III 118
On Bernard Williams' approach to the "absoluteness" of the world:
Putnam: the world "independent of our experience" is a cold world. Values (as well as colors) are not found in the world, but projected onto the world.
III 118/119
Values are even worse off than colors, because after we discover that they are projections, we lose our ability to use them. This is not the case with color classifications. They belong more to a biological world than to a "social world". ((s) Connection: PutnamVsWilliams, B., PutnamVs"Absolute World", VsB. Williams' approach of an "absoluteness" of the world). >
Absoluteness.
III 125
Colors: the situation does not become more favourable (objective) if we look at colors instead of heat. Color vision is not a mere reaction of our physiology and by no means without relationships to objective characteristics of the surface we are looking at.
Disjunction/definition/Putnam: for example, a surface is green if it refuses to reflect a significant amount of red light relative to the other colors (including green). Here, the boundaries remain vague but it explains that different compositions can produce the same color impression.
III 126
Colors/Putnam: e.g. "standard green": standard green has no intersubjective stability but from this does not follow that there are no clear cases of green/not green.
III 162
Saussure assumed that the idea of a system of differences from the individual elements should be transferred to language as a whole.
But in fact, different languages do not have the same semantic opposites. One language may have only four basic colors, another 7. Such a way out quickly leads to the conclusion that meanings are reserved for specific individual languages. And from here it is not far to the thought that they are reserved for individual "texts".
According to this thesis, two languages never express the same meanings.
Thus, even the concept of the sign's meaning, which is detachable from the sign itself, becomes obsolete (PutnamVsSaussure).
---
V 114
Colors/functionalism/Putnam: when we adopt the "functionalist" theory of subjective colors: "a sensation is a blue sensation when it has the role of signaling the presence of objective blue in the environment": this theory captures a meaning of the expression "blue sensation", but not its desired "qualitative" sense. If this functional role were identical to the qualitative character, one could not say that the quality of the sensation has changed.
But the quality has changed. In this case, quality does not seem to be a functional state (VsFunctionalism). >
Functionalism.
