Bordeaux

We're back at Sapir-Whorf and Eleanor Rosch, with the whole blue thing, right?

I agree with Jayson, although I'll observe that the measurements may or may not be done by the society under discussion. By which I mean, blue-blind Greeks, if so they be, don't also have a theory that has a blue-shaped slot in it.

And, yes, a small group of tasters can develop a "complexity" group-think. But that's John Stuart Mill and the kaffee-klatsch of baby-killers, right?

So much old ground. Can I pull a new cork instead?
 
The answer to Jayson's question about CdP, and this is what I have been saying all along, is no. There is no objective aspect to taste in wine. Ian can get a group of people around a table to agree on complexity. I can get a group of people around a table to agree that Comet Ping Pong had captive children in their basement. The group agreement won't make the claim accurate.

I won't go into the vexed history of philosophy's relationship to science except to say that I think Jayson's definition of objectivity is at least a swerve from the usual definition, which is usually, merely, a state of knowledge of an aspect of reality, without bias from the problems of perception, regardless of how that's achieved. In other words, if I say that there is a tree outside my window, and there is, in fact, a tree outside my window, even though I know that merely because my perceptual apparatus is working ok, my knowledge is objective. The swerve comes from the difference between what's out there and our ability to know what's out there. Science has, quite properly, developed a series of protocols regarding measurement and testing in order to make claims about what's out there warranted. I have a lot of respect for those protocols. But they aren't the same thing as what's out there.

Ian, if you don't hold the second point I attributed to you, what was your point about the Greeks not knowing what blue is?
 
My quantum mechanics professor in grad school (now almost 90) liked to say that you understand and believe in quantum mechanics once you understand that the baseball has some probability to diffract around and “miss” the directly oncoming bat. Just thought I’d throw that in there.

I’m no philosopher but if we are starting to talk about Dionysius, is a discussion of what Nietzsche has to say about objectivity next?
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
We're back at Sapir-Whorf and Eleanor Rosch, with the whole blue thing, right?

So much old ground. Can I pull a new cork instead?
Click to expand...

Please. I’m still waiting for Levi’s Tuscan picks.
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
My quantum mechanics professor in grad school (now almost 90) liked to say that you understand and believe in quantum mechanics once you understand that the baseball has some probability to diffract around and “miss” the directly oncoming bat. Just thought I’d throw that in there.

I’m no philosopher but if we are starting to talk about Dionysius, is a discussion of what Nietzsche has to say about objectivity next?
Click to expand...

This is why I don't undertand quantum mechanics. I understand what your professor's sentence means and I can imagine an alternative universe in which baseballs work like that, I just can't quite get how it's our universe. I readily admit this to be my ignorance.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
My quantum mechanics professor in grad school (now almost 90) liked to say that you understand and believe in quantum mechanics once you understand that the baseball has some probability to diffract around and “miss” the directly oncoming bat. Just thought I’d throw that in there.

I’m no philosopher but if we are starting to talk about Dionysius, is a discussion of what Nietzsche has to say about objectivity next?
Click to expand...

This is why I don't undertand quantum mechanics. I understand what your professor's sentence means and I can imagine an alternative universe in which baseballs work like that, I just can't quite get how it's our universe. I readily admit this to be my ignorance.
Click to expand...
Obviously not a Mets fan
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
What do you want to know about quantum theory?

I imagine this is the farthest ranging Bordeaux thread in the history of wine boreds.

I have a serious question about objectivity. Let’s assume Jonathan opens some Southern Rhône Grenache-y hoo-hah for me next time he’s in NY that doesn’t have Rayas somewhere on the label, as he has told me is likely to happen. Is there a state of the universe in which alleged objectivity plays any role in my appreciation or lack thereof of said wine? If so, ‘xplain.
Click to expand...

RE: QT, more than I do, especially the underlying mathematics. Would like to be conformable with Poisson brackets, converting back and forth from Lagrangian to Hamiltonian mechanics, applying matrix algebra. Would also like to understand the individual terms of the Schroedinger equation better than I do.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
The answer to Jayson's question about CdP, and this is what I have been saying all along, is no. There is no objective aspect to taste in wine. Ian can get a group of people around a table to agree on complexity. I can get a group of people around a table to agree that Comet Ping Pong had captive children in their basement. The group agreement won't make the claim accurate.
Click to expand...

I love your mind, Jonathan, but this is a specious comparison and not apt to the discussion.

Ian, if you don't hold the second point I attributed to you, what was your point about the Greeks not knowing what blue is?
Click to expand...

It's in the sentence preceding the para in which the reference to blue occurs.
 
Sorry, Ian, but despite the melodramatic politics, it is precisely the analogy I want to challenge you with. Agreements of groups of people does not warrant any claim further than that they agree. This is even true of groups of scientists, as the scientists who were my colleagues would be the first to agree. The one difference between a group agreeing about what constitutes complexity in pinot and the group and the group agreeing about what the basement at Comet Ping Pong contained was that the second claim was falsifiable and was in fact falsified, if, alas , the hard way. Oh, and,of course, the first claim, though I think mistaken, is pretty harmless.

On the Greeks and blue, here is your sentence:

My argument would be that what is perceived changes with time, from the perspective of individuals and of human society in aggregate. There's a question, for example, of whether humans perceived the color blue before they learned to make blue dye

That looks a lot like a claim that the Greeks couldn't perceive blue. As to your prior sentence, if you think the universe existed for the 19.99 billion years before there were humans in it, then it follows that what was out there was out there even though we weren't here to perceive it. Worms can't hear but there are sound waves. The fact that we can't know something is our problem not the something's problem.
 
With regards to Oregon pinot while it is certainly rarer for me to find what I would define as complexity there as opposed to Burgundy I have certainly experienced it. More commonly in less ripe vintages such as 2011 and of course vintage dependent.

FWIW I put a 2011 Brooks Janus in a blind flight and everyone guessed Burgundy. And I noticed that it had vanished from Wine Searcher the next day.
 
This is interesting and relevant to the perception of blue issue:

Loading…

www.sciencealert.com

"...one of the most compelling [studies] was conducted by Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London, who worked with the Himba tribe from Namibia. In their language, there is no word for blue and no real distinction between green and blue.

To test whether that meant they couldn't actually see blue, he showed them a circle with 11 green squares and one painfully obvious blue square. Well, obvious to us, at least, as you can see below. But the Himba tribe struggled to tell Davidoff which of the squares was a different colour to the others. Those who did hazard a guess at which square was different took a long time to get the right answer, and there were a lot of mistakes."
 
You steer the conversation into a curious corner. I can't agree that there's a basis for comparison in this context of a group of conspiracy theorists selected for their credulity and a group of reasonably experienced tasters discussing wines within their reach. I challenge you to reconsider.

If the issue for you is that complexity can't be an objective attribute ... I'm not persuaded that proposition of pinning complexity down as an objective attribute is inherently beyond reach. But there's no point repeating what I wrote earlier, and I'm not prepared to spend a ton of time on the actual endeavor.

As to blue, note please the brief side-discussion with Dr. Lipton, which may help. But I feel to some extent you are arguing with yourself.

Anyway, I believe the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, mostly based on good authority, rather than my own observation and reasoning. That seems to be the current limit of our capacity as a group to infer with respect to time and space from available from evidence. I bet we'd agree on that.
 
I think that most, if not all, of us agree that one of the signal virtues of Pinot Noir as a grape is that, along with Riesling, it reflects the effects of terroir better than other varieties. When I went to New Zealand I was struck by the unique character of the Pinot Noirs produced there which had a distinctly sappy and resinous character. Oregon Pinot Noirs have their own distinct character to me, as do Pinot Nero from Italy, Spätburgunder from Germany and Pinot Noir from the Jura. It's one of the things that makes Pinot Noir such a fascinating grape to me.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
My quantum mechanics professor in grad school (now almost 90) liked to say that you understand and believe in quantum mechanics once you understand that the baseball has some probability to diffract around and “miss” the directly oncoming bat. Just thought I’d throw that in there.

I’m no philosopher but if we are starting to talk about Dionysius, is a discussion of what Nietzsche has to say about objectivity next?
Click to expand...

This is why I don't undertand quantum mechanics. I understand what your professor's sentence means and I can imagine an alternative universe in which baseballs work like that, I just can't quite get how it's our universe. I readily admit this to be my ignorance.
Click to expand...
Obviously not a Mets fan
Click to expand...
Rimshot!
 
originally posted by Pavel Tchichikov:
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
What’s the point again? Oh yeah. Oregon Pinot ain’t Burgundy.
Click to expand...

Isn't it mostly on granite? (I may be mistaken.) Not a fair comparison then.
Click to expand...

Here's the scoop on Oregon soils: http://willamettewines.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Soil-into-Wine-2014.pdf

One odd thing about soil and terroir discussions is how it always seems to focus on the underlying geology and soil derived from it. But soil isn't just crushed rock, there's a lot of organic matter involved; which might have as much or more influence on the wine.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Agreements of groups of people does not warrant any claim further than that they agree. This is even true of groups of scientists, as the scientists who were my colleagues would be the first to agree.
Click to expand...

What if the scientists' agreement is based on a variety of properly controlled experiments whose results all replicated the "truth" being agreed upon?
 
I learned that the universe is 20 billion years old, and the earth 5 billion. I' m easily correctible on both numbers, as I don't have any real knowledge of the basis of either calculation or whether my source, my college astronomy class, is outdated.

Christian, surely the difference between being able to replicate an experiment and coming to an agreement isn't that abstruse.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top