blowfish posted:the ancient Greek poets' wine dark sea was not described as blue most likely because the colour blue had yet to be invented as a distinct colour from that of crappy wine (there nobody talks about things being a beautiful shade of blue in ancient Greek poetry). With regards to this specific example, it is just as likely, as first postulated by Gladstone, that Homer was in fact colour-blind - this is a view that has been taken up in some of the more modern scholarship of his work. Although it is true that blue in particular seems to be very malleable between cultures.
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Aug 17, 2015 01:07
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rudatron posted:It's a difficult question to answer, the easiest being that something is supernatural if it cannot be mechanistic/is arbitrary. If an ESP field existed, then you expand nature to fill that new area, and what was previously miraculous now becomes natural. The only way you couldn't do that is if there wasn't a way to mechanize the new field you're trying to cover. So the end of basic & pure cause and effect (even if this is only done by adding something to causality - such as telos). Yeah, but at that point you're really having a Foucauldian about schematisms and not an argument about the existence of something supernatural as that word is commonly understood (that is to say, by definition not explicable in mechanistic terms) IMO. The things that we think can be interrogated scientifically, and where those things fit in to the structure of our knowledge are constantly shifting. But that is very different from the belief that those things change in their underlying nature when they make that epistemic shift in our minds (something supernatural becomes natural by virtue of that epistemic moment).
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Aug 17, 2015 11:01
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I think the point is we've acquired an intelligence sufficient to interogate the accuracy of our beliefs so we're not stuck using a shorthand outside of its applicable range, which has made human beings unusually adaptable and able to cope with change - we can recognise when our behaviour is no longer situationally appropriate and try to develop new behaviours in a way no other organism can. That doesn't make accuracy our primary drive but we do have a mechanism for evaluating the effectiveness of our behaviours.
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Aug 23, 2015 13:48
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