 I'd been going to call, oh before we go on actually, the final exam is in 100 genetic and plant biology, not this room, so post-genetic and plant biology, we're over at the other end of campus, it's over at the science end, completely out of my control, I don't know why they said it like that, but let me just highlight that, okay, it's on the study questions I mailed to you, the time and place that on the study questions I mailed to you, yeah it's not a secret, but I just want to highlight because you might naturally suppose it's going to be here, and it is not, we might even come round here on the day just to check that nobody's showing up, okay, okay, does that make sense, 100 genetic and plant biology, yep, how many blue books, well as many as you think you're going to write, if you're asking what's your best strategy in the exam, well you want to hit a balance between writing lucid well-structured essays and just pouring out everything, every bit of progress you've made, if you see what I mean, so you don't want to do it in just some unstructured mess, but you want to get out as much volume as you can, so I would try and take as many blue books as you reasonably think you might cover, yeah, there's a lot of personal variation in this and there really isn't any golden rule, but speaking subjectively my own inclination for myself would always be to write as much as possible, that's not, I'm not giving you a wink here, do you have any, that's true, irrelevance is a bad idea, yeah, irrelevance is a bad idea too, I mean the thing is, yeah, that's true, so you have to hit the right balance, yeah, anything else about the exam? Okay, so I was going to call today's lecture resolution of outstanding problems and then I changed it to some ideas and then I changed it to an idea and then I thought, well it's a set of a review, meaning that there's no particular set reading for this, okay, so let's start by going right back to where we came from with modes of presentation and informative identities and then I want to make a suggestion in the second section about how in the most basic cases to address the problem of informative identities and then go on and look at how that relates to rustle and acquaintance and one last time just to broaden the field of view to see what large philosophical questions are right beside us the whole time as we go through these topics, so modes of presentation, remember that these guys, Percy Blakene is the Scarlet Pimpernel, Kent is Superman, you're the same person being referred to twice and you ask, well, how can that be informative? You have, and then you think, well maybe there is some descriptive material associated with the two sides that is different and that's how it's informative and what's so engaging about Frega is that when you're thinking about these examples, I think perceptual examples are the ones that really make most sense. If you think of the earth as being given like this or the earth as being given like that, then in these two ways of being given the earth, because those two ways are being given, the identity is informative, if you were given the earth in the same way twice, then the identity wouldn't be informative and the puzzle is to explain what that notion, I think in the most basic cases, the perceptual cases, in most basic perceptual cases, how would you characterize that notion of a perceptual way of being given an object? It doesn't apply just to heavenly bodies, if you've got a building you can be given the same building now this way and now that way and it's informative to be told, it's the same building. So how you describe that difference in the way the building is being given here and the way the building is being given there, how do you characterize that difference in the perceptual mode of presentation? It said, if you think about examples like Sir Percy Blakeney, then the natural way to do it, and this is what description theories do, the natural way to do it is to think there are some representations I associate with Sir Percy Blakeney, the names Sir Percy Blakeney, there are different representations I associate with the name the Scarlett Pimpernel and because they're different that's why the identity is informative. Now although that's very natural and intuitive for these cases, it just can't be the general answer and the reason it can't be the general answer is that wherever you have representations you get mode of presentation phenomena. Anytime you have a representation you can ask and how is that representation identifying the thing out there. So those associated representations, if you ask what they are you're going to get in their descriptions, general terms, more singular terms, maybe demonstratives, the man I met last Wednesday is something like that, that man, and that problem of informative identities is just going to come up for whatever terms you have in these associated representations. So that can't be the general answer though there's a difference in associated representations because this difficulty of mode of presentation comes up here. So the natural idea is that these linguistic things, these representations that are being associated with the signs, at the end of the day there's got to be a way of describing modes of presentations that is purely perceptual, that is purely to do with your experience of the object. I said we need that notion of experience anyway if you're to explain how it is that your knowledge of the truth condition of a statement can be giving you knowledge of what you're about in using the statement. So you might try thinking over like this, this is something like this is how Russell was thinking of acquaintance. Acquaintance in Russell is a generic relation that you can stand in to lots of different things and if you take a notion like being a yard away from, you can be a yard away from practically anything, right? You can be a yard away from a chair, a yard away from a person, a yard away from a neutron bomb, you can be a yard away from just about anything. A yard away is a generic notion and what's on the either end of the yard away thing can vary a lot. So the idea about acquaintance is you can think of acquaintance as a generic relation of consciousness that you can stand in to lots of different things. You can stand in that generic relation to a color, to a shape, to a person and so on. So I can be acquainted now with this person, now with that person and that's a matter of what's on the other end of the relation, what thing it is that's in the other end of the relation. And now the puzzle is if what I've got is this generic relation of experience, how can I make sense of the possibility of informative identities? What does it mean to say if I've got one in the same thing on either end or on the other end of the acquaintance relation in these two cases? What does it mean to say is being given to me in different ways? If that's not a matter of different descriptions being associated with a sign. And as we saw causal theories of reference, it's not that they're not, they don't in themselves have some truth, but they just don't help with this issue. They don't tell you how to address this issue of themselves. So Russell's own answer was basically to say you can only be acquainted with things for which these problems of our informative identity don't arise. If you're acquainted with a color, then there's no such thing as being acquainted with the color in a different way and being informative to be told is the same color. And the trouble with that is that there's a real pressure towards idealism, if you think of it like that. Because if you think that what you're, the foundation or all your reference to the world is stuff that you can't be given it in two different ways, then that stuff that you're thinking about in the first place is going to be something like sense data, objects of which you have comprehensive knowledge for which there's no, there are no informative identities. And that approach in terms of informative identity, in terms of special objects of reference, you think of when you think you're not referring to the chair ordinarily, you're referring to something like the experienced chair or the lived chair. And there's a whole, there are whole schools of philosophy that regard this kind of talk as extremely insightful when you talk about the lived world as a world in which informative identities are not possible. And the trouble with it is, is that it really does involve this press to idealism. If you're going to be a realist about the objects you see around you, then you just have to acknowledge that there can be different takes on one and the same object. So that's the puzzle of informative identities. I think the basic puzzle is how do we characterise our ordinary knowledge of what a sign stands for in the case where we're talking about something we're perceiving. I hope there's nothing wildly surprising in that. Is that right? Are we all on the bus? That's what I think we've got to. Hello? Maybe I'm just too nervous. I'm always haunted by the fear that I'm the only one who understands what Nerf I'm talking about. Okay, thank you. Okay, in that case, let's proceed. Here is what I want to suggest is the solution to, or at any rate, let's not get too carried away here, one part of the solution to this puzzle about informative identities and that's the distinction between selection and access. The general thing I got to last time was if you're looking at a sea of faces and someone saying to you, look at that woman there and talking about that woman, then I can't be said to understand who you're talking about to know who you're referring to until I manage to single out and experience that person, right, until I managed to attend specifically to that person. Now, what are you doing? What is going on when just as you look around the room, your gaze picks on a single person? What is happening there? I think you can make a distinction between a property that just figures in the phenomenal character of your experience, a property that's making a difference to your experience and accessing a property of an object. So this might not make much sense right now, but let's just get the words, the syntax of the distinction in place, that sometimes a property is making a difference to what your experience is like. So if your gaze roams around the room, then there is a very rich multicolored display and so on. So all those characteristics of the room are making a difference to how your experience is, but only some of the properties of people in the room are being made explicit in your experience. There are two roles that a property can have in your attending to an object. One is that property can be what lifts out the object from its background and another is you can get knowledge that the thing has a property from your encountering it. So let me give an example. Statistically there are bound to be some people in the class who can't see what's going on here at all, but this is one of the standard color vision tests. So this is, I think anyway, it's a greenish-goldy five on a red background. Yes? That's all right. So if you can't see, let's take my word for it. It's a greenish-gold five on a red background. And the point about the standard color vision chart like this is that there is nothing that systemically differentiates the five from the background other than the color. It's not the lightness or anything else delineating the five. The scatter of luminance here is just random except for that systematic variation in Q. So you can see the five. You're only doing it because you're having experience of color. Now, when you have this ability to lift out objects from their backgrounds, that's not something that applies by color. That's not just something that applies only to the special case in who you're looking at a chart. And if you are a tiger out hunting, then tigers don't have great color vision. But what you are going to do is, if you are hunting, what you are going to do is identify objects from their backgrounds using color. And if you are out in the savannah, then what you have to watch for is lifting out the tiger from his background by the color. Okay? But you could be able to lift out the thing from the background by its color, even though you're not able to say what the color of an object is. Children learn color words at a relatively late age. In 1900, the children were eight years old before they learned more than the six basic color words. Eight. I mean, even has gone down a lot in the last century because, presumably, because children live in highly color-coded environments these days. So the colors are constantly given significance for them. But it's still very difficult for children to learn color words. It's harder to learn color words than it is to learn most other color words for observable characteristics. You can take a child of two that has literally hundreds of words in its vocabulary and show it a red, do the Wittgenstein thing. You showed a red thing. You showed a green thing. You showed a red thing. You showed a green thing. You say, that's red. That's green. That's red. That's green. You do that seven or eight hundred times and the child still doesn't get it. Still doesn't know quite what you're after. Color, being able to label the colors of things is quite an achievement. But still, children have color vision in place by the time they are two or three months old. So a child of two or three would be able to see the five against his background, would be able to see the tiger as an object here. So you can use the color to lift out the object from his background, even though you can't make explicit what that color is. So young children are able to use color vision to distinguish objects from their backgrounds, way before they're able to attend to the colors. There are also cultural things here. The great neurophysiologist, Luria, was out in Uzbekistan and a peasant said to him at one point, us Uzbeks don't know the colors of things and so we call everything blue. What the peasant was saying there was they've never got over that hump. They've never managed to crack through and use the color word systematically. But somebody says that isn't saying we're all color blind. They can use color vision just as well as anyone else to detect objects. The ancient Greeks seem to have had a quite different kind of color of vocabulary to the one we have now. My impression is that what we now think of as vocabulary referring specifically to the colors, the ancient Greeks just didn't have names for colors are kind of tangled up with names for kinds of substances. You don't get a filtering off of color specifically. So you can see the five here before you can access the colors. You wouldn't say, that's very good, this is my next point actually, but don't let me sweep you aside. Come back in a second. What I'm saying is you can see the five before you can verbally access the colors, before you can make the color verbally explicit. As you say that there is more to being able to attend to the color than that and you might be able to do things like say these are red berries. Red berries always made me sick last time. I'm not going to eat those. You might be able to do color induction. That'd be one way in which your ability to attend to the colors could come out even though you couldn't make it verbal. You couldn't make it verbally explicit. Or you might be able to sort a whole bunch of things into piles of the same color or rank them from light to dark. Something like that, yeah. You could do that without being able to make the colors verbally explicit and then you'd still be attending to the color. But the thing is being able to see the five, being able to see the tiger is more basic than any of these things. These are different kinds of tasks. What's going on, I mean it's very clear if you think about the tiger's color vision. Tigers do have pretty rudimentary color vision but they do need some kind of color vision if they're going to distinguish their prey, if they're going to use vision to distinguish their prey. So being able to lift that thing out from its background using its color doesn't of itself guarantee that you're going to be able to do any of these further tasks. A child who passes the color vision test who says that's a five might not be able to sort objects into like colored groups, might not be able to say well that's a red berry, the red berries always make me sick or whatever. And when you think about it from the point of view of a tiger, tigers are, how should I say, tigers are severely practical in their interests. What the tiger wants is the object. I mean if it's a tiger out hunting fives, if you see what I mean, you see what I mean? Well if it was a tiger out hunting things that are differentiated from their background principally by their color, right? That makes sense. A tiger, what do tigers care about color? Tigers are going to say oh what a fantastic blue. You see what I mean? The tiger wants the object. Everything is entirely instrumental for getting at the object. So the tiger isn't going to attend to the color at all. The tiger has no interest in the color. It's not going to stack everything into groups of similar color. It's not going to do color inductions even. I shouldn't. It was to get the object. So you being able to use the color to lift the object out from its background is one thing. And being able to attend to the color or access the color of the object is another. Can you put your hand up if that seems pretty plain at this point? That's not bad. It's not what you hoped for. It's not bad. So please feel free to challenge me in this if you don't quite get this yet. Are you happy with the idea? How about the idea that animals or young children could use color to pick out objects from their backgrounds, even though they don't have any further capacity to make color explicit or to use it in any other cognitive task? Okay. Yes. That's right. They'd be able to identify each berry and say there's a berry. Look at that one. But getting the commonality in color might be beyond you. Yeah. That's the thing that children seem to find so difficult. Darwin famously thought that his own children were colorblind because he seemed smart enough, but he just couldn't get them to get the color word. So just that thing you say, that's right. That's right. That's right. And they don't get it. There's actually a word in German for it for this phenomenon with children. Farben, boom height, color stupidity. You've got people who are perfectly smart, but the colors. Okay. So if you're in this situation, you can use the colors to lift out the objects, then you certainly might not be able to introspect the color dimension of your visual experience. You just can't attend to that kind of thing at all. Now I say that illustrates the two roles for a property in visual experience. One is, is what you use in your experience to lift out the object from his background. And the other thing is, it can be a property of the thing that you access that you do make explicit that you give a verbal label to, or that you use for some further cognitive tasks, like sorting or color induction. So this is right. You can see the five before you can access the colors. You can experience the object before you can access the colors before you can access its color. But in order to see the five, the color has to be making a difference to your experience. Right? Otherwise, the color vision test would be this would be useless as a test for color vision. I mean, when they're doing this color vision test, you don't say, what color is the five? You say, is there a number there? And the answer is, it's a five. And that's good enough for a clinician to conclude that you have experience of the color. Yeah. And if you're, you can imagine a situation where your experience of the color here was completely uniform, but you had some kind of blind sight style guessing. Yeah, if the clinician said to you, guess what numbers there and by God, you always get it right. Right? You could tell a story where that could happen. But in that situation, you wouldn't be having conscious experience of the five. In order to have conscious experience of the object here, you must have experience of the color. And what I'm saying is you just can't, it's not exactly you got a contradiction if you deny that, but you can't imagine it. You can't imagine a situation in which someone's looking at a scene like this that is uniform in experienced color, but nonetheless, experiencing the object. Yeah. So in this case, seeing the five means the color is making a difference to your visual experience. And the color then can be defining the mode of presentation of the object. The color defines the way you're given the object. It's not a description is not a representation that you have in your head. The representations you have in your head are the characteristics of the object that you access. This is something much more primitive. There's you and the object out there. But in order to be differentiating the object from his background, there have to be some characteristics that allow you to see the object. The color in this case is a very pure case. In the case of the shed, in that case of the shed, in that case of the shed, the properties of the thing here that allow you to lift out that structure as an object from his ground. These are not descriptions. These are not descriptions that you understand the descriptions you understand the things you access. These properties are figuring how should I say like the color of the five in a more subterranean way. They're not things that you're attending to. All you're attending to is the shed. But we can look and say we can look at your sideways on as it were and say what characteristics of the shed are allowing you to lift it out and differentiate it from his background. So if you wanted to camouflage the shed, that's what you need to know how to go about that, how to make a blend with his background. And since the properties that allow you to lift out the shed, to select the shed here, are different to the properties that are allowing you to select the shed here, that's why we say you have a different mode of presentation in the two cases. So that resolves the problem of mode of presentation for a perceptual case. A rude interruption from the real world. Okay. No spontaneous cheering. Yes. Only objections. Yes. Yes. Yeah. The morning star and the evening star is to my ear anyway, it's a little bit of an intermediate case. Because I don't think I have ever knowingly looked up at the night sky and said, Oh, that one's the evening star. But you know, I've talked about them so much that I think I understand the words. So it's more like the name of a historical figure or something for me. Yeah. Well, I have to say this is not worked out. It's taken me forever to get this picture. Right. But here's what I think that if you think about the problem with Sir Percy Blakeney and the Scarlet Pimpernel, the way I set up the problem there was, you can say I get different descriptions associated with the two names. And that's letting me, that's what makes you identity informative. And then I said, but now you've got to regress, because those representatives, representations, those descriptions, they themselves will have more representation phenomena associated with them. So it's got to bottom out somewhere without representations. And that's what I'm suggesting is so helpful about this picture that you're not talking about representation at all here. You're talking about the causal work that a property of the object is doing in allowing you to see it. Yeah. So maybe you could have some descriptive picture for Sir Percy Blakeney or the morning star. But say, nonetheless, in the most fundamental cases, the perceptual cases is not descriptions. But there's something a little bit more than that. Once you get that distinction between selection and access, you could think that, say with Goodle, what's important about the descriptions associated with the name Goodle might not be that they accurately fix the reference of Goodle is rather that they are what let you lift Goodle out, select Goodle as the object you want to think and talk about, not that they give a correct descriptive identification of it. What I mean is, if you look at this case again, if you think of seeing the five, then suppose, can you make sense of this? Suppose you're one of these people who are a young child or an animal or something, and you can't make color explicit. But there's something, can you make sense of the idea that you've got an illusion of color with the five? Maybe this is not quite as bright a green as it looks to you. It would be strange to call that an illusion because all you've got here is a system for letting you see the object. And so long as it lets you see the object one way or another, there's nothing for you to be taken in by. So it doesn't matter whether the color here, whether what you're experiencing is, whether what you're doing is correctly experiencing the color or not. Or to put it another way, I don't think it really makes sense to talk about experiencing the color correctly if it's something you can't access. All it matters is that one way or another, that property lets you lock on to the thing. So the tiger, I mean, it would be crazy to say, ah, yes, but the tiger has spectrum inversion. So it really makes mistakes about the colors of objects the whole time. All that matters is that it gets the object. So you could go back and say I want to think about descriptions associated with names in terms of how they let us select the objects. And so long as one way or another, those descriptions let us select the objects and then access further characteristics of them. That's all that matters. It doesn't really matter whether the descriptions are right or not. So that's obviously programmatic, but that's how I think that's the path forward. Does that make sense? So say if you showed like there's this. There's one, yeah. And so what if, okay, you don't, I guess you're very new to this type of seeing this thing. And a group of people colluded to believe that there's a five on there, but you correctly see that there's no five. To make you think there's a five. I mean, I see the colluded to say to you there's a five there, you know. Yes, right. And so you correctly see it, but then you think it's a five. Yeah, that could happen. Yeah. Um, well, it's an interesting case. I don't it's an interesting case. And I don't think the I don't think it's really an objection to what I'm saying. It's a point to keep in mind that you might, yeah, you might think you were experiencing a five, even though you weren't. That'll be the case. Right. If they really get at you and you say, yes, I can see it too. I can see it. Right. I see the five of the old shirt. Hallelujah. He sees the five. Then you could really be making a mistake there. You're not infallible about this. Yeah. About whether you are seeing a five. Yeah. So the reason I say it doesn't really tell against my point is that it's still true that if you are seeing the five, there's the role that the cover is playing in presenting the five to you. Yeah. Okay. I just realized it's time's pressing on a little bit. That is actually the main point I wanted to suggest in the class today. Let me just, okay, let me just rapidly move on to some points that came up when we were thinking about Putnam on brains and vats and how you could be acquainted with the medium sized world. I was suggesting that Russell said you're acquainted with your sense data. And that's all and all the pressures making use to make you say you're acquainted only with your sense data. And then with brains and vats and so on. The idea was that your sense data was going on in your mind. That's just signs of some unknown physical reality out there. And I think what lies in back of a lot of this, these problems about reference, is actually a much bigger background picture that we tend to have about our relation to the physical world. I mean if you ask what's really here in this space time zone in the room, the natural answer is it's just a configuration of atoms occupying nothing like the people if you look to this room the way physics looks at it. You wouldn't see the people, you'd just see fundamental atoms circulating in the void and they might be producing quite different experiences and all of us maybe no experiences and some of us. So physics makes you think what's out there in the world is something alien, is something hard to picture, not really blue, but that's just a kind of artist's impression of this alien world and none of the stuff we actually care about is out there in the physical world. It is a bleak, yep, there's a kind of metaphysical terror you experience when you understand what physics is telling you about what's really there and the natural rate in particular there's nothing to refer to, right? And that's really Putnam's picture, there's this alien stuff out there and one way or another it's causing us, that's really what we're talking about, but we don't refer to the stuff we think we're referring to. But before physics you didn't have to think of it like that. Before physics you could have thought of the medium sized world as really there just the way you think it is with all the other people and conscious experience you can think of just the way Russell was thinking of it as a relation, or the way Russell should have been thinking of it if he'd been, anyway, a relation, experience as a relation to the qualitative characteristics, the colors and so on out there. So if you can think of color, for example, as describing the world at a higher level than the level of basic physics then that's when you get the picture that experience is a relation between you and what's out there and you can explain modes of presentation in the most basic case by cat picking out the properties of the object that allow you to see them and they're not representations, they're not things in the mind at all. It's because all this stuff gets squashed back into the head by physics that we think, well there's no choice but to think of everything in representational terms because what's going on in the brain of the mind that is representing the world, well all we need to be able to do if we're to get a recognizable picture of ordinary reference and ordinary modes of presentation is to think in terms of experience as a relation to high level properties of the medium-sized world and those properties as allowing us to pick out the objects that we then go on to talk about. So you could think of this as after this hellish world presented to us by physics and brains and vats and all that, you could think of this as paradise regained, the world there, out there, just the way you think it is with all its colors and smells and tests and on that exuberant note I want to say I've taught this class a few times it has just been wonderful doing this with you guys, I really have enjoyed that. Okay, thank you very much.