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Re: [ProgSoc] XML languages



On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 08:54 +1000, John Elliot wrote:

(quoting Lakoff and Johnson)

> Both the phenomenology-first and science-first strategies are inadequate 
> in one way or other. If we take the phenomenology-first strategy, we 
> miss what we know scientifically is true about colour. We get the 
> scientific metaphysics of colour wrong. Our "truth conditions" do not 
> reflect what we know to be true. If we take the science-first strategy, 
> we do violence to the normal meanings of the word and to what ordinary 
> people mean by "truth".

The authors have snagged themselves on a false dilemma.

- The human-preceived-phenomenological theory neccessarily involves a
human brain and individual differences (including colour blindess) and
is therefore an unsound basis for a "truth" as the term is usually
understood. Agreed.

- The "science-first" theory is mis-presented as not being permitted to
incorporate a repeatable-but-constrained measurement procedure
(green-ness is a consequence of the interaction between inherent
properties of an object, and those of specified lighting conditions;
whether or not human retinal cones are involved). In fact, _all_
measurement procedures introduce analagous constraints; that local
lighting conditions are part of the measurement procedure be part of
determining "the colour of an object" is not inconsistent with
"science-first", in fact it's intrinsic. Plato sorted this out 2500
years ago (the allegory of the cave). High school physics students deal
with a simplified version of this in their first few lessons (that
measurement does not reveal underlying truth, merely an approximation;
that different measurement procedures of the same phenomenon will yield
_different_ (but hopefully overlapping) results).




- Raz


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