GRUE & BLEEN — A Cartographic Exploration
Nelson Goodman’s riddle of induction says:
“The New Color term, `grue´, referring to all things examined for color before the particular time t. that are green, & to other things in case they are blue.
Items will be grue in case they are green & the time is before t. or are blue & the time is at t. or after.
An item that is green & is examined before t. is grue but if it is examined after t. it would not be grue it would be bleen, ie, it would be either examined before time t. & blue, or not so examined & green.”
Rudolph Carnap argues grue & bleen are positional terms, we concur, but must describe in what way we mean the term positional.
EXPERIMENTS- there are two towns situated right next to each other with a white dividing line marking their border (or if one likes it can be a whack or blite dividing line) all houses in these towns are painted different colors, some are blue & some are green, but we have not yet examined any of these houses.
The names of these towns shall be Springfield & Shelbyville.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to produce the new color coded composite map of both Springfield & Shelbyville.
Any house that you can see right now from your position on the dividing line which is either blue or green shall be marked blue or green upon your map — but any house that can not see right now that is on the Shelbyville side & is green or is on the Springfield side & is blue shall be noted as being grue, while any house that is on the Springfield side & is green or on the Shelbyville side & is blue shall be bleen.
Goodman argued that Carnap’s definition of grue & bleen as positional designates was unsatisfactory because many predicates are positional & are used in acceptable generalizations, Goodman then gave such examples as `Ming´, `Arctic´, & `Pleistocene´ as well as the generalization “All Ming vases are expensive.” confirmed by the instances of particular expensive Ming Vases.
Well then, here is a grue of a different color “This car is grue.” (I stole it in Shelbyville, if you’re interested.) & here is a Ming sentence “This Ming vase is expensive.” (I stole it from Mr. Burns) how interesting! Let’s try some more: . . .”All grue things are perceivable.” & “This Ming vase is bleen.”
So it becomes sort of obvious that the words Ming or grue when used as adjectival positional terms are generally fine, but such terms are usable as nouns when we have developed an agreed upon deductive quality for them; the generalization of “All Ming vases are expensive.” is actually an already agreed upon definition of the quality `Ming´, just as the quality of being perceivable is a defined within the quality `grue´ or `bleen´ since they are defined as being temporally relative versions of green & blue.
When you tell me the Vase is Ming I naturally assume it is expensive as well.
an example: “This vase is Mung.” where Mung is all Ming artworks that have been stolen from Springfield or all Outsider artwork stolen from Shelbyville as opposed to Mang which is all Ming artworks stolen from Shelbyville or all Western Americana stolen from Springfield — some of which may be grue or bleen.
Now when something is Mung we no longer know if it is expensive. If indeed the Mung work was stolen from Springfield information has been destroyed by using the word Mung instead of Ming — because if said it was Ming we would know it was expensive but by saying it is Mung we do not know.
Experiment #2: First we kidnap Schrodinger’s cat. We take him to a shack where we have two unmarked paint pots — one is blue & one is green but we don’t know which is which — while blindfolded we randomly dip the cat in one of the pots, luckily the cat doesn’t make a fuss; he’s a cool cat & has seen some bad shit in his day (either that or he’s dead).
We then put the cat in a box, give you the box & instruct you to drive between Shelbyville & Springfield until you run out of gas. When that happens open the box & examine the cat — if you run out of gas on the Shelbyville side & the cat is green or if you run out of gas on the Springfield side & the Cat is blue then the Cat is Grue, but if you run out of gas on the Shelbyville side & the cat is blue or run out of gas on the Springfield side & the cat is green then the cat is bleen; if you run out of gas before or at time t. the cat is also gnam whether or not it is grue or bleen, & if you run out of gas after time t. the cat is also gnum whether or not it is bleen or grue.
Thus the possibilities are:
A. a bleen cat that is gnum.
B. a grue cat that is gnam.
C. a bleen cat that is gnam.
D. a grue cat that is gnum.
the problem this presents is that it is actually a very simple logical operation done with language that has been warped in a way that someone accustomed to using English would generally not warp it, unless he wanted to destroy its agreed upon grammatical forms.
The words we have manufactured are like many other technical terms used to define several linked qualities but different in that the meanings they contain are opposed; there wouldn’t be a problem if bleen meant blue things over ten feet in height composed of organic materials exclusively. But instead we find the terminology might function at best like a mnenomic, if we keep in mind that the cat was grue & gnum perhaps we can remember better what time & place we ran out of gas, but we cannot communicate that knowledge with the sentences, we can at best communicate that there are two possibilities two choose from, so that a respondent could find out if we broke down at time t. or after by asking where we broke down — Keeping in mind the meaning of gnum.
P.S: If possible, please check to see if the damn cat is alive or dead, that questions been haunting me for years.
P.P.S: If you run out of gas on the Whack or Blite dividing line you will be instantly annihilated.
This Article was written by IG Agent 81 some years ago before she became the regional director of the North American West Coast divisions of Illuminati Ganga.
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