paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx schrieb:
>
> Pat
> thanks a lot for further illustrating the point
> The aborigenal example is really really funny, sounds absurd yet it
> must happen to all of us to mistake one thing
> for another for whatever reason (it would have been interesting to see
> where such belief came from)
>
> I am glad that is not just me missing the plot
>
> In the face of such challenges, I think we can only be cautios when
> passing judgement... (01)
In this philosophical discussion, as in most, there are three
overlapping plots: a philosophical-ontological, an epistemological, and
a semantical. With respect to the notion of 'truthlikeness', which I
have advertised, I have tried to show that it is semantically coherent,
that it fits an epistemological fallibilist realism ("we should be
cautious"), and that, therefore, semantic and epistemological
considerations should not force anyone to stop talking about a
mind-independently existing external world. *All* of Pat's examples take
such a world and knowledge of such a world for granted. (02)
Ingvar (03)
>
> Pdm
>
>
>
> On 5/9/07, * Pat Hayes* <phayes@xxxxxxx <mailto:phayes@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
> >In fact, you guys got me thinking.
> >
> >Would it be absolutely futile to say that that 'sky' does not exist
> >as such, as there is nothing there at all, really
> >yet it plays a very important role in human value system
> >
>
> Yes. This is an interesting example, in fact. I looked into this in
> detail when I was doing 'naive physics'. If you look at drawings done
> by kids in kindergarten, they will draw the sky as a band of blue
> color at the top of the drawing. If you ask them why, they will say
> that the sky is high up. They will resist any suggestion that the
> entire area above the horizon should be colored blue, because that
> would mean that the sky comes all the way down to the ground, which
> is false. So 'the sky' is not the actual atmosphere; they know that
> there is air down here and that we breathe it. A similar distinction
> is made between cloud (up in the sky) and mist (same stuff, but down
> at ground level). One is an object, the other is an environmental
> condition, a 'state' of the world. You can be in mist, but (until
> recently) never in a cloud.
>
> Another interesting datum is provided by the moon illusion. If you
> look at a full moon near the horizon it looks much larger than when
> it is high in the sky. This illusion vanishes if you look at the
> horizon upside-down by bending over and looking between your legs, so
> it is cognitive rather than optical. What is the source of this? I
> think it happens because the horizon is intuitively judged to be much
> further away than the sky 'is'. The horizon is about 8 miles away.
> Our visual systems see the sky as a surface, and judging from the
> apparent size ratio of the moon illusion, I think we 'see' the sky as
> a surface about 2 miles up. If you have ever tried to judge distances
> on a level plain, 2 miles is about as far as you can see a human
> being or a large animal as a distinct object, a speck. Maybe these
> distances and the associated perceptual judgements were wired into
> our brains when we were still trying to avoid being eaten by lions in
> the savannah.
>
> There are other data, all however anecdotal. One I love was told to
> me by an anthropologist who visited a single Australian tribe on
> several occasions and befriended them, arriving each time in a small
> passenger plane. In an idle conversation one of the elders asked what
> it felt like when one got smaller. It emerged that watching the plane
> fly he had decided that it got smaller as it rose, until it was only
> about a few inches long. That much technological magic he could
> understand and respect: but he was worried about how the people
> inside could be shrunk and then later restored without it hurting.
> Again, the idea seems to arise from the perception that things 'in
> the sky' are in fact much closer than they really are, because the
> sky can't be as high as it really is. In this case, the elder seems
> to have seen the sky as only about half a mile high.
>
> There is lots of evidence for a "fisheye lens" distortion in distance
> perception: we tend to underestimate distances proportionately as
> they are taken further from us. (Nicely illustrated by the famous
> Steinberg New Yorker drawing of the world seen from 9th Avenue
> http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/assets/2/50326_l.jpg
> <http://www.thenewyorkerstore.com/assets/2/50326_l.jpg> ) It may be
> that direct visual perception of objects, such as the horizon line,
> acts as a kind of corrective to this, but that there isn't anything
> in the atmosphere to produce the same corrections as terrestrial
> objects and landscapes do.
>
> Anyway, a fascinating topic. And you are right, there really isn't
> any such thing as 'the sky' as a place or volume, and yet we talk and
> think as though there was: any we also know that we cannot define it.
> And yes, this is a real challenge to ontologists, if they set out to
> capture intuitive meanings like this. (Not all of them do, of course.)
>
> Pat Hayes
> --
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>
>
>
> --
> Paola Di Maio****
>
>
> Lecturer and Researcher
> School of Information Technology
> Mae Fah Luang University
> Chiang Rai
> Thailand
> *********************************************
>
> --
> Paola Di Maio****
>
>
> Lecturer and Researcher
> School of Information Technology
> Mae Fah Luang University
> Chiang Rai
> Thailand
> *********************************************
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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> (04)
--
Ingvar Johansson
IFOMIS, Saarland University
home site: http://ifomis.org/
personal home site:
http://hem.passagen.se/ijohansson/index.html (05)
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