I have been holding my breath this past month, not wanting to jinx the long-overdue electoral retribution awaiting George W. Bush and his gang of miscreants.
To kill time, I’ll write some more irrelevant garbage.
Today it concerns my 1990 Volvo 240 DL. I used to be bothered by the fact that I couldn’t decide whether it’s blue-green or green-blue. On sunny days it seems more blue than green; on cloudy days the opposite is true.
Well, it turns out there’s a word for that color (leaving aside the aforementioned meteorological circumstances):
Across cultures, people tend to classify hundreds of different chromatic colors into eight distinct categories: red, green, yellow-or-orange, blue, purple, brown, pink and grue (green-or-blue), say researchers in this week’s online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Now, this is not to be confused with Nelson Goodman’s grue, which is affected by temporal circumstances:
Nelson Goodman is best known for his “new riddle of induction”, which he set up by first defining what appears to be a new color adjective, grue: Something is “grue” if and only if it is examined before some particular time T and is green, or else is examined after time T and is blue. He also throws in, as a bonus, “bleen”, which applies to anything examined before time T and is blue, or which is examined after time T and is green. Now, he says, how do we know that the grass is green and not grue before that time T arrives, and that the sky is blue and not bleen? This is for him, and for numerous other analytic philosophers who jumped into the fray, a very worrisome problem indeed!
The guy who provided that summary (Scott Harrison) doesn’t think much of the notorious brainteaser and provides some argumentative details before offering a bit of “philosophical doggerel”:
Nelson Goodman seems quite keen
Induction yet to show anew
Is somewhat sick as will be seen
And may not be completely true.Is this leaf a lovely green?
Or is it rather colored grue?
Is the sky above quite bleen?
Or am I right in seeing blue?I really don’t care to be mean
And have no wish to Goodman skew;
But childish puzzles can demean;
Has he nothing else to do??—JSH, “On ‘The New Riddle of Induction'”
So … is it the seventh of November yet?
