§56
I'm not totally sure what point Wittgenstein is making in §56. Is he challenging the view that simples/universals such as red must exist?
What if all of the samples of red were to be destroyed? - What if all of the red things in the world vanished? (Is this the kind of case Wittgenstein wants us to imagine?) Would the word 'red' continue to have a meaning? - Perhaps it would if we called to mind/remembered the colour - produced an image in our mind's eye.
But in that case it is unclear whether we've remembered correctly. - We have no standard of correctness in place. Isn't this enough to make Wittgenstein's point? - Why does Wittgenstein go on here?
Wittgenstein goes on to make the point that we would sometimes say that we must have misremembered something - even if something appears a different shade to us one day - if we make a colour out of a particular combination of chemical substances. There you might appeal to the fact that the colour has been produced by the same chemical combination as a reason for thinking that what you've produced is the same colour as before - even if your memory tells you different. In which case your memory does not always produce 'the verdict of the highest court of appeal'.
I took this section as a sort of response to an argument someone might make: to save the theory that "what the names signify must be indestructible", they could argue that what words like "red" signify is some kind of mental image or memory. Whenever we refer to anything in the world as red, we're comparing it to this mental image. And this image cannot be destroyed.
ReplyDeleteI think Wittgenstein's response is to point out that the relation between memories of colours and perceptions of colours is not as hierarchical as this - yes, in some cases we judge that a physical object has changed colour by 'comparing it' with memory, but in other cases we'd judge that we misremembered a colour, by comparison with a physical object. So a mental image cannot be the indestructible sample/standard for our colour concepts.
The section reminded me of this -
ReplyDelete"If a blind man were to ask me, 'Have you got two hands?' I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don't know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn't I trust my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested by what?"
On Certainty s. 125.
The context is kind of different, but I think it's related - in some circumstances we might test our eyes by looking for our hands, and in some (weird) cases the opposite. Likewise with colours.