To call red blue—or to use quotation marks more accurately, to call red “blue”—you must already be familiar with the thing that is being referred to as “red” in that phrase, in order to consider naming the thing by a different word.
It is the same if you ask “What is consciousness?” You must already being using that word to refer to some thing or phenomenon that you are familiar with, and what you are asking about is what that thing is made of, or how that thing works, questions about the world, not about words. Redefining the word is not relevant to answering the question.
Compare “What is ’Oumuamua?” There are two different questions that can be asked with those words. For someone who has not heard the word before, the question is about the word “’Oumuamua”, and can be answered by saying “the name given to a certain object of extrasolar origin that recently passed through the Solar System.” For someone who already knows that, if they ask that question in exactly the same words, it is a different question. It is a question not about the word “’Oumuamua”, but about the thing—was it just a lump of rock? was it an alien spacecraft? where did it come from? where is it going? These questions are to be answered by looking through telescopes or sending expeditions.
”How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg? Still four. Calling its tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
I just reread this comment, which is lucky since I failed to appreciate it the first time round. It’s a very useful framing, even though I still agree with my original assessment that there really isn’t a dichotomy between trying to figure out what a word means and how the world is, as often you’re often trying to figure out how the world is so that you can define a word in a way that is socially useful.
“It is the same if you ask “What is consciousness?” You must already being using that word to refer to some thing or phenomenon that you are familiar with, and what you are asking about is what that thing is made of, or how that thing works, questions about the world, not about words”—philosophy discussions ask this all the time without presuming that the definition is already known.
Words precede anyone defining them (and things precede both). The best examples of discussions of phenomena where people didn’t know what they were (i.e. what are they made of, how do they work, how can we use them) is in the development of chemistry and physics through the 17th to 19th centuries. They were simultaneously trying to find out both what things exist and what is true about them.
ETA: Also mathematics, e.g. Lakatos’ book “Proofs and Refutations”. On a topic in physics, Hasok Chang’s “Inventing Temperature” is good.
Sure you have to be using the word in some way, but there’s not guarantee that there’s a meaningful concept that can be extracted from it or whether the term is just used in ways that are hopelessly confused.
Agreed. For example, the concept of phlogiston eventually fell apart. It was at one time clear enough: the thing that a material loses when it burns, the ashes being the part that wasn’t phlogiston. But the growth of knowledge forced the concept to take more and more strained forms until it fell apart. (Thinking of it as negative oxygen is a retcon that does not fit the history.) And the philosopher’s stone was pretty much a non-starter. (I think Eliezer has Harry Potter remark on this somewhere in HPMOR.)
To call red blue—or to use quotation marks more accurately, to call red “blue”—you must already be familiar with the thing that is being referred to as “red” in that phrase, in order to consider naming the thing by a different word.
In order for us to understand the sentence, we must understand both “red” and “blue”. (To tell someone you call red blue is a different matter.)
(Edit: Removed “no”, because the distinction between sufficient and necessary conditions wasn’t necessary in this context.)
In the larger context, this will in practice be true.
To call red “flizzm”, “flizzm” need not have any meaning already. To call red “blue” likewise can be done without knowing that “blue” is even a word. But of course, it is already a word with a generally assigned meaning. In the real world, no-one is going to call red “blue” unless they do know that generally assigned meaning of “blue”, and they will have an ulterior end in calling the thing by a name everyone else uses for a different thing. Compare, for instance, the uses of the words “man” and “woman” in the context of transgender politics.
To call red blue—or to use quotation marks more accurately, to call red “blue”—you must already be familiar with the thing that is being referred to as “red” in that phrase, in order to consider naming the thing by a different word.
It is the same if you ask “What is consciousness?” You must already being using that word to refer to some thing or phenomenon that you are familiar with, and what you are asking about is what that thing is made of, or how that thing works, questions about the world, not about words. Redefining the word is not relevant to answering the question.
Compare “What is ’Oumuamua?” There are two different questions that can be asked with those words. For someone who has not heard the word before, the question is about the word “’Oumuamua”, and can be answered by saying “the name given to a certain object of extrasolar origin that recently passed through the Solar System.” For someone who already knows that, if they ask that question in exactly the same words, it is a different question. It is a question not about the word “’Oumuamua”, but about the thing—was it just a lump of rock? was it an alien spacecraft? where did it come from? where is it going? These questions are to be answered by looking through telescopes or sending expeditions.
”How many legs does a dog have if you call its tail a leg? Still four. Calling its tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
I just reread this comment, which is lucky since I failed to appreciate it the first time round. It’s a very useful framing, even though I still agree with my original assessment that there really isn’t a dichotomy between trying to figure out what a word means and how the world is, as often you’re often trying to figure out how the world is so that you can define a word in a way that is socially useful.
“It is the same if you ask “What is consciousness?” You must already being using that word to refer to some thing or phenomenon that you are familiar with, and what you are asking about is what that thing is made of, or how that thing works, questions about the world, not about words”—philosophy discussions ask this all the time without presuming that the definition is already known.
Words precede anyone defining them (and things precede both). The best examples of discussions of phenomena where people didn’t know what they were (i.e. what are they made of, how do they work, how can we use them) is in the development of chemistry and physics through the 17th to 19th centuries. They were simultaneously trying to find out both what things exist and what is true about them.
ETA: Also mathematics, e.g. Lakatos’ book “Proofs and Refutations”. On a topic in physics, Hasok Chang’s “Inventing Temperature” is good.
Sure you have to be using the word in some way, but there’s not guarantee that there’s a meaningful concept that can be extracted from it or whether the term is just used in ways that are hopelessly confused.
Agreed. For example, the concept of phlogiston eventually fell apart. It was at one time clear enough: the thing that a material loses when it burns, the ashes being the part that wasn’t phlogiston. But the growth of knowledge forced the concept to take more and more strained forms until it fell apart. (Thinking of it as negative oxygen is a retcon that does not fit the history.) And the philosopher’s stone was pretty much a non-starter. (I think Eliezer has Harry Potter remark on this somewhere in HPMOR.)
Wasn’t that how Joseph Priestley identified it when he Isolated oxygen and called it dephlogistonated air?
What he had was oxygen. What he thought he had was dephlogisticated air.
In order for us to understand the sentence, we must understand both “red” and “blue”. (To tell someone you call red blue is a different matter.)
(Edit: Removed “no”, because the distinction between sufficient and necessary conditions wasn’t necessary in this context.)
In the larger context, this will in practice be true.
To call red “flizzm”, “flizzm” need not have any meaning already. To call red “blue” likewise can be done without knowing that “blue” is even a word. But of course, it is already a word with a generally assigned meaning. In the real world, no-one is going to call red “blue” unless they do know that generally assigned meaning of “blue”, and they will have an ulterior end in calling the thing by a name everyone else uses for a different thing. Compare, for instance, the uses of the words “man” and “woman” in the context of transgender politics.