I guess with swans you can just say “go look at swans in africa” which gives a recipe for public experience that would reproduce the category-boundary.
It is the case with seaguls that they are mostly white but males and female have different ultraviolet patterns. Here someone who doesn’t see ultraviolet can easily tell the classes apart but someone who sees only 3 colors will be nearly impossible. Then if throught some kind of (convulted) training you could make your eye see ultraviolet (people with and without all the natural optics respond slightly differently to ultraviolet light sources so there is a theorethical chance some kind of extreme alteration of the eyes could yield it to clearly recognisable levels).
Now ultraviolet cameras can be produces and those pretty much produce public experiences (ie the output can be read by a 3 color person too). Now I am wondering whether the difference between “private sensors” and constructed instruments is merely that with constructed instruments we do have a theory how they work but with “black box sensors” we might only know how to (re)produce them but don’t know how they actually work. However it would seem that sentences like “this and this kind of machine will classify X into two distinct groups Y and Z” would be interesting challenges to your theory of experiment setting and would warrant research. That is any kind of theory that doesn’t believe “in the training” would have to claim something other on what the classification would be (that all X would be marked Y, that the groups would not be distinct, that the classifier would inconsistently label the same X Y one time and Z the next time). But I guess those are only of indrect interest if the direct interest is whether groups Y and Z can be established at all.
Hehe, I didn’t mean it that literal just trying to get the idea across :)
Nevertheless, your analysis is correct for the case where alternative ways of confirmation are available. There is of course the possibility that at the current stage of technological development the knowledge is only accessible through experience like in my lucid dreaming example in the original post.
I guess with swans you can just say “go look at swans in africa” which gives a recipe for public experience that would reproduce the category-boundary.
It is the case with seaguls that they are mostly white but males and female have different ultraviolet patterns. Here someone who doesn’t see ultraviolet can easily tell the classes apart but someone who sees only 3 colors will be nearly impossible. Then if throught some kind of (convulted) training you could make your eye see ultraviolet (people with and without all the natural optics respond slightly differently to ultraviolet light sources so there is a theorethical chance some kind of extreme alteration of the eyes could yield it to clearly recognisable levels).
Now ultraviolet cameras can be produces and those pretty much produce public experiences (ie the output can be read by a 3 color person too). Now I am wondering whether the difference between “private sensors” and constructed instruments is merely that with constructed instruments we do have a theory how they work but with “black box sensors” we might only know how to (re)produce them but don’t know how they actually work. However it would seem that sentences like “this and this kind of machine will classify X into two distinct groups Y and Z” would be interesting challenges to your theory of experiment setting and would warrant research. That is any kind of theory that doesn’t believe “in the training” would have to claim something other on what the classification would be (that all X would be marked Y, that the groups would not be distinct, that the classifier would inconsistently label the same X Y one time and Z the next time). But I guess those are only of indrect interest if the direct interest is whether groups Y and Z can be established at all.
Hehe, I didn’t mean it that literal just trying to get the idea across :)
Nevertheless, your analysis is correct for the case where alternative ways of confirmation are available. There is of course the possibility that at the current stage of technological development the knowledge is only accessible through experience like in my lucid dreaming example in the original post.