Originally posted by Palynka
But when you say a blind person cannot understand "blue" or a virgin cannot understand "sex", you tie personal direct experience with knowledge.
Here I disagree, one doesn't need to conduct quantum experiments to aquire some knowledge about quatum mechanics. If you've said that one cannot "create" knowledge without proper testing, I would absolutely agree believe. The blind can learn about colours without ever knowing the perception of them.
The blind can learn ABOUT colours without ever knowing the perception of them. (My all-caps added.)
Maybe I’m missing the point of this argument, but—
The thing is, that word
“about” is a huge one.
Imagine a person totally blind from birth. You teach him all the technical “textbook” details about color; perhaps you might “identify” each color with a musical tone, so he can gain a substitute aesthetic experience. One day in his early adulthood, say, he undergoes an operation (which was heretofore unavailable) which gives him perfect sight. Will he immediately recognize the various colors from the education you gave him while he was blind?
More importantly for the point at hand, I think, is, do you think he’ll just shrug his shoulders and say: “Oh, yeah. Now I see colors. No big deal. I learned all about them.”
No doubt, he will be able to identify the conventional names of the color-perceptions he now experiences, describe their wavelengths, etc., fairly quickly because of the education he received while blind.
But there is certainly a huge difference between knowing “about” color (or sex), and
knowing color.
In the end, conceptual/descriptive knowledge and perceptual (experiential) knowledge are simply not substitutes for one another. And in the case of color (and sex), among other things, I value the sensual experience far more than the descriptive or propositional knowledge.
EDIT: Of course, quantum mechanics deals with matters that are outside the range of our sense perception. In that case, ultimately experimental verification takes the place of sense perception, no? Ultimately, any scientific theory is subject to verification/falsification by empirical observation--even though it may take a long time in some cases to design and carry out experimentation.
EDIT^2: I am aware of the philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief. I find that to be an unnecessarily narrow definition
in everyday discourse. In the Greek, there are two terms:
episteme and
gnosis. If you’re using the word “knowledge” in strictly the first sense, I have no problem with that. Just substitute an appropriate term in my post where I chose to use knowledge also in the second sense.