I’m baffled by this, and kinda just going to throw a bunch of reactions out there without trying to build them into a single coherent reply.
If you take this view, these statements don’t have much difference between them on a fundamental level because “The dress is X” means something like “I assess the dress to be X” since you’re the one speaking and are making this call.
If someone says “the dress looks white to me, but I think it’s actually blue”… how would you analyze that? From this it sounds like you’d think they’re saying “I assess the dress to be white, but I assess it to be blue”?
To me it has a perfectly natural meaning, along the lines of “when I look at this picture my brain tells me that it’s white. But I’m reliably informed that it’s actually blue, and that the white appearance comes from such-and-such mental process combined with the lighting conditions of the photo”.
(e: actually, “along the lines of” isn’t quite what I mean there. It’s more like “this is the kind of thing that might cause someone to say those words”.)
It sounds to me like you’re trying to say there’s, on some level, no meaningful distinction between how something is and how we assess it to be? But how something appears to be and how we assess it to be are still very different!
I see as making essentially the same fundamental claim with minor differences about how its expressed to try to convey something about the process by which you made the claim so that others can understand your epistemic state, which is sometimes useful but you can also just say this more directly with something like “I’m 80% sure the dress is X”.
But “I’m 80% sure the dress is X” doesn’t convey anything about the process by which I came to believe it? It’s simply a conclusion with no supporting argument.
Meanwhile “the dress looks X” is an argument with no ultimate conclusion. If a person says that and nothing else, we might reasonably guess that they probably think the dress is X, similar to how someone who answers “is it going to rain?” with “the forecast says yes” probably doesn’t have any particular grounds to disbelieve the forcast. But even if we assume correctly that they think that, both the explicit and implicit information they’ve conveyed to us are still different versus “I’m _% confident the dress is X” or “I’m _% confident it’s going to rain”.
I’m baffled by this, and kinda just going to throw a bunch of reactions out there without trying to build them into a single coherent reply.
If someone says “the dress looks white to me, but I think it’s actually blue”… how would you analyze that? From this it sounds like you’d think they’re saying “I assess the dress to be white, but I assess it to be blue”?
To me it has a perfectly natural meaning, along the lines of “when I look at this picture my brain tells me that it’s white. But I’m reliably informed that it’s actually blue, and that the white appearance comes from such-and-such mental process combined with the lighting conditions of the photo”.
(e: actually, “along the lines of” isn’t quite what I mean there. It’s more like “this is the kind of thing that might cause someone to say those words”.)
It sounds to me like you’re trying to say there’s, on some level, no meaningful distinction between how something is and how we assess it to be? But how something appears to be and how we assess it to be are still very different!
But “I’m 80% sure the dress is X” doesn’t convey anything about the process by which I came to believe it? It’s simply a conclusion with no supporting argument.
Meanwhile “the dress looks X” is an argument with no ultimate conclusion. If a person says that and nothing else, we might reasonably guess that they probably think the dress is X, similar to how someone who answers “is it going to rain?” with “the forecast says yes” probably doesn’t have any particular grounds to disbelieve the forcast. But even if we assume correctly that they think that, both the explicit and implicit information they’ve conveyed to us are still different versus “I’m _% confident the dress is X” or “I’m _% confident it’s going to rain”.