Walid Saba, PhD
1 min readApr 26, 2021

--

That's a nice twist on the problem... but unfortunately it does not hold. Your explanation that the beauty of the car is connected to its "redness" is only in our heads - because perhaps of associating the color "red" with nice sporty cars (red corvette or a red Ferrari, etc...) But that does not explain things linguistically/cognitively - change "red" to "green" and the same phenomenon is still at work: "John bought a beautiful green car" is still more natural to say than "John bought a green beautiful car"... You can even replace the color adjective entirely to make this point even stronger... "small" should not imply beauty and yet "John bought a beautiful small car" is more natural to say than "John bought a small beautiful car". What is at work is not what the second adjective implies (whether it is a color or size or whatever...) What is at work is a strongly-typed ontological structure that seems to put constraints on (the external) linguistic communication.

--

--

No responses yet