ABSTRACT
Here’s a new thought experiment. This thought experiment takes place in the here and now. Let’s imagine a woman (for a change) born totally blind. While we might expect that she, living as she does in the here and now, would have had her congenital cataracts removed as a newborn, for some reason this didn’t happen. Perhaps she was born into a remote rural area of the US, off the grid in a libertarian, survivalist cult. The philosophy of this cult would dictate avoiding modern medicine, more out of a wariness about the sort of questions health care professionals might ask about the child’s home life and parentage. Or perhaps the cult elders simply don’t notice anything unusual about her eyes until later when they decide that her blindness does not seem to bother her much. She is without other impairments, average intelligence though home-schooled. Of course, the cult elders would mistrust the public school system, abhor technology and the internet. So her education would be of a particularly limited kind. She would not have access to Braille books except perhaps for certain libertarian tracts which someone went to the trouble to transcribe for her. But cult elders being uncharacteristically sensitive on her behalf, have purged these texts, and their own speech, of any references to visual phenomena. She has no familiarity with the words for color, perspective, reflection, transparency or any other vision-related term.
