>>>What follows is from my first September of blogging. A fairly trivial post, but since writing it I’ve seen it’s even more true than I originally realized.<<<
Tuesday is the day for my philosophy class’ weekly discussion section (at least for my discussion group).
Most of our discussion revolved around shades of blue, namely, whether we imagine anything truly new when we imagine a shade of blue in between two other shades of blue. We then talked about various possible sources of analogy: imagining pink from red and white, imagining green from yellow and blue, and imagining a missing tone in a series of tones.
Why spend so much time on shades of blue? Because Hume talks about them in his /Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding/. It stuck me how positively weird it is that philosophers can have a strong lasting influence not only on what questions we debate, but what examples we use to debate them. Thanks to Hume, every time people talk about the problem of induction, they talk about sunrises. Thanks to Popper, every time people talk about falsifiablism, they talk about ravens. Thanks to Russel, every time people talk about skepticism regarding the past, they ask if the universe could have sprung into existence five minutes ago, but never ask the same thing for last week. What’s up with this?
I am fairly sure that I was introduced to The Problem of Induction with swans rather than ravens. Hm…
A few different kinds of birds are used… swans, crows, ravens, but I think those are the only three.
Swans seem like a particularly elegant example given that black swans exist (and, indeed, are the only kinds of swans *I’ve* ever seen…) but weren’t “discovered” (by white people) until fairly recently
Well, these examples have been already framed, so there’s less effort to come up with a better example.
Of course, this is from me, who thinks some of these questions are entirely silly in the first place – define ‘new’; isn’t it just a new human thought? The shade of blue would, by definition, have existed already, since supposedly the entire visible spectrum is represented in the universe.
I have to ask what the hell philosophy hopes to accomplish by asking these sorts of things.
The question with the shade of blue thing is one of how we come up with our concepts, whether it is possible for our minds to come up with a shade of color we’ve never seen before.