"This is White"

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Dinesh ^club

Let us suppose that I assert the proposition ‘This is white’, and my words are taken to refer, not, as they normally would, to some material thing, but to a sense-content. Then what I am saying about this sense-content is that it is an element in the class of sense-contents which constitutes ‘white’ for me; or in other words that it is similar in colour to certain other sensecontents, namely those which I should call, or actually have called, white. And I think I am saying also that it corresponds in some fashion to the sense-contents which go to constitute ‘white’ for other people: so that if I discovered that I had an abnormal colour-sense, I should admit that the sense-content in question was not white. But even if we exclude all reference to other people, it is still possible to think of a situation which would lead me to suppose that my classification of a sense-content was mistaken. I might, for example, have discovered that whenever I sensed a sense-content of a certain quality. I made some distinctive overt bodily movement; and I might on one occasion be presented with a sense-content which I asserted to be of that quality, and then fail to make the bodily reaction which I had come to associate with it. In such a ease I should probably abandon the hypothesis that sense-contents of that quality always called out in me the bodily reaction in question. But I should not, logically, be obliged to abandon it. If I found it more convenient, I could save this hypothesis by assuming that I really did make the reaction. although I did not notice it, or, alternatively, that the sense-content did not have the quality I asserted it to have. The fact that this course is a possible one, that it involves no logical contradiction, proves that a proposition which describes the quality of a presented sense-content may as legitimately be doubted as any other empirical proposition6 And this shows that such a proposition is not ostensive. for we have seen that an ostensive proposition could not legitimately be doubted. But propositions describing the actual qualities of presented sense-contents are the only examples of ostensive propositions which those who believe in ostensive propositions have ever ventured to give. And if these propositions are not ostensive, it is certain that none are. ~ Page 92

3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

3 years ago.

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