Cheerskep
> I like the point -- though I'd want to change it to: "green can SUGGEST the
red not present", in the sense of "call to mind".
How can an inanimate object--or in this case, an abstracted quality--do
anything active like suggest? Isn't it you who are doing something
suggestive?
> Throughout philosophy we see alleged "screaming for" something not present .
Theists have often claimed that the existence of the world screams for the
concession that there must be a creator. Early (mistaken) philosophers of
language claimed (or, often, tacitly assumed) that because a given word
occasions very similar notionin millions of minds, it must be that the word
has a mind-independent "meaning" that each auditor is taking on board from
some extra-mental space.
When I read the Matisse quote, I understood him to mean that the painting's
complete lack of red produced a perceptible deficiency (of red) that was
unmistakable to a viewer. It "screamed for red" in the sense that a hungry
person screams for food. Is this how your reacted?
> Those philosophers -- seemingly determined to make a point about referring
or denoting or signifying, etc -- ignored the immense variety of notion that a
given word can occasion. So they never appreciated that "the meaning for
> me" is entirely a function of the mind's prior associations. That explains
why English terms "have no meaning" for the shepherd in the Andes. Differing
accumulated associations are why though Matisse's painting might scream to HIM
for red, I'm sure it wouldn't do so for all contemplators.
William's remark about the tube of red paint seemed to vindicate my point that
words, artifacts, and utterances contain formal configurations that persist
and convey their "meaning." The tube of paint contains stuff that conveys
"redness" to the viewer. The counterargument that some people are colorblind
initially made me rethink the idea that the tube "contained" redness, and
further that there is some kind of radical subjectivism [sorry, I forget the
name of the appropriate philosophical doctrine] that we cannot get around,
namely that all experience is percept and construct ("will and
representation"?). If so, it's impossible to get outside that subjectivist
paradox, so we are left with the decision to tacitly accept that there are
persistent things in the world and ways to speak of them (a variation on
Pascal's Bargain). Thus, the fact that some observers are impaired does not
alter the validity of statements about the "normal" manner of perception and
awareness. Your Andean shepherd is "deficient" in English, so the inherently
meaningful configurations of English "have no meaning" to him only to the
extent that they are inaccessible to him because he doesn't speak English. If
he did speak English, he could access them, and even if they referred to, say,
"bangers," the Andean could be shown how to access whatever that word's
configuration conveyed.
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Michael Brady
