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TheOtherDave comments on Probability is in the Mind - Less Wrong
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I think I'm confused. We're talking about something that's never even heard of colors, so there shouldn't be anything in the mind of the robot related to "blue" in any way. This ought to be like the prior probability from your perspective that zorgumphs are wogle. Now that I've said the words, I suppose there's some very low probability that zorgumphs are wogle, since there's a probability that "zorgumph" refers to "cats" and "wogle" to "furry". But when you didn't even have those words in your head anywhere, how could there have been a prior? How could B9's prior be "very low" instead of "nonexistent"?
Well, if nothing else, when I ask B9 "is your ball blue?", I'm only providing a finite amount of evidence thereby that "blue" refers to a property that balls can have or not have. So if B9's priors on "blue" referring to anything at all are vastly low, then B9 will continue to believe, even after being asked the question, that "blue" doesn't refer to anything. Which doesn't seem like terribly sensible behavior. That sets a floor on how low the prior on "'blue' is meaningful" can be.