Question How would you explain the color green to a blind child?

Accepted:
October 17, 2005

Comments

Many philosophers would say that you couldn't. This relates to Jackson's famous Mary case (previously discussed here - and originally laid out in Jackson's article "Epiphenomenal Qualia.") Jackson asks us to suppose that Mary is a color scientist who has spent her entire life in a black and white room. Though she has learned all the physical science relating to color, she has never experienced color herself. Now imagine that one day she is let out of the room and shown a ripe tomato. Jackson supposes that we would have the intuition that she has now learned something new about color. "Aha," she might say to herself, "So that's what the color red looks like." In other words, despite knowing all the physical facts about color, Mary did not know what it is like to experience the color red.

If you buy this argument, then it would seem to follow that even if you were to teach the blind child (who, I'm assuming, is blind from birth) all the physical science about the color green, you still wouldn't really have explained the color green to her - she still wouldn't know what it is like to see green.

In addition to Jackson's article, another article that takes up similar issues is Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?"

It might also be useful to distinguish the color green from the experience of that colour. Some philosophers (and scientistists, e.g. Galileo) have held that the color just is the experience, but it is m0re common and more plausible to distinguish them. Some would identify the colour with a disposition to produce the experience (which is distinct from experience itself, since it may be present in the dark), some would identify the colour with physical properties of the surfaces of objects, and there are other views as well. Anyway, if colour is say a property of surfaces to reflect light at certain frequencies, then this is something that can be explained to a blind person. But when it comes to the experience itself, it may well be that someone who has not had any visual experience is not in a position to have the full concept of color that the sighted have, and so not in a position to understand the experience as fully as the sighted can.

Question How would you explain the color green to a blind child? Accepted:October 17, 2005

Question How would you explain the color green to a blind child?

Accepted:
October 17, 2005