Thomas Nagel's
use on
blind
extracted from "What is it like to be a bat?"(1974)
Thomas Nagel's
use on
blind
extracted from "What is it like to be a bat?"(1974)
Mitzub'ixi Quq Chi'j
(The problem is not confined to exotic cases, however, for it exists between one person and another. The subjective character of the experience of a person deaf and blind from birth is not accessible to me, for example, nor presumably is mine to him. This does not prevent us each from believing that the other's experience has such a subjective character.)
We would have to develop such a phenomenology to describe the sonar experiences of bats; but it wouldalso be possible to begin with humans. One might try, for example, to develop concepts that could be usedto explain to a person blind from birth what it was like to see. One would reach a blank wall eventually,but it should be possible to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present, and with much greater precision. The loose intermodal analogies? for example, 'Red is like the sound of a trumpet'? which crop up in discussions of this subject are of little use. That should be clear to anyone who has both heard a trumpet and seen red. But structural features of perception might be more accessible to objective description, even though something would be left out. And concepts alternative to those we learn in the first person may enable us to arrive at a kind of understanding even of our own experience which is denied us by the very ease of description and lack of distance that subjective concepts afford.
(notes #8.) For
example, blind people are
able to detect objects near them by a form of sonar, using vocal clicks
or taps of a cane. Perhaps if one knew what that was like, one could by
extension imagine roughly what it was like to possess the much more
refined sonar of a bat. The distance between oneself and other persons
and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other
persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only
partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a
lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The
imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we
cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that
epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a
conception of what it is like to be a bat (and a fortiori to know what
it is like to be a bat) one must take up the bat's point of view. If
one can take it up roughly, or partially, then one's conception will
also be rough or partial. Or so it seems in our present state of
understanding.
++
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