display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
6860 | How can one discriminate yellow from red, but not the colours in between? [Williamson] |
Full Idea: If one takes a spectrum of colours from yellow to red, it might be that given a series of colour samples along that spectrum, each sample is indiscriminable by the naked eye from the next one, though samples at either end are blatantly different. | |
From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.151) | |
A reaction: This seems like a nice variant of the Sorites paradox (Idea 6008). One could demonstrate it with just three samples, where A and C seemed different from each other, but other comparisons didn't. |
19358 | Colour and pain must express the nature of their stimuli, without exact resemblance [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: Ideas such as those of colour and pain are not arbitrary. ...That is not God's way ...I would say there is a resemblance of a kind, not a perfect one, but a resemblance in which one thing expresses another through some orderly relationship between them. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
A reaction: The main point of Locke's idea of 'secondary' qualities is that (unlike the 'primary' ones) they bear no resemblance to their stimuli. It's not much of an argument from Leibniz, to say that is not God's way, but he has a vast system to support his claim. |
12948 | A pain doesn't resemble the movement of a pin, but it resembles the bodily movement pins cause [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: It is true that pain does not resemble the movement of a pin; but it might thoroughly resemble the motions which the pin causes in our body, and it might resemble them in the soul; and I have not the least doubt that it does. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
A reaction: He may not have the least doubt, but the rest of us do, I should think. Try as I will, I cannot see any resemblance between pain and a motion. What feeling does a pendulum resemble? |
13005 | Truth arises among sensations from grounding reasons and from regularities [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: The truth of sensible things is established by the links amongst them; these depend upon intellectual truths, grounded in reason, and upon observations of regularities among sensible things themselves, even when the reasons are not apparent. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
A reaction: It's not clear why regularities would establish truths, given that most hallucinations have regularities in them. I'm thinking that Leibniz is not sufficiently rationalist here, and that it is the rational coherence of experience which validates it. |