On Grue


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Akash Mehta
6/4/19
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What justifies inductive reasoning? What has the fact that the sun has risen every
morning to do with whether or not it will rise tomorrow? A natural answer is that to make
predictions at all, we need to assume certain continuities in the world around us, to trust that
things will go on roughly in the same way. Induction works, we might want to say, because the
universe doesn’t change without cause. But the ‘New Riddle of Induction’, posed by Nelson
Goodman in his 1955 book Fiction, Fiction and Forecast, challenges the determinateness of the
word ‘continuity’; it seems to reveal that we don’t have a firm grasp on what it is to stay the
same. Thus it calls into question the legitimacy of all induction.
In this essay I will present a variant of the riddle, briefly discussing Rudolf Carnap’s
attempt to solve it and Goodman’s rejoinder. Then I will discuss two ways the riddle can be
interpreted, and attempt to ‘solve’ it in each of these interpretations. In particular, I will show that
interpreted one way, the riddle depends on the apparently absurd possibility that color carries
information about time; interpreted the other way, it is vulnerable to Carnap’s solution.



Say that in the course of conversation on a fine spring afternoon—the last day of May in
the year 2019, to be precise—it becomes manifest that your friend Nelly has been using the word
‘green’ to mean what the two of you agree to henceforth call ‘grue’. (She gripes a little about
having to give her usage, not yours, the odd name, but your stubbornness wins out.) A grue
object is one that appears green (as you’ve been using the word) when observed before June 1st,
2019 and blue when observed afterwards. The blade of grass, Nelly insists, is grue rather than
green; it will appear blue tomorrow.
“But surely you must admit,” you protest heatedly, “that this blade of glass will stay the
same color unless something changes it!”
“But it will stay the same—it will stay grue!” she responds just as heatedly.
Here we face a variant of what Goodman calls the New Riddle of Induction. Goodman’s
presentation of the ‘grue’ paradox is slightly different than the one presented above—his ‘grue’
refers not to items that change color (from the perspective of our normal understanding of ‘blue’
and ‘green’, of course), but rather to the set of items that are either first examined before
tomorrow and are (and always have been) green or first examined after tomorrow and are (and
always have been) blue. I have altered the paradox to bring out more explicitly the challenge it
seems to pose to continuity, but I believe the core questions raised are the same. (Indeed, most
secondary literature on the problem deals with the variant under discussion here, and Goodman
himself sometimes discussed this variant without noting any significant differences from the
original.)
Unlike questions of the ‘is my red your red?’ variety, the question of whether the grass is
green or grue is testable. You and Nelly have only to wait until midnight to determine who is
correct. But have you any justification for favoring your prediction over hers? One attempt at
such a justification, made by Rudolf Carnap in his 1947 paper “On the Application of Inductive
Logic”, is that induction can only be legitimately applied to predict what Carnap calls ‘purely
qualitative’ predicates. Purely qualitative predicates are those that “can be expressed without the
use of individual constants, but not without primitive predicates” (Carnap 138), such as
‘friendly,’ ‘cold,’ or ‘alive’. Positional predicates, on the other hand, require reference to a
specific time, space, or other individual constant, for example ‘less than 42,’ ‘legally adult’ (i.e.
older than 18 years old), or ‘west of Chicago’. ‘Green’ involves no reference to a specific time
and thus is purely qualitative; ‘grue’ refers to the specific date June 1st and thus is positional.
Goodman readily responds that Carnap’s distinction between positional and qualitative
predicates begs the question. “True enough,” he writes, “if we start with "blue" and "green", then
"grue" and “bleen" will be explained in terms of "blue" and "green" and a temporal term. But
equally truly, if we start with “grue" and "bleen", then "blue" and "green" will be explained in
terms of “grue" and "bleen" and a temporal term.” From the perspective of the hypothesis that
the grass is grue, after all, it is the hypothesis that it will turn ‘bleen’ on June 1st (ordinarily
expressed as ‘the grass is green’) that refers to a specific temporal position. Thus, Goodman
concludes, “qualitativeness is an entirely relative matter and does not by itself establish any
dichotomy of predicates.” (Goodman 80)
R.G. Swinburne, however, defends an updated version of Carnap’s distinction. In order to
test whether or not something is grue, he claims, one needs to know the date; “the primary tests
for an object’s being grue are the primary tests for an object’s being green or blue and a test
which involves finding out whether or not its present state is prior or posterior to t—viz. asking
people the date, looking at the date on the day’s newspapers, etc.” (Swinburne 125) In order to
test whether or not something is green, on the other hand, “we do not have to show what the date
is, whether or not the object is grue or bleen” (Swinburne 127); one carries out the tests (say,
comparison with other objects known to be green, or measurement of the wavelength of the
reflected light) without ever looking down at one’s watch. Thus ‘grue’ carries within it an
inherent reference to a specific time, Swinburne claims, whereas ‘green’ does not. Is this claim
warranted?

It depends, I think, on how we understand the perceptual character of the color grue. If
‘grue’ implicitly involves a reference to midnight and ‘green’ does not, we should be able to
engineer a situation in which the claim that the grass is ‘grue’ commits Nelly, but not you, to a
position about whether or not it’s past midnight. Say you and Nelly resolve to stay up to
midnight to resolve the debate, but then both nod off at around eleven. You wake with a start a
little later, but your phone has died and you’re not sure how long you’ve been asleep.
Unbeknownst to you, it’s 11:50pm. The grass still appears green to you, but that tells you nothing
about the time; you expected it to appear green both before and after midnight.
Now you shake Nelly awake, who (also unaware of the time) takes a look at the grass—
and does what? How she reacts depends on what she meant when she insisted that the grass
would stay the same color. In particular, either her concept of ‘staying the same’ did or did not
entail temporal indistinguishability. Let’s first take the case in which it did not entail temporal
indistinguishability; in other words, in which the immediate perceptual experience of pre-t grue
is different from that of post-t grue. In this case, Nelly would look around her, see that her
perceptual experience of the grass is unaltered, and would say: “let’s go back to sleep; it’s not
midnight yet.” Thus her conviction that grass is grue commits her, unlike you, to a position about
the current time (namely, whether it is before or after midnight).
This means that to entertain the hypothesis that the grass will remain grue, in this
interpretation, is to entertain the possibility that one’s visual perception of grass imparts
information about the time. Note that Goodman’s usual maneuver, to flip the tables by recasting
the words green and blue in terms of grue and bleen, fails to establish symmetry here. The
hypothesis that the grass remains green can be translated into the hypothesis that it changes color
from grue to bleen at midnight. But it goes hand in hand with the fact that the immediate
perceptual experiences of post- and pre- t grue are temporally distinguishable that those of pre-t
grue and post-t bleen are not; they both look like what you'd previously called ‘green’. Thus you
cannot tell from the fact that your perceptual experience of the grass is unaltered whether or not
it’s before midnight; you would have the same perceptual experience either way. To entertain
your hypothesis, then, does not require entertaining the possibility that color tells time.1
Is this damning for Nelly’s prediction? Can’t she simply say: “Of course our positions are
asymmetrical! You seem to be operating under the crazy idea that perceptual experience of grue
objects confers no knowledge about time. But you’ll be disabused of your madness soon
enough!” In response, you’d naturally ask why she thinks such perceptual experience imparts
temporal information. It’s difficult to imagine an answer to this question, but let’s suppose that
instead of trying to give one, she simply asked why you think such experience doesn’t impart
temporal information. Perhaps at first you’d splutter that it had never imparted such information
before; she would exasperatedly correct you, pointing out that grue objects have so far imparted
information about time with a perfect record of reliability; they’ve always indicated that it’s been
before June 1st, 2019, and they’ve always been right!
But you’d be within your rights, it seems to me, to insist on the default position that any
fact about the world (here, the color of the grass) does not impinge on the likelihood of any other
fact about the world (here, the time). In other words, the burden falls on whoever claims such an
impingement to give a reason for it. That this should be the default assumption might itself be
challenged, of course, and it’s not clear to me whether or not one can justify it. (Perhaps one
might attempt to do so by means of the principle of insufficient reason, but among other
difficulties this might inappropriately cast the assumption as a probabilistic best guess, rather
than something like a methodological certainty.) In any case, at the very least we have before us
a deeper conviction on the strength of which we prefer the green hypothesis to the grue
hypothesis. If we cannot justify this deeper conviction, so be it; after all, it seems to me (although
this is of course a contested claim) that our forms of life inevitably rest on convictions for which
we cannot give reasons. Ask for too many reasons, dig too deep, and inevitably you will find
yourself saying—as Wittgenstein puts it—“I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached
bedrock, and my spade is turned.” (PI 217)

1Note that this asymmetry applies equally well to Goodman’s original variant, in which a grue object first
examined after midnight is (and always has been) ‘blue’. Upon waking you and Nelly would hunt for a
hitherto-unexamined stalk of grass, from whose color she would claim to know whether or not it was past
midnight.
 Thus we have adequately defended our claim, I think, to being able to predict the color of
grass from the challenge posed by first interpretation of the grue hypothesis. If post- and pre- t
grue are temporally distinguishable, Swinburne is right to say that ‘grue’ implicitly carries a
reference to a specific time—and we saw the absurdities to which the grue hypothesis then leads.
But what of the second case? Here, Nelly conceives of a color ‘remaining the same’ as entailing
indistinguishability; the immediate perceptual experience of pre-t grue is identical to that of post-
t grue. When you wake her up, she will have no idea whether or not it’s past midnight; looking at
the grass won't help her anymore than it does you. To entertain this grue hypothesis, then, does
not require entertaining the possibility that one’s visual perception of grass imparts information
about the time. ‘Grue,’ here, carries within it no temporal reference point.
But what would it mean to entertain the grue hypothesis as an alternative to the green
hypothesis? In the case in which Nelly held grue to be temporally distinguishable, her hypothesis
yielded a different prediction than yours, giving rise to the dialogue I presented at the beginning.
But in this case, such a dialogue would never have occasion to arise. I wrote that sometime
during midday on the 31st “it becomes manifest that your friend Nelly has been using the word
‘green’ to mean what the two of you agree to henceforth call ‘grue’””—but how could this
difference in usage become manifest? Perhaps we imagine it being discovered after Nelly muses
“I wonder whether I’ll like the grass as much tomorrow,” much like one might muse “I wonder
whether I’ll like the weather as much tomorrow.” But that would be to assume that she is
expecting some sort of change in the perceptual experience of the grass, which places us squarely
back in the first interpretation.
In the second interpretation, it seems, the difference could never be made manifest before
time t. Both you and Nelly assume as a matter of course that you are using the word ‘green’ in
the same way, and nothing could indicate anything to the contrary. You use ‘green’ to refer to all
the same objects (such as grass) and to make all the same predictions and hypotheses (such as
that all grass is and will remain green). If there can be said to be a difference at all, it is
incommunicable. Thus posing Goodman’s riddle might seem to reveal itself as just another
version of asking the familiar “is my red your red?” question.
And yet there is a difference between the hypotheses that all grass is grue and that your
perceptual experience of strawberries is different from Nelly's.2 The latter is unfalsifiable so long
as you can’t peer into each others’ minds,3 whereas the former is falsified if on the morning of
June 1st, you wake to find your perceptual experience of today’s grass exactly like you
remember your perceptual experience of yesterday’s blueberries. Perhaps you wake Nelly and
yell: “look, the grass is blue!” She takes a look and then asks whether you hit your head; the
grass looks to her much as it did yesterday. Only then does the difference in your usages of the

2 Put more precisely, I’m speaking of the hypothesis that our perceptual experiences of strawberries are
different even once we correct for any differences in neurological hardware; or again, that two exact
clones might have different perceptual experiences of strawberries.
3 One might say that entertaining the grue hypothesis in the second interpretation is like asking ‘is my
green your green?’ to your future self, who by means of memory can peer into your mind. But my
approach to dealing with the hypothesis will hinge on the fact, although I will not present it in these
terms, that you cannot peer into your future self’s mind as he can into yours.
word ‘green’ become manifest. And if on the 31st you discussed this very possibility with Nelly
—that the next morning, one of you would think the grass has turned blue—she might say: “Huh,
I guess that is a possibility! How weird that would be. I feel pretty confident it’s not going to
happen, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.”
Thus you and Nelly are exactly identically situated on the 31st; when the two of you
imagine the grass as grue rather than green, you imagine the same exact bewilderment the next
morning. You both start from your experience of what you call ‘green’, and imagine it changing
into what you call ‘blue’. And this is not just because you’ve grown up in the same community
and have learned the same language. In fact, Goodman’s nominalist-flavored claim that (on the
31st) we only start from ‘green’ rather than ‘grue' because the former has been used more often
than the latter, has been ‘entrenched’ in our language, shows that he too was implicitly operating
within the first interpretation.
To see why, let us imagine that you and Nelly live on different planets orbiting what you
call a ‘green’ sun. Far from being friends, sadly, you are ignorant of each other’s existence; in
fact, your species have never interacted. Now let’s consider the predicate ‘green', translated into
Nelly’s language. (Of course, this assumes that it can be so translated, which might be false if,
for example, Nelly’s species couldn't see color. But if it couldn’t be so translated, then neither
could its negation; and thus Nelly could not express a hypothesis that contradicted your claim
that the grass is green.) On the 31st, Nelly uses this predicate to refer to the exact set of objects
that, if you were somehow transported to her planet and presented with them, you would call
‘green’. One such object is the sun. Now will she predict that the same predicate will apply to the
sun the next day? If so, then she expresses no hypothesis about the sun that contradicts your own.
If not, this means that she thinks the predicate is temporally distinguishable—meaning that we’re
back in the first interpretation!
Regardless of what linguistic culture we’re entrenched in, then, we all make the same
hypotheses on the 31st. We don’t start from ‘green’ rather than ‘grue’ because of the past usages
of our language or culture; we start from it out of logical necessity. When Goodman rebuts
Carnap’s argument by pointing out that “if we start with ‘grue’ and ‘bleen’, then ‘blue' and
‘green’ will be explained in terms of ‘grue’ and ‘bleen' and a temporal term,” he is implicitly
imagining two people, one starting from ‘grue’ and the other from ‘green’. But no two people
could exist, even on different planets; they must start from the same predicate. If grue entails
indistinguishability, it is impossible on the 31st to define ‘grue’ in any terms other than ‘green’
and a specific temporal point. Carnap is right: ‘grue,’ unlike ‘green’, is inescapably positional.
Now we have exactly what Goodman was looking for: a rule of induction—something
along the lines of “if one hypothesis’s predicates are positional and another’s are qualitative, the
latter should be preferred if the evidence confirms them both equally”4—which allows us, on the
31st, to prefer the hypothesis that the grass is green over the hypothesis that it is grue. The rule
makes sense, intuitively; it passes Goodman's test of according with our actual inductive

4Note that Carnap’s tentatively proposed rule was stronger than this: “all purely qualitative properties…
are inductively projectible; perhaps only these are; certainly the purely positional properties are not
projectible, and I am inclined to believe that the mixed properties [containing both positional and
qualitative elements] are not, but this requires further investigation.” (Carnap 146)
practice. Moreover, it doesn’t feel ad hoc but rather seems to target exactly what felt suspect
about the grue hypothesis, its seeming arbitrariness. (After all, why was the date June 1st rather
than June 2nd?) True, it leaves untouched other hypotheses that conflict with the hypothesis that
the grass is green; for example, it is of no help against the hypothesis that “the grass will appear
to Nelly to turn blue at some unspecified point in the future.” But these can be hopefully dealt
with by other means—the example given, for instance, might be disqualified on grounds of
unfalsifiability. Have we, then, solved the New Riddle?
I think the answer depends on what one takes to qualify as a solution. If asked to justify
our prediction that the grass will appear green tomorrow, we now have a rule to point to; if such
a rule counts as a solution (as Goodman thought it would) then it seems to me that we are
justified in answering in the affirmative. But if a solution must be a guarantee that our prediction
is correct, then it seems to me that we don’t have one and indeed can’t have one. I take none of
what I have said to rule out the possibility that I might wake up tomorrow to find the grass has
turned blue. After all, I make no claim to understanding how exactly my subjective experience is
hooked up with the physical world; who am I to say it won’t be hooked up slightly differently
tomorrow?
In this sense, my attitude towards Goodman’s challenge is similar to Goodman’s attitude
toward Hume’s challenge. “If the problem [posed by the Humian challenge to induction] is to
explain how we know that certain predictions will turn out to be correct, the sufficient answer is
that we don't know any such thing,” Goodman writes. “If the problem is to find some way of
distinguishing antecedently between true and false predictions, we are asking for prevision rather
than for philosophical explanation.” To claim to know with certainty what color the grass will
appear tomorrow, it seems to me, would be the hubris of claiming prevision. Even to claim to
know with high probability seems suspect, for it seems like a fool’s errand to try to evaluate or
even estimate the relative likelihoods of the green and grue hypotheses. All we can maintain is
that according to our method of induction, we have evidence for the former and not the latter.
What else could there be to say, at the end of the day?
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Word count: 3613
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Goodman, Nelson. Fact, fiction, and forecast. Harvard University Press, 1983.
Swinburne, R. G. "'Grue'." Analysis 28.4 (1968): 123-128.
Carnap, Rudolf. "On the application of inductive logic." Philosophy and phenomenological
research 8.1 (1947): 133-148.