to others.
“Martian colors”
Yep. I’m not colorblind, though—I’m pretty sure the colors I get are just flat-out impossible in the real world.