On Quixotism and Colorless Ideas

Does Red Taste Good?

So I had this shower thought while thinking about common debates about the realism of ethics, free will, and god (some surprisingly related topics, all of which I’ve written about). In each case, I pretty much made the argument that too much fuss was made over finding answers, while the real problem lay in the formulation of the questions themselves; it was an error to focus on whether these things were “real” or not. But then I realized that “error” was the wrong word to describe this problem (haha, meta moment, since “wrong” is the wrong word, and so on…). The word “error” carries within itself the idea that what one aims for is “correct” in a sense. To use archery as a metaphor, “error” implies that one has identified the target and its center—one was simply not skilled or fortunate enough to hit the mark.

But what if the mark itself was misspecified? What if I hit exactly what I intended to, but the target I chose was really foolish? And here I struggled for a while, because I was never taught a single term to describe this phenomenon, though I have deeply internalized this kind of idea. Also, I struggled to come up with simple examples which illustrated the phenomenon. But then I hit upon something: “does red taste good?” If one was as dull as a chatbot, one could answer that no, red does not taste good because red is a color and not a flavor, Red 40 is flavorless, etc. But really, the answer is neither yes nor no, nor is it anything in between. The answer is to say “what?” and to shoot the person a quizzical glance.

I’m requisitioning the term “quixotic” to describe this phenomenon, of course referencing Don Quixote’s infamous windmill episode. For example, if someone were to attempt to prove to me that free will exists (or doesn’t exist), I would not say that their argument was right or wrong, but I would say it is quixotic. Whether or not they can defeat the windmills is not the issue—it is their choice to take on the windmills in the first place that is problematic.

Quixotic questions often lead to colorless ideas—ideas which sound sensible but which have no (pragmatic) meaning. This term is a reference to Noam Chomsky’s famous sentence: colorless green ideas sleep furiously, but it also represents the idea that the ideas are drained of meaning. The perfect example of this is the question of whether god is real: many (it seems mostly theist apologists) have made logical proofs for the existence or nonexistence of god, but the god they prove is meaningless—Anselm proves that there exists “some greatest being,” while Thomas Aquinas proves that there is some “first cause.” Even if we accept the argument—indeed, even if we accept that, logically, such a god is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent—that does not make any meaningful change. The laws of physics hold whether or not god created them, and people suffer whether or not god is good. And this kind of proof of god certainly does not prove that this god hates gays or that there is a heaven but dogs don’t go there. Those actually meaningful qualities have to be re-added after the fact through a sleight of hand, much the way a magician wows audiences by taking advantage of optical illusions and attentional blindness.

I wanted to create these terms because without them, our language does not allow us to think about the limitations of logic. The misses of theory in representing reality are reduced to a skill issue. We can only speak of the answer—about whether it is right or wrong—and this discourages the question of the question itself.