I’m not sure what I’m meant to be convinced by in that Wikipedia article—can you quote the specific passage?
I don’t understand how that confirms you and I are experiencing the same thing we call orange. To put it another way, imagine a common device in Comedy of Errors: we are in a three-way conversation, and our mutual interlocutor mentions “Bob” and we both nod knowingly. However this doesn’t mean that we are imagining “Bob” refers to the same person, I could be thinking of animator Bob Clampett, you could be thinking of animator Bob Mckimson.
Our mutual interlocutor could say “Bob has a distinctive style”—now, assume there is nothing wrong with our hearing. We are getting the same sentence with the same syntax. Yet my mental representation of Bob and the visual style will be different to yours. In the same way that we could be shown the same calibrated computer screen which displays the same image of an orange, of a banana, we may appear to say “yep that orange is orange” “yep, that banana is a pale yellow”—but how do you know that my mental representation of orange isn’t your purple. When ever I say “purple” I could be mentally experiencing your orange, in the same way that when I heard “Bob” I’m making reference to Clampett not Mckimson?
I’ll certainly change the analogy if you can explain to me what I’m missing… but I just don’t understand.
I’m not sure what I’m meant to be convinced by in that Wikipedia article—can you quote the specific passage?
I don’t understand how that confirms you and I are experiencing the same thing we call orange. To put it another way, imagine a common device in Comedy of Errors: we are in a three-way conversation, and our mutual interlocutor mentions “Bob” and we both nod knowingly. However this doesn’t mean that we are imagining “Bob” refers to the same person, I could be thinking of animator Bob Clampett, you could be thinking of animator Bob Mckimson.
Our mutual interlocutor could say “Bob has a distinctive style”—now, assume there is nothing wrong with our hearing. We are getting the same sentence with the same syntax. Yet my mental representation of Bob and the visual style will be different to yours. In the same way that we could be shown the same calibrated computer screen which displays the same image of an orange, of a banana, we may appear to say “yep that orange is orange” “yep, that banana is a pale yellow”—but how do you know that my mental representation of orange isn’t your purple. When ever I say “purple” I could be mentally experiencing your orange, in the same way that when I heard “Bob” I’m making reference to Clampett not Mckimson?
I’ll certainly change the analogy if you can explain to me what I’m missing… but I just don’t understand.