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Single Idea 8778

[filed under theme 18. Thought / E. Abstraction / 8. Abstractionism Critique ]

Full Idea

It is not true that men born blind can form no colour-concepts; a man born blind can use the word 'red' with a considerable measure of intelligence; he can show a practical grasp of the logic of the word.

Gist of Idea

Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently

Source

Peter Geach (Mental Acts: their content and their objects [1957], §10)

Book Ref

Geach,Peter: 'Mental Acts: Their content and their objects' [RKP 1971], p.35

A Reaction

Weak. It is obvious that they pick up the word 'red' from the usage of sighted people, and the usage of the word doesn't guarantee a grasp of the concept, as when non-mathematicians refer to 'calculus'. Compare Idea 7377 and Idea 7866.

Related Ideas

Idea 7377 Mary learns when she sees colour, so her complete physical information had missed something [Jackson]

Idea 7866 Mary acquires new concepts; she previously thought about the same property using material concepts [Papineau]

The 27 ideas from Peter Geach

10731 For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world [Geach]
10732 If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible [Geach]
10733 The abstractionist cannot explain 'some' and 'not' [Geach]
10734 Only a judgement can distinguish 'striking' from 'being struck' [Geach]
10735 Abstraction from objects won't reveal an operation's being performed 'so many times' [Geach]
22489 'Good' is an attributive adjective like 'large', not predicative like 'red' [Geach, by Foot]
2567 You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens [Geach]
2568 Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours [Geach]
8769 If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach]
8770 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group [Geach]
8771 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience [Geach]
8772 We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted [Geach]
8773 Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects [Geach]
8774 The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages [Geach]
8775 A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach]
8776 We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach]
8778 Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently [Geach]
8777 If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted? [Geach]
8779 We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience [Geach]
8780 Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach]
8781 The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach]
11910 Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach]
8969 We should abandon absolute identity, confining it to within some category [Geach, by Hawthorne]
16075 Denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory [Wasserman on Geach]
12154 Are 'word token' and 'word type' different sorts of countable objects, or two ways of counting? [Geach, by Perry]
16073 Leibniz's Law is incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate [Geach, by Wasserman]
12152 Identity is relative. One must not say things are 'the same', but 'the same A as' [Geach]