No Witnesses

Inconsistent with language usage. Devices like IR imagers are widely described as allowing users to see infrared, and this language is viewed as accurate by an overwhelming number of English speakers.Sorry, you're wrong. You've mistaken yourself as the arbiter of language use. Usage is the arbiter of language use.

Yeah, they are; just like how someone using a hammer is driving a nail, just like how someone sitting in an airplane is travelling, just like how someone making a phone call is talking to the other person.Just like how someone gripping an orange in their medical prosthesis is holding an orange. All senses are prosthetic. Confusing freefall with "zero gravity" is an error of category, but there's no difference between seeing infrared via the prosthesis of a machine and seeing the visible spectrum via the prosthesis of your own eyes. It's not a "technical issue concerning science", it's your own idiosyncratic word use.

By definition, it can't be. Again, you're confusing yourself with the arbiter of English usage. Usage is the arbiter of English usage. Not at all. If the "Loch Ness Monster" means "a fake aquatic reptile that people frequently manufacture photos of" than you're no more inaccurate in your speech than I am when I say that I've seen Mickey Mouse.Where we draw a distinction between seeing something and seeing a picture of something is when it's possible to see something without seeing a picture of it - i.e. you can go to India and use your eyes to see the Taj Mahal directly. But it's not possible to use your eyes to see IR images directly, you have to use a machine to see a picture of an IR image, so in English we call that "seeing IR" because it's as close to seeing IR directly as it's possible to get. Yes. Because I see no practical difference between a machine made of circuits interpreting EM data and a machine made of cells interpreting EM data. All senses are prosthetic.

Dr. Adequate, have you ever seen Mickey Mouse?By your definition, you'd be forced to deny that you ever had - that, indeed, nobody ever had, since they had only ever seen images of Mickey Mouse, people pretending to be Mickey Mouse, and so on. Uh, no. If you've ever seen the Queen on television, or as a photograph in a magazine or on the computer, you've seen the Queen.Everybody who has read this post has seen the Queen. See? There she is! Sure. Most people have seen the Loch Ness Monster, just like most people have seen Mickey Mouse. No, exactly wrong. It's precisely because it is possible to see in infrared that we say that we can see in infrared. My mind. You see, "see" means many more things than just using your eyes to view something directly. See?

You should try using it to see, instead.

Now everyone who's reading this post has seen the Loch Ness Monster.I don't see what's so absurd about it. You've seen the Loch Ness Monster just the same way you've seen Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. If you adamantly insisted that you had not seen Mickey Mouse, people would wonder where you had grown up because see means other things besides "direct observation, in-person."Have you really not seen Mickey Mouse? Not ever? It seems like the one in the noose is you.

Have you seen Mickey Mouse?

Well, sure, but that's because when they say that "macroevolution is fish turning into rabbits", or whatever, their mental notion is that this all happens to a single organism; that there was actually one fish that suddenly grew hair and long ears.People look at that diagram of yours - monkey to man - and if they don't think about it too hard, they see it as a single monkey standing up and turning into a man. That's why "millions of years" doesn't make any sense to them; they know organisms don't live that long. (Except when they do.)It's a fairly sophisticated mode of thought, requiring the simultaneous mental modeling of a large number of things, to view evolution not as something that happens to a single organism, or that happens in a single organism reproducing, but that happens as populations change and grow - as described statistically, stoichometrically - over long periods of time. It took me a long time to understand that, longer still to learn how to describe it to others. (I've probably not, in this post, succeeded.)

Yeah, I think you can, particularly when generational times are fairly low (like 40 minutes or so.)

I don't think it would be misleading, because I don't think anyone would think that you were claiming to be a time traveler. Similarly, people talking about 9/11 reminisce about what they were thinking when they "saw the twin towers fall", irrespective of whether they were actually at Ground Zero when that happened. Most people making that statement watched it happen on TV, even in New York."See" has a pretty expansive definition that includes nearly all forms of optical prosthesis.

I don't think they would. They might wonder what your point is, but "last night, I saw the Queen on TV" is a completely quotidian statement in English, not groan-worthy in the least. It's roughly the same as "I saw the new episode of Game of Thrones on TV last night", and nobody would accuse you of lying simply because you did see it on TV, and not live on set during filming in Malta or wherever the fuck. Well, right, but the word we're talking about is "see", not "witness." And you can see that primates evolved into humans. With your eyes and everything.

But here the ambiguity is a function of why you think it's comment-worthy to have seen the Queen (on TV or in person.) It's not a function of you using or misusing the word "see", which is what we're talking about. I've been pursuing Dr. A's position that looking at the display of an infrared imager doesn't count as "seeing in infrared." But "see", as a word, is sufficiently broad to encompass such an act of seeing.

Yes, now you're getting it! And yet, despite that logical ambiguity in language, people are able to communicate completely effectively with it, to the point that almost nobody bats an eye at asking their blind friend "hey, are you seeing anyone?""I can still see her face", says the poet of his lost love, despite that face having oh-so-dramatically cast itself down the bottom of a well, or some such, and therefore completely hidden from his eyes. And I doubt you would object in any other context. You're just being a tiresome asshole, and it's beneath the level of completely enjoyable assholeness we've come to expect from you.

Um, no, that's clearly false. "Seeing someone" is a common expression for "dating" regardless of one's eyesight, or the fact that a lot of what you're eventually doing, you're doing in the dark. This whole thing started because you took it upon yourself to "correct" several people who asserted that using an IR visualizer constituted "seeing" in IR. Nobody flinches at the notion that millions of people saw Janet Jackson's exposed breast during Super Bowl XXXVIII, even though Reliant Stadium seats only 71,000 people. A google search for the phrase returns on the order of 37 million hits, suggesting that the use of "see" in this regard is not unusual.Since all senses are prosthetic anyway, it's clearly not an unusual usage to talk about "seeing" something through a prosthesis. Millions of children and adults will tell you that of course they've seen Mickey Mouse, even though there's no such person. "Language" is the antecedent of the pronoun "it" in the sentence you quoted. I would have expected a speaker of English to know that. You might want to schedule some grammar classes before you crown yourself the arbiter of the English language, since you appear to know fuck-all about it. Exactly. Because despite the inherent ambiguity in language, people are able to communicate effectively with it, completely contrary to your assertions otherwise. Well, ok. Who thinks Dr. Adequate is still being funny or amusing? Who thinks he isn't? If people are really getting a charge out of this I'm perfectly happy to keep going, but doesn't it seem like we've bored everybody away?

Wait, so now you don't object that an IR visualizer allows you to see in IR?Then we are done, because you've accepted my position on language. Then surely you can answer the question you keep ignoring:By what basis can you claim that you've seen Mickey Mouse but not the Loch Ness Monster?