Qualitative States

This post is about qualitative states. Qualitative states are often (although not uniquely) expressed as "the X of Y" where X is a sense, (like smell, taste, or feel) and Y is something that exists out there in the world. Examples: The smell of a rose, The taste of wine, The feel of getting stung by a bee. Most people would avow that they are familiar with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of these states. "Yeah, of course I know what the smell of a rose is like." Upon deeper inspection though, I think that people are not really as familiar with these states as they lead themselves to believe.

Ask someone to describe the smell of a rose, they will probably give adjectives such as flowery, pleasant, or refreshing. These adjectives don't really seem to describe the scent itself, but are more just labels used to classify scents. Compare this to asking someone to describe something concrete, say, a table. hard, wooden, brown. These adjectives are not just labels, but are actually inherent qualities of the table itself.

Phrased another way, if you group all the things in the world that are hard, and pretend for a minute that they don't exist, there would still be a definition for hard. Hard can be defined independently of things that are hard.

Now take the word refreshing and group all the things in the world together that are refreshing and pretend for a minute that they don't exist. Would you be able to define refreshing without reference to something else that is refreshing? I think not. Try this thought experiment with other adjectives and you'll see that this pattern remains consistent.

So what's the point? Basically, my point is that we don't have the access to our own qualitative states like we think we do. We think we know what The smell of a rose is like but really all we can do is vaguely compare it to everything else we have smelled before. This leads to the intuition that qualitative states actually don't exist at all, but more on that later.