Language as a Way of Knowing

How would you try to explain to a blind person what the word RED means? What does this suggest to you about the limitations of definitions? 

Because the person is blind, I would try to describe the color red through emotional and thermoceptive stimuli. I would describe it as a warm, vibrant color that in its most intense qualities, is hard to ignore. However, after saying this I would reach my descriptive limit because being able to fully covey the meaning of 'red' relies heavily on visuals. Even further, describing a color is hard because it's something that for people who aren't visually impaired is taken for granted– why would you describe and analyze something that is easy to see and understand? An apple is red because it's red, you don't need to argue with someone over it. 

What this reveals about the usefulness of descriptive definitions is that, to an extent, they really aren't useful. There are things that words themselves can not express because we don't have the ability to put something so simple into words because never before had we had the need of doing so. Because we just see color– it just is and does not need to be discussed, argued or described to understand what color something is. What this also suggests is that there is, in fact, such a thing as a visual definition. In this context, that would be color. You may describe the emotions and sensations attached to that color, but without the visual aspect, there is no fully accurate manner of describing it. 

What this also leads to is the knowledge question of, is it possible to know something without describing it? Which I believe is possible because there are other ways of being aware of knowledge rather than just through verbal expression. In this case, emotional knowledge plays a role because personal emotions will never be fully conveyed to others, yet you personally know that you know your emotions to be true because you feel them and aware of them. Bringing this back to the question of ‘red’, it is hard to express what it looks like because language is so limiting in terms of its useful conveying of visual and emotional information, yet you are aware of what red is without the need of description because of your sense perception that captures visual information. You see it so you believe it. And because you believe it, you don’t find the need to verbally describe it which is part of the reason why it is virtually impossible to ever transmit that to a blind person.