[ExI] utah: RE: Frank Jackson's brilliant color scientist Mary

[John Clark]

On Thu, Dec 26, 2019 at 12:32 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I think it's only circular if there is only one example.  bill w
>

It's circular if you have no examples and only have a dictionary to work
with, a dictionary that is full of definitions that are made of words,
words that have their own definitions that are made of yet more words also
in the dictionary that are also made of words etc. Words describing words
can only get you so far, you've got to start out already knowing the
meanings of a few words and that can only come from real world examples.
And you'd usually need more than one example, otherwise when I pointed to a
ripe tomato and said "red" you'd have no way of knowing if "red" referred
to a color qualia or the fact that it's good to eat.

 John K Clark
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