Talk:greenness

RFV discussion

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"The result or product of being green" - as distinct from other sense, "the state or quality of being green". Equinox ◑ 02:25, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Kill, don't even ask. --Hekaheka 07:12, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Problem is, that sense is countable and the other is uncountable, and we have greennesses. Still, is there not scope to merge them? Mglovesfun (talk) 12:16, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

The American Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (in his 1967 Philosophical Perspectives) offers the (un?)helpful comment that "once one is committed to the idea that the greenness of the leaf is a spatio-temporally individuated green item, the inevitable conclusion is that greennesses are the primary green items and that ordinary changeable things are green by virtue of having greennesses." Aha...

More recently and more intelligibly, William Harmless translated Hildegard von Bingen's Latin Viridissima Virga into English (in his 2008 book Mystics), and rendered "Et illa apparuerunt omnia in viriditate plena" as "And then there appeared, in greennesses full, all things". However, in each case, "greennesses" could just mean "the qualities/states of being green", which is the existing (though supposedly uncountable) sense. — Beobach972 18:14, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Mary Francis Slattery adds to the philosophical exposition of colournesses: she discusses "blue-greennesses" and not "greennesses", but she may help us figure out what senses the words have. In the 1971 Hazard, Form, and Value, she writes this:

"The absolute things are the substances or entities of things whose aspects (blue-greenness, shininess) are related. It would destroy the unity and simplicity of an impression to dwell on carness, riverness, atmosphereness, but it unifies and simplifies the impression to explore and oscillate among the blue-greennesses. And the more complexity among blue-greennesses (complexity arising from the differences of the absolute things, the numerousness of things reflecting blue-green, the variety of hue and intensity and light and dark and values of blue-green), the more the interrelatedness of the blue-green isolates the blue-green structuredness as a separate whole, a new structure distinct from everything else."

This again seems to reinforce that the/a "state of being green" is what is meant, and is countable — while only Sellars might provide any support for the "product of being green". — Beobach972 18:47, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

Note (deprecated template usage) yellowness and (deprecated template usage) blueness (and others?) have the same disputable sense. Equinox ◑ 23:35, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

RFV failed, sense removed. I've removed the (uncountable) tag from the other sense. (And I've made the same two changes to [[yellowness]] and [[blueness]].) —Ruakh_TALK 22:39, 17 January 2011 (UTC)