GaryLouisSmith wrote: ↑October 14th, 2019, 2:58 pm
I think part of my problem in understanding your words is that you speak of a subject, a mind, as "exemplifying" a property such as red. The word I use is "intend". I intend that my water bottle is red. Or I intend the redness of by water bottle. I would never say that my mind is red. Exemplification is that little word "is".
I used the word 'exemplify' because I thought you use it as almost a synonym for 'intend' in the case of a subject's consciousness of something, like seeing red.
Also I would NOT say that the red that I see is "in" my mind. If it is in anything, it is in the water bottle and that water bottle is on my desk, not in my mind.
The water bottle is surely on your desk, but the red you see is not in the water bottle. It belongs to your relationship with the water bottle. It is in your seeing, not in what you see. It is the phenomenal correlate of certain light waves that reflect from the water bottle and hit your retina. Your mind is a self-contained information system that gets its information from the real world. The red water bottle belongs to that information system, but the bottle itself has no color, other than the light waves. But you are right when you say that you see the real water bottle. We perceive things, not perceptions, as some epistemic idealists seem to think.
I have no doubt that when you look at that water bottle you may see a color that is different from what I see, maybe not. Nonetheless, the color you see can be repeated countless times all through the world, all through time. That repetition is, as i see it, the appearance of the universal ever again. And a generic universal such as red doesn't always have to appear as the same shade and hue. Specific shades of red are all still red. Fire engine red is different from sunset red is different from popsicle red, but they are all red.
The problem is not that we all have different 'reds'. The problem is that our 'reds' cannot be compared at all because there are no criteria for such comparing until we have language where my 'red' and your 'red' mean the same. Only a reductive materialist may say that our reds can be similar in themselves before language becomes possible to make them public. Whether our ways of seeing the world in general, our phenomenal structures, are similar or dissimilar is a public, empirical fact, but the qualia that are the subject's way of seeing the world from its own point of view are inaccessible to others except by understanding what that subject says. This is how colors exist, we do not get them from heaven.
It is also part of my philosophy that the logical form of the world exists in the world. Sameness is part of that along with difference and all the quantifiers. Such logical properties don't depend on language.
I have only tried to analyze the logic of sameness and universals among conscious subjects, i.e. intersubjectivity. Therefore language necessarily comes into play. I leave the status of logic in general for future discussion.