the barbarian sees red!

I had a discussion with my new found friend Tim; a guy I met at my Starbucks. Of the many discussions and disagreements we’ve gotten into, one of them is the following. I questioned the assumption many people seem to think is obviously true; namely, the proposition that “one cannot know a thing unless one has something else to compare it to.” Why think this is true? And the reply went something like, “because without the ability to make a distinction between any two things, one cannot be aware of anything in particular.” So I went experimenting in my thoughts and came up with the following scenario:

Imagine there is a barbarian (by ‘barbarian’ I mean a man who knows no language nor any language users) who lives in a rainforest paradise with birds and trees and all sorts of other wonderful created things, but unlike most rainforests known to man this particular rainforest and everything in it is colored red, and no thing in the forest is any color besides red, and all things in the forest are the same hue or red. Imagine further that our barbarian has the same sort of vision, lighting conditions, and neural network, such that, everything going on with us when we see red also goes on with our barbarian. So the question is, does our barbarian know the forest is red? I imagine he would be seeing the same thing we do when we see red, but of course he wouldn’t know there is other possible colors than red, or even further that there is such a thing as natural-kind ‘colors,’ since anyone who knows about the natural kind colors would have to be aware of at least two. Bust despite all of this, isn’t it the case that our barbarian sees red when he looks at everything in the forest? Would he have a name for phenomenon of red? Probably not, since I think in most cases words are created in response to distinctions, and our barbarian knows of no other color to distinguish the color he sees. So if we asked him, “Mr. Barbarian, do you see red?” He probably wouldn’t know what we are referring to, because the thing we’re referring too (the red he sees) would be so universally manifested that he would unconsciously assume that the red he sees is not something distinct from everything else in the rainforest. But despite all this, is he not seeing the same hue of red we see when we see the same hue of red he sees? He’s got to be seeing the red in the forest, and this is true despite the fact he wouldn’t be able to communicate his knowledge to us. To claim that “one cannot know a thing unless one has something else to compare it to”, one must show how the above stated scenario is not only improbably but logically impossible. And good luck showing that…