One of my favorite college professors was Harry Weinberg – his course was general semantics and his book was called Levels of Knowing and Existence.  I know, it seems boring but it was fascinating. I took it with my best friend Bob Donze (he got an A, I got a B but don’t remind him).

In one class, Weinberg who had suffered a stroke previously and talked with a speech impediment as a result asked the class “what color is a red light?”  We laughed and made fun of him (hope my NYU students are not reading this part).  This foolishness went on for an hour until the bell rang and he said one last time “what color is a red light?” Wait until you hear his answer.

RED.  Unless you are color blind.  His point:  by adding “to me” the light is red makes it a fact because it can be observed and verified.  To someone else, red may be a different color.

It wasn’t really about traffic lights — it was about perspective. Weinberg was teaching us that truth is not always absolute but filtered through experience. That lesson feels even more urgent now, when algorithms, echo chambers, and social feeds convince us our “red” is the only red.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” — Marcus Aurelius

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