Anyone who is a color eliminativist‐i.e., believes that the physical world is colorless‐must explain how our sense experience of color can be so systematically illusory. As it turns out, it is difficult to do this without committing oneself to dualism. In this paper I explore the options available to the color eliminativist in this regard, and argue that his/her prospects are more promising, though still far from certain, if s/he adopts the position that sense experience is strictly intentional.

The philosophical debate over the nature of color has been governed by what we have learnt from color vision science and what color phenomenology suggests to us. It is usually thought that color eliminativism, which maintains that physical objects do not have any properties that can be identified with colors, can account for the former but not the latter. After all, what could be more obvious than the external world to be colored? Here I outline one color eliminativistic response (...) to the objections based on phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper (from 2006) is now defunct. I argue against "realist primitivism". One of my arguments is a kind of "evolutionary debunking argument". Some of the material of this was incorporated into “Can Disjunctivists Explain Our Access to the Sensible World?” and "How Does Color Experience Represent the World?".

Philosophical Papers, Volume 41, Issue 2, Page 305-321, July 2012.

Jonathan Cohen has produced a powerful argument for Colour Relationalism: the metaphysical thesis that colours are relational properties of a certain sort—relational with respect to perceivers and circumstances. Cohen makes two important assumptions: one is that Colour Relationalism and Colour Irrealism (which include Colour Eliminativism, Fictionalism and other “error theories”) are rivals; the second is that “error theories” are theories of last resort. In this paper, I challenge both assumptions. In particular, I argue that there (...) is good reason to think that Colour Relationalism needs to be supplemented by some version ofan Error theory. In so doing, I examine, in detail, the issues raised in a paper by Janet Levin in which she engages in an instructive debate with Colin McGinn. Levin’s paper is important since Cohen places heavy reliance on her arguments, both in defending his relationalist theory against crucial objections, and in his dismissal of error theories. (shrink)

Jonathan Cohen has produced a powerful argument for Colour Relationalism: the metaphysical thesis that colours are relational properties of a certain sort—relational with respect to perceivers and circumstances. Cohen makes two important assumptions: one is that Colour Relationalism and Colour Irrealism (which include Colour Eliminativism, Fictionalism and other “error theories”) are rivals; the second is that “error theories” are theories of last resort. In this paper, I challenge both assumptions. In particular, I argue that there (...) is good reason to think that Colour Relationalism needs to be supplemented by some version ofan Error theory. In so doing, I examine, in detail, the issues raised in a paper by Janet Levin in which she engages in an instructive debate with Colin McGinn. Levin’s paper is important since Cohen places heavy reliance on her arguments, both in defending his relationalist theory against crucial objections, and in his dismissal of error theories. (shrink)

Colour variation is the fact that what colour physical objects look to have depends on viewing conditions and a perceiver’s visual system. Both Colour Relationalists and Colour Eliminativists regard their analyses of colour variation as central to the justification for their respective views. Yet the analyses are decidedly different. Colour Relationalists assert that most instances of colour variation are veridical and infer from this that colours are relational properties of objects that are partly (...) determined by perceivers. By contrast, Colour Eliminativists assert that colour variation is too unsystematic to ground the claim that many or most instances of colour variation are veridical. From this they infer that objects don’t have colours. I argue that the Eliminativist analysis is superior. On my view, the Relationalist account of veridical colour experience reduces to the assertion that objects have colour simply because they cause perceivers to have colour experiences of them. In this context, I argue, the resulting conception of veridicality is vacuous. More directly, the foundational idea of Eliminativism is the opposite claim: the fact that objects cause perceivers to have colour experiences of them is on its own not sufficient to justify or ground the claim that objects have colour. The Relationalist, I argue, has failed to justify anything stronger than this. In this debate we should thus side with the Eliminativist: objects do not possess colour; they merely cause us to undergo colour experiences. (shrink)

Levine suggests the following criticisms of my book. First, the absence of a positive account of first-person knowledge in it makes it vulnerable to eliminativist refutation. Second, it is a relative strength of the higher order representation accounts of consciousness I reject that they offer explanations of the subjectivity of conscious states and their special availability to first-person knowledge. Further, the close connection I draw between the phenomenal character of experience and intentionality is unwarranted in the case of both color (...) perception and conceptual thought. In response to Levine's critique, I argue that the eliminativist can be rebutted and higher-order representation theories found wanting, even without offering a positive account of first-person knowledge. Also, I note that I actually have begun to offer an account of this based on my conception of phenomenal consciousness. Finally, it will be seen that Levine's concerns do not undermine my views on color experience, conscious thought, and intentionality, once their justification and character are made clear. (shrink)

It is common for an object to present different colour appearances to different perceivers, even when the perceivers and viewing conditions are normal. For example, a Munsell chip might look unique green to you and yellowish green to me in normal viewing conditions. In such cases, there are three possibilities. Ecumenism: both experiences are veridical. Nihilism: both experiences are non-veridical. Inegalitarianism: one experience is veridical and the other is non-veridical. Perhaps the most important objection to inegalitarianism is the ignorance (...) objection, according to which inegalitarianism should be rejected because it is committed to the existence of unknowable colour facts. The goal of this paper is to show that ecumenists are also committed to unknowable colour facts. More specifically, I argue that, with the exception of colour eliminativism, all major philosophical theories of colour are committed to unknowable colour facts. (shrink)

One of Daniel Dennett's most sophisticated arguments for his eliminativism about phenomenological properties centers around the color phi phenomenon. He attempts to show that there is no phenomenological fact of the matter concerning the phenomenon of apparent motion because it is impossible to decide between two competing explanations. I argue that the two explanations considered by Dennett are both based on the assumption that a realist account of the phenomenon must include a neat mapping between phenomenological time and objective (...) time. Since this assumption is false, Dennett's argument is unsuccessful. Like most eliminativist arguments, Dennett's arguments may indicate that the subjective character of experience is different from how it is often described, but this leaves plenty of room for alternative models of consciousness. (shrink)

The typical kind of color realism is reductive: the color properties are identified with properties specified in other terms (as ways of altering light, for instance). If no reductive analysis is available — if the colors are primitive sui generis properties — this is often taken to be a convincing argument for eliminativism. That is, realist primitivism is usually thought to be untenable. The realist preference for reductive theories of color over the last few decades is particularly striking in (...) light of the generally anti-reductionist mood of recent philosophy of mind. The parallels between the mind—body problem and the case of color are substantial enough that the difference in trajectory is surprising. While dualism and non-reductive physicalism are staples, realist primitivism is by and large a recent addition to the color literature. And it remains a minority position, although one that is perhaps gaining support. In this paper, we investigate whether it should be accepted, and conclude it should not be. (shrink)

A Naive Realist Theory of Colour defends the view that colours are mind-independent properties of things in the environment, that are distinct from properties identified by the physical sciences. This view stands in contrast to the long-standing and wide-spread view amongst philosophers and scientists that colours don't really exist - or at any rate, that if they do exist, then they are radically different from the way that they appear. It is argued that a naive realist theory of (...) class='Hi'>colour best explains how colours appear to perceiving subjects, and that this view is not undermined either by reflecting on variations in colour perception between perceivers and across perceptual conditions, or by our modern scientific understanding of the world. A Naive Realist Theory of Colour also illustrates how our understanding of what colours are has far-reaching implications for wider questions about the nature of perceptual experience, the relationship between mind and world, the problem of consciousness, the apparent tension between common sense and scientific representations of the world, and even the very nature and possibility of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Colours and consciousness both present us with metaphysical problems. But what exactly are the problems? According to standard accounts, they are roughly the following. On the one hand, we have reason to believe, about both colour and consciousness, that they are identical with some familiar natural phenomena. But on the other hand, it is hard to see how these identities could obtain. I argue that this is an adequate characterisation of our metaphysical problem of colour, but a mischaracterisation (...) of the problem of consciousness. It mischaracterises the problem by presenting consciousness as more 'colour-like' than we have reason to take it to be. The real problem of consciousness is, I suggest, that almost nothing theoretically useful is known about this phenomenon at present. I also explore some implications of this perspective on the problem of consciousness. Given the shape of the problem, I argue that we can't rule out all forms of eliminativism about consciousness. Nor can we rule out that future research will close the ' explanatory gap' that consciousness gives rise to. (shrink)

Despite the fact about colour, that it is one of the most obvious and conspicuous features of the world, there is a vast number of different theories about colour, theories which seem to be proliferating rather than decreasing. How is it possible that there can be so much disagreement about what colours are? Is it possible that these different theorists are not talking about the same thing? Could it be that more than one of them is right? Indeed (...) some theorists, e.g. Leo M. Hurvich, D. L. McAdam and K. Nassau, say that the term ‘colour’ is used to identify a range of different properties, e.g. pigments, properties of light, and sensations. Such a view has its attractions, but it raises the question of what it is that unites these various concepts – what is it that would make them all concepts of colour? What is it that justifies using the same terms, ‘yellow’, ‘blue’, ‘pink’, mauve’, and so on?This paper aims to address this question, arguing that its answer supports the conclusion that the best theory of colour is a form of anti‐realism: the Illusory theory of colours. There are two parts to this thesis, one negative, the other positive. The negative part is that there are no colours, as they are ordinarily conceived. The positive part is that, nevertheless, the world is such that ‘it is as if there are such colours’. Such a theory has important implications. One is that it doesn’t fall neatly into the usual taxonomy of philosophical theories. In particular, it does not deserve the label ‘eliminativist’. Another is that it allows some space for the views expressed by Hurvich, McAdam and Nassau, but not quite in the sense that they intend. (shrink)

Larry Hardin has been the most steadfast and influential critic of physicalist theories of color over the last 20 years. In their modern form these theories originated with the work of Smart and Armstrong in the 1960s and 1970s1 and Hardin appropriately concentrated on their views in his initial critique of physicalism.2 In his most recent contribution to this project3 he attacks Michael Tye’s recent attempts to defend and extend color physicalism.4 Like Byrne and Hilbert5, Tye identifies color with the (...) reflecting properties of objects (“reflectance physicalism”). Specifically, the determinate and determinable colors are identified with types of reflectances. (Setting some complications aside, the reflectance of an object is the proportion of light that it reflects at each wavelength in the visible spectrum.) These reflectance types are, in the terminology of Hilbert, anthropocentric—in the terminology of Lewis6, they are not very “natural”. (shrink)

The view that physical objects do not, in fact, possess colour properties is certainly the dominant position amongst scientists working on colour vision. It is also a reasonably popular view amongst philosophers. However, the recent philosophical debate about the metaphysical status of colour properties seems to have taken a more realist turn. In this article, I review the main philosophical views – eliminativism, physicalism, dispositionalism and primitivism – and describe the problems they face. I also examine (...) how these views have been classified and suggest that there may be less disparity between some of these positions than previously thought. (shrink)

In "How to Speak of the Colors", Mark Johnston’s claims that eliminativism would require us to jettison colour discourse. In this paper, I challenge Johnston’s claim. I argue that a particular version of eliminativism, i.e., prescriptive colour fictionalism, allows us to continue employing colour discourse as we have thus far in the absence of colours. In doing so, it employs statistical models in its base discourse to derive high-level statistical constructs that can be linked to (...) the fiction via bridge principles. (shrink)

Color subjectivists claim that, despite appearances to the contrary, the world external to the mind is colorless. However, in giving an account of color perception, subjectivists about the nature of perceived color must address the nature of perceived spatial location as well. The argument here will be that subjectivists’ problems with coordinating the metaphysics of perceived color and perceived location render color perception implausibly mysterious. Consequently, some version of color realism, the view that colors are (physical, dispositional, functional, sui generis, (...) or some other) properties of physical objects, is correct. (shrink)

Some philosophical theories of the nature of color aim to respect a "common sense" conception of color: aligning with the common sense conception is supposed to speak in favor of a theory and conflicting with it is supposed to speak against a theory. In this paper, we argue that the idea of a "common sense" conception of color that philosophers of color have relied upon is overly simplistic. By drawing on experimental and historical evidence, we show how conceptions of color (...) vary along several dimensions and how even supposedly "core" components of the contemporary "common sense" conception of color are less stable than they have been thought to be. (shrink)

But Hardin hasn’t contented himself with reframing traditional philosoph- ical issues about color in a way that is sensitive to relevant empirical con- straints. In addition, he has been a staunch defender of color eliminativism — the view that there are no colors, qua properties of tables, chairs, and other mind-external objects, and a vociferous critic of several varieties of re- alism about color that have been defended by others (e.g., [Hardin, 2003], [Hardin, 2005]). These other views include the (...) so-called color physical- ism of [Hilbert, 1987], [Byrne and Hilbert, 1997a], [Byrne and Hilbert, 2003], and [Tye, 2000],¹ and, inconveniently, even the relationalist view defended in [Cohen, 2003a], [Cohen, 2004a], [Cohen, 2003b], [McLaughlin, 2003], and [Jakab and McLaughlin, 2003]. (shrink)

This entry outlines relationalism, primitivism, and eliminativism about color and considers objections to each theory.

Byrne and Hilbert provide valuable clarification of the complexities–undreamt of by the layman–that make it hard to answer the question of what color is, and that often lead color scientists to say such remarkable and extravagant things. They emphasize at the outset that their issue is not just how to define the ordinary language term “color”: “The problem of color realism is like the investigation of what humans can digest, not the investigation of the folk category of food.” [ms p4], (...) but then I am puzzled by a tension in the target article regarding the weight they put on our ordinary intuitions about color. The very setting of the issue as a disagreement between “color realists” and “color eliminativists” endows the everyday concept with somewhat more authority than it deserves–comparable to an imaginary debate between biologists who were “food realists” and “food eliminativists”! (shrink)

In many cases of variation in color vision, there is no non-arbitrary way of choosing between variants. Byrne and Hilbert insist that there is an unknown standard for choosing, while eliminativists claim that all the variants are erroneous. A better response relativizes colors to perceivers, thereby providing a color realism that avoids the need to choose between variants.

One of the main targets of Barry Stroud’s criticism in his recent book ‚The Quest for Reality. Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour’ are eliminativist theories of colour which he regards as a version of the metaphysical project of the unmasking of colours (Stroud, 2000). According to this view, no physical objects have any of the colours we see them or believe them to have. However, although this error theory describes all our colour perceptions as illusory, and (...) all our colour beliefs as false, it cannot deny that we actually perceive colours and that we do believe that physical objects are coloured. Therefore, it has to account for these psychological facts without relying on any assumptions about the colours of things. Thus, the central question for the unmasking project is whether it is possible to acknowledge someone’s perceiving a certain colour or having beliefs about the colours of things without holding that anything anywhere has any colour at all. Contrary to Stroud, this paper defends the view that we can acknowledge that people believe in colours without having ourselves to accept their existence. (shrink)

Mendelovici (forthcoming) has recently argued that (1) tracking theories of mental representation (including teleosemantics) are incompatible with the possibility of reliable misrepresentation and that (2) this is an important difficulty for them. Furthermore, she argues that this problem commits teleosemantics to an unjustified a priori rejection of color eliminativism. In this paper I argue that (1) teleosemantics can accommodate most cases of reliable misrepresentation, (2) those cases the theory fails to account for are not objectionable and (3) teleosemantics is (...) not committed to any problematic view on the color realism-antirealism debate. (shrink)

That Descartes’ God is not a deceiver is amongst the canonical claims of early modern philosophy. The significance of this (purported) fact to the coherence of Descartes’ system is likewise canonical, infused in how we teach and think about the _Meditations_. Though prevalent, both ends of this narrative are suspect. We argue that Descartes’ color eliminativism, when coupled with his analysis of the cognitive structure of our sensory systems, entails that God is a deceiver. It’s doubtful that Descartes recognized (...) this, given his insistence that God is not a deceiver, and the role this plays in his system. But this is a concession Descartes can grant if we are careful about the kind of deception at play—a kind Descartes _does_ recognize, albeit not without some ambiguity. On our story, Descartes’ metaphysics and epistemology are not driven by concerns about deception _per se_, but by concerns about God’s _benevolence_. (shrink)

Hardin’s empirically-grounded argument for color eliminativism has defined the color realism debate for the last 30 years. By Hardin’s own estimation, phenomenal structure—the unique/binary hue distinction in particular—poses the greatest problem for color realism. Examination of relevant empirical findings shows that claims about the unique hues which play a central role in the argument from phenomenal structure should be rejected. Chiefly, contrary to widespread belief amongst philosophers and scientists, the unique hues do not play a fundamental role in determining (...) all color appearances. Among the consequences of this result is that greater attention should be paid to certain proposals for putting the structure of phenomenal color into principled correspondence with surface reflectance properties. While color realism is not fully vindicated, it has much greater empirical plausibility than previously thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There are forms of discriminations that are not defensible, and unjustified discriminations manifest in different forms. One such manifestation is racism, which involves the use of morally arbitrary natural and moral constituents (characteristics, abilities, qualities) to demarcate racial or ethnic groups and consequently designate some groups as superior and others as inferior. In this article, I discuss one form of racism (intellectual racism), namely, racism in relation to color, as a way of highlighting how the notion of superiority and (...) inferiority of racial or ethnic groups (Caucasian and Africans) play out in the intellectual landscape and discourse. Ultimately, my motivations are threefold: one, to signify and engage with some views of racial coloring and color eliminativism; two, to make and extend the position that color eliminativism is not defensible; and three, to highlight and emphasize the claim that given the notion of a “one-colored humanity,” racial groups ought not to be classified as superior or inferior. (shrink)

Variations in colour perception have featured prominently in recent attempts to argue against the view that colours are objective mind-independent properties of the perceptual environment. My aim in this paper is to defend the view that colours are mind-independent properties in response to worries arising from one type of empirically documented case of perceptual variation: variation in the perception of the «unique hues». §1 sets out the challenge raised by variation in the perception of the unique hues. I argue (...) in §2 that the empirical findings are less dramatic than they might initially appear, and in §3 that accounting for the inter-personal differences is consistent with the view that colours are mind-independent properties that normal subjects veridically perceive, at least roughly speaking. (shrink)

When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to produce certain kinds of visual experiences. (...) According to both _primitivism_ and _physicalism_, colors are not psychological dispositions; they differ in that primitivism says that no reductive analysis of the colors is possible, whereas physicalism says that they are physical properties. This paper is a defense of physicalism about color. (shrink)

When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to produce certain kinds of visual experiences. (...) According to both _primitivism_ and _physicalism_, colors are not psychological dispositions; they differ in that primitivism says that no reductive analysis of the colors is possible, whereas physicalism says that they are physical properties. This paper is a defense of physicalism about color. (shrink)

[Author's note: I am posting this dissertation since it may be of interest to some people working on vagueness and related topics. It does not represent my current views on the topic. I have never attempted to publish any of this work, though I hope some day to return to it.] -/- Philosophers have devoted a lot of attention to vagueness in recent years, but there is still no general consensus about how to resolve the Sorites paradox. Timothy Williamson‘s epistemic (...) view, which claims that our vague terms have unknown sharp boundaries, is the most popular and most controversial current account. No one has shown exactly what is wrong the epistemic view and no one has provided a satisfying alternative to it. These two projects – articulating what is wrong with the epistemic view, and providing a plausible alternative – are the primary goals of this dissertation. -/- Additionally, I survey ordinary intuitions that underlie Sorites paradoxes, and I note how these intuitions inform, and are informed by, a number of deeper philosophical debates in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and ethics. In part, this serves as an explanation of why the Sorites paradox has remained so difficult to resolve. -/- The most common objection to the epistemic view – that it provides an unsatisfactory account of the connection between meaning and use – has not been successful in undermining the view. My own objection is a metaphysical, and not a semantic, objection: the epistemic view fails to provide the best explanation of what objects and properties exist. Instead, an eliminativist account of macro-level objects and properties, according to which there are no mountains and there is no property of being lavender-colored, is a better metaphysical account than one that claims that there are mountains and color properties that have sharp boundaries. -/- Of course, this eliminativist view is intuitively unappealing, and to show how statements in ordinary language can in some way be taken to be true, I introduce the normative choice account. According to this view, although non-normative facts about linguistic behavior and about the external world do not determine a precise reference for our terms, our choices may do so. I claim that this provides all that is needed for there to be semantic normativity. First, we are still guided in our choices to some extent by psychological tendencies, and second, there are resources in semantic deliberation to respond to aberrant uses of language. (shrink)

We present the problem of perceptual agreement (of determinate color) and submit that it proves to be a serious and long overlooked obstacle for those insisting that colors are not objective features of objects, viz., nonobjectivist theories like C. L. Hardin’s (2003) eliminativism and Jonathan Cohen’s (2009) relationalism.

This dissertation develops and defends a detailed realist, internalist account of qualia which is consistent with physicalism and which does not resurrect the epistemological 'myth of the Given.' In doing so it stakes out a position in the sparsely populated middle ground between the two major opposing factions on the problem of phenomenal consciousness: between those who think we have a priori reasons to believe that qualia are irreducible to the physical , and those who implicitly or explicitly treat qualia (...) as contentful but non-phenomenal physical properties . ;I present a minimal, non-question-begging definition of "qualia" and then use this definition in a reformulation of the argument from perceiver relativity which shows that qualia must, at least in humans, be properties of states of the central nervous system. That is, brain states do not simply indicate the colours of external objects---they instantiate phenomenal colours. Since brain states are not coloured in the same way as are external objects, I argue that to token phenomenal property F must be to be the first-person phenomenal sensation of F. I build on this position to argue that the phenomenal apprehension of qualia, is "given"---immediate, certain and private---but that qualia nevertheless do not provide an absolutely certain epistemological foundation since they do not constitute a set of indisputable propositions about facts. I then define what it would be for physicalism to be true of qualia, but argue that the main a priori arguments for and against qualia physicalism---including the logical possibility of zombies and the impossibility of epiphenomenalism---fail. Whether qualia are consistent with physicalism, I claim, is still an open question, answerable only when we discover in more detail how qualia depend upon the brain. ;Although strongly in sympathy with many commonsensical intuitions about qualia, this account stands in contrast to most influential extant theories of qualia, such as eliminativism , externalism , or property-dualism : I conclude the dissertation by using its results to argue explicitly against these three positions. (shrink)

John Perry’s Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness is based on the Jean Nicod Lectures, which he gave in Paris in 1999. The main goal of this book is to defend what he calls ‘antecedent physicalism’ from various common objections to physicalism. The book is organised as follows. In Chapter 1 Perry reviews a number of antiphysicalist arguments, which have been intensively discussed in the last few years among philosophers of mind. In Chapters 2 and 3 he formulates antecedent physicalism. Unlike (...) class='Hi'>eliminativism, antecedent physicalism grants the subjective character of phenomenal experiences. It then tries to construct the best possible account of them on the assumption that they are physical (p. 27). However, according to Perry, it is a mistake to think that the antecedent physicalist is ‘a complete dogmatist for whom physicalism is a religious principle’. The antecedent physicalist is rather one ‘who is committed to physicalism in the sense that she or he sees some compelling reasons for it and will not give it up without seeing some clear reason to do so’ (p. 27). In the rest of the book Perry attempts to show how his antecedent physicalism can block existing antiphysicalist arguments. In PSYCHE: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ Chapter 4 he discusses the zombie argument, according to which physicalism is false because the existence of a zombie—someone physically identical to a human being but lacking conscious experience altogether—is a logical possibility. In Chapters 5, 6 and 7 Perry discusses the knowledge argument, according to which physicalism is false because there could be a scientist—call her Mary—who knows all the physical facts but does not know what it is like to see colour. In Chapter 8 Perry discusses the modal argument, according to which physicalism, the identity theory in particular, is false because psychophysical identity statements such as ‘pain=c-fibre stimulation’ cannot be true, even if we regard them as necessary and a posteriori.. (shrink)

Probably colour is the best worked-out example of allegedly neurophysiologically innate response categories determining percepts and percepts determining concepts, and hence biology fixing the basic categories implicit in the use of language. In this paper I argue against this view and I take C. L. Hardin's Color for Philosophers [1988] as my main target. I start by undermining the view that four unique hues stand apart from all other colour shades (Section 2) and the confidence that the solar (...) spectrum is naturally divided into four categories (Section 3). For such categories to be truly universal, they have to be true for all peoples and in Section 4 I show that Berlin and Kay's [1969] widely quoted theory of basic colour categories is not sufficiently supported to lend it any credibility.Having disposed of the view that inspection of language or ‘pure’ perception unveils the universal colour categories. I turn to neurophysiological and psychophysical theories of colour vision to see whether they provide a more solid basis for deciding what the innate response categories are. In Section 5 I show that Hardin's account of the opponent-process theory neither supports his view that ‘colour-coding’takes place early in the visual neural pathway, nor his view that knowledge of colour vision science will help us solve many philosophical mysteries about colour.In Section 6 I give a more detailed review of what is known today about the neurophysiology of colour vision and I show that there's nothing in the brain which could be called a colour module, let alone a module with homunculi for particular basic colour categories. In Section 7 I show that psychophysical models do not support such rigid constraints on category formation either. Hence (Section 8), at least in the case of colour, current science supports a plasticity in the formation of categories that goes far beyond the requirements of those naturalistic philosophers who would like to ground primitive concepts in biology. (shrink)

In this target article the following hypotheses are discussed: (1) Colour is autonomous: a perceptuolinguistic and behavioural universal. (2) It is completely described by three independent attributes: hue, brightness, and saturation: (3) Phenomenologically and psychophysically there are four unique hues: red, green, blue, and yellow; (4) The unique hues are underpinned by two opponent psychophysical and/or neuronal channels: red/green, blue/yellow. The relevant literature is reviewed. We conclude: (i) Psychophysics and neurophysiology fail to set nontrivial constraints on colour categorization. (...) (ii) Linguistic evidence provides no grounds for the universality of basic colour categories. (iii) Neither the opponent hues red/green, blue/yellow nor hue, brightness, and saturation are intrinsic to a universal concept of colour. (iv) Colour is not autonomous. (shrink)

Physicalism about colour is the thesis that colours are identical with response-independent, physical properties of objects. I endorse the Argument from Structure against Physicalism about colour. The argument states that Physicalism cannot accommodate certain obvious facts about colour structure: for instance, that red is a unitary colour while purple is a binary colour, and that blue resembles purple more than green. I provide a detailed formulation of the argument. According to the most popular response to (...) the argument, the Physicalist can accommodate colour structure by explaining it in terms of colour experience. I argue that this response fails. Along the way, I examine other interesting issues in the philosophy of colour and colour perception, for instance the relational structure of colour experience and the description theory of how colour names refer. (shrink)

Classification -- Creed -- Country -- Color -- Class -- Culture -- Coda.

Byrne & Hilbert conceive of color perception as the representation of a physical property “out there.” In our view, their approach does not only have various internal problems, but is also apt to becloud both the intricate and still poorly understood role that “ color ” plays within perceptual architecture, and the complex coupling to the “external world” of the perceptual system as an entirety. We propose an alternative perspective, which avoids B&H's misleading dichotomy between a purely subjective and a (...) realist conception of “ color.”. (shrink)

This paper proposes an experimental investigation of the use of vague predicates in dynamic sorites. We present the results of two studies in which subjects had to categorize colored squares at the borderline between two color categories (Green vs. Blue, Yellow vs. Orange). Our main aim was to probe for hysteresis in the ordered transitions between the respective colors, namely for the longer persistence of the initial category. Our main finding is a reverse phenomenon of enhanced contrast (i.e. negative hysteresis), (...) present in two different tasks, a comparative task involving two color names, and a yes/no task involving a single color name, but not found in a corresponding color matching task. We propose an optimality-theoretic explanation of this effect in terms of the strict-tolerant framework of Cobreros et al. (J Philos Log 1–39, 2012), in which borderline cases are characterized in a dual manner in terms of overlap between tolerant extensions, and underlap between strict extensions. (shrink)

This chapter discusses color blindness and how it can be considered a guide and test for theories of normal vision. There are a multitude of stories to be told about the physiology of the receptor pigments of the eye and the genes that code for them, about the various kinds of cells in the retina and elsewhere in the visual system, and about color processing in the brain. It is a topic on which psychologists, physicists, biologists, and neurophysiologists have reason (...) to be proud and glad of the convergence of interests and views. Color blindness might, at first, seem just a peripheral abnormality, but it has often been both a guide to the nature of normal color vision and a test application for theories of it. It has the potential to provide cases where the various components of a complex process that are either hard or impossible to separate artificially are found already separated in nature. (shrink)