Today's Ontology Quiz

By -
Are rainbows real? Discuss.

Comments

  1. Unknown7:46 PM

    Rainbows are physical phenomena...On the other hand, if you are asking whether colors really exist or are something 'created' by our perception, I don't know.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bob Murphy11:13 PM

    Yes. To rule them out because they are not "as real" as, say, the dining room table is to commit a crude materialistic fallacy.

    (Gene if you start arguing with me on this one too, I'm quitting.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jim Wetzel12:26 PM

    Tongue-in-cheek answer from optics: no. (There's no place to put a screen on which the rainbow is formed.) However, a photograph of a rainbow is real.

    More serious answer: what does "real" mean?

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah12:01 AM

    Jim's question was the crux of this post: What do we mean by "real"? Rainbows are an interesting case, because they were examples used by some in the "secondary qualities" school (Galileo, Descartes, Locke, etc.) as something that was not real. (I forget offhand which of them used it, so please don't take me to mean those three I mentioned did so.)

    Now, my favorite definition of "real" omes from -- and this is going to be a big surprise to Bob -- Oakeshott, who said (I quote from memory), "Everything is real if not taken for other than what it is." In other words, "real" and "unreal" apply not so much to the world but to our ideas. The rainbow is perfectly real if we look up and think, "There is some light being beautifully broken up into its component wavelengths by some rain." It's unreal if we think it's a bridge in the sky we might cross under.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous1:24 AM

    "Everything is real if not taken for other than what it is."

    Is a square circle real?

    ReplyDelete
  6. gcallah1:38 AM

    "Is a square circle real?"

    Sure, it's a real impossibility.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more