E.G.

5 responses to “Are there any trivially luminous conditions?”

1. 

   don k

   February 17, 2005

   It is merely a matter of how you define it. The important issue is the experience of the condition. If you want to call it “feel” and attach the notion of “conscious” to the experience of “feel” then so be it. Seems that the matter is semantic. If luminous means conscious of being involved in the condition that is one thing but if luminous merely means being in that condition it is another. Define it any way you want and live with it.

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2. 

   Richard

   February 17, 2005

   Schmold1 might work if we accept (KK_c): if you know you feel cold, then you know that you know you feel cold.

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3. 

   enwe’s meta-blog

   February 17, 2005

   2/18/2005: Philosophical Weblogs, Daily overview

   Dave Chalmers: All the Power in the World

   <

   div style=”margin-left: 40px;”>[Peter Unger has put six of the ten chapters of his forthcoming book <a href=”http://www.nyu.edu/gsa

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4. 

   enwe

   February 18, 2005

   Only a two short (and perhaps stupid) questions. Firstly: What do you mean with “know” in “if a condition is “luminous,” then if one is in that condition, one is in a position to know one is in that condition”? I mean: Is that some sort of justified belief?
   And secondly: Your write that
   “A condition would be “trivially luminous” if it were luminous by definition. For instance, “feeling cold” would be trivially luminous if it were part of the definition of “feeling cold” that one who feels cold is in a position to know one feels cold”.
   Well, what do you mean with “is in a position”?
   Does it mean:
   A feels cold -> A is able to know that A feels cold
   or that:
   A feels cold ->A knows that A feels cold?

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5. 

   david

   February 18, 2005

   Richard,
   Well, even if your KK_c is necessarily true (which I somewhat doubt), it probably is not true in virtue of the definition of “know”. So unless we incorporate something like KK_c into the definition of “schmold1,” I don’t see how KK_c could make schmold1 trivially luminous.
   So, suppose we do incorporate something like KK_c into the definition of schmold1. In that case I suppose we’d get something like this:
   Schmold3: The condition of feeling cold, knowing that one feels cold, and knowing that one knows one feels cold
   But now we’ve got the same problem all over again, since one could know that one knows one feels cold without knowing that one knows that one knows one feels cold.
   Something like KK_c might work here, though. If so I’d like to see how.
   Enwe,
   I’m intentionally leaving “know” open here. Actually, I’m not sure it matters much what “know” means. I think you could generate a similar problem with “believe,” or “doubts that,” or “wishes that,” etc.
   By “in a position to” I mean something like “able to.” If one is in a position to know one is in condition C, then one could “very easily” know that one is in C. But as with “know,” I don’t think very much hinges on what “in a position to” really means. I think we’d have a similar problem if we just dropped “in a position to” from the above formulations altogether.
   By the way, if anyone’s curious, my motivation to think about this question comes from chapter 4 of Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits, where Williamson presents an argument designed to show that conditions like “feeling cold” aren’t luminous. For reasons I won’t go into now, I think that if we found a way to define a trivially luminous condition, we could show that Williamson’s argument fails.

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