🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <schiller.726741489@hpas5> schiller@prl.philips.nl (schiller c) writes:
>christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:

      [...] Putnam's "What theories are not."  The position
>>outlined there is a little technical, but the central example is that one
>>cannot establish, through obsevation, that a thing is red unless one has
>>a conceptual scheme for colors that includes red in advance.
>
>You are right: one needs a concept of red. But a concept and a theory
>are two different things. Red is a concept formed by children
>before they are six months old, and it gives a name to certain class 
>of colours. When a child says: "it is red", it just says, "it has a similar
>look than all the previous things I have observed, which I call red".
>The statement "It is red" therefore just compares different observations.
>Not much of theory there.
>
>			Christoph Schiller
>

"gives a name to a certain class of colors"?  That is a thoroughly
theory-laden assertion.  
    My 2-year-old uses "green" as a term of
approbation (at least, that's the closest I can figure it).  He does not
have the technique of using color words to refer to what we adult language
users think of as colors.  So it is not "looks" he is comparing.  But he *is*
using linguistic utterances to express his comparison of observations. 
Only when he gains some sophistication will adults be able to straighten
out his conceptual scheme by explaining some theoretical considerations
about color-terms and what kind of observations are relevant to them.
    He may not yet have an explicit theory (or even an explicit concept) but
in order to interact with him you have to have theories and concepts, and
you have to be able to transmit them to him.  His (socially correct)
observations *will* be theory-laden.

Charles Creegan  NC Wesleyan College
I disclaim the below disclaimer.
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