From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 31 2002 - 22:42:14 MDT
At 09:16 PM 8/31/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>1. Do you believe that there is a big hot ball of gas
> about 8 light minutes from the Earth that we call
> "the sun"?
>(And I dearly pray that this can be answered with a simple
>"yes" or "no"
Too bad. Do I `believe' this assertion? Not exactly; a belief is a
conviction derived from confidence in another person's report
unsubstantiated in one's own direct experience. Do I `know' that it's true?
Not in the sense that I surely know the light coming from the small flat
circle up there is very bright and hurts my eyes if I gaze at it too long.
But in an extended sense of `know', drawing upon my education, I do indeed
know that the Sun is a big hot ball of gas about which our spherical world
orbits. Had I lived a thousand years ago, I would have `known' in exactly
the same sense that the Sun is a small bright flaming ball which orbits
about our flat world.
>2. If the answer to the first question is "yes", then I
> announce to the world that from now on my statements
> about the sun are to be *taken* as referring to that
> ball of gas, and *not* any possibly weird thing going
> on in people's brains.
Obviously it's neither, except in shorthand. The written or auditory
signifier `Sun' combines with the cognitive mapping inside your brain and
that of other contemporary English speakers to form a sign that references
the bright light up there. The sign points us to the thing in the outside
world, of which we experience very little direct information. Luckily we
can trust the reports of solar scientists and others who build up that
constructed mapping. Even today most humans, of course, don't know that
hifalutin stuff about absorption lines and proton-proton thermonuclear
exchanges, so they just assume it's a big hot bright... thing...
>P.S. Not only that, but you must be aware that 99.99%
> of everyone else's statements are *also* about
> that thing out there, and *not* about culturally
> derived constructs of one damn sort or another.
Some more bah baby talk, then: The construction of the Sun as a vast ball
of hot gas is not a physical construction like making a chair our of timber
and glue but a linguistic/cognitive mapping of a complicated experience
that each of us, as social animals, have of the world. Nobody, not the
wildest pomo social constructivist, denies that we experience the thing you
and I and the rest of us call the Sun. But surely you don't mean to say
that all those honest reporters of the ancient world were just pulling our
legs when they said it was a flaming chariot or `greater light' passing
overhead every day?
Damien Broderick
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