The Quest for Reality, contains, amongst much else, a sustained and deeply illuminating investigation of the thesis Barry Stroud labels ’subjectivism’ about colours. The grounds he relentlessly amasses for rejecting the thesis are, in my view, compelling. There is a sense, indeed, in which I think they are more compelling than he says he himself finds them. For as I understand his arguments, they contain the materials for delivering a positive answer to the question: are objects really coloured? As Stroud (...) himself presents the outcome of his investigation, they do not. Actually, to put it in this ’headline-grabbing’ way is misleading. The real issue turns on the main concern of his book-- his immensely thought-provoking investigation of the questions: what counts as a metaphysical account of reality? And, in the test case of colours, can the task of addressing the question of whether they are or are not part of reality be successfully undertaken? The suggestion I will be making is that his rejection of subjectivism contains the materials for asking about the metaphysical reality of colour in a way that is distinct from the way he shows cannot work; and that on this distinct way, the answer to the question of whether objects are really coloured is: yes. So, he might either reject the very idea that this alternative way of framing the question about colours does count as an example of a metaphysical quest for their reality; or he might agree that it is one, but disagree with the positive answer I sketch on his behalf, so to speak. (shrink)

[opening paragraph]: If we think intuitively and non-professionally about the evolution of consciousness, the following is a compelling thought. What the emergence of consciousness made possible, uniquely in the natural world, was the capacity for representing the world, and, hence, for acquiring knowledge about it. This is the kind of thought that surfaces when, for example, we make explicit what lies behind wondering whether a frog, as compared to a dog, say, is conscious. The thought that it might not be (...) is closely bound up with doubts about whether there is a world out there for it. Such doubts are reinforced by neurophysiological and psychological theories to the effect that its purpose-specific, bug-detecting input does not provide for a connected spatial representation of the environment. Or rather there is no need to postulate such a representation in order to explain its tongue lashing out to catch the bug. Reflecting further, it seems that something else critical is lacking, or not necessarily present, in the explanation of the movement of the frog's tongue, namely the kind of appeal we normally make to another major feature we think consciousness introduced into world -- wants, emotions, desires, or, more generally, affective states and events. Without their existence, the intuition is, all we have are, at most, non-conscious information processing mechanisms. And when we ask what is required for desires and the like to be in play, we seem to come full circle. For whether or not it is correct to speak of individual desires for specific things in the world seems to have some kind of dependence on whether the organism in question is capable of representing those things, which in turn seems to depend on whether there is a world out there for it. And finally we tend to think that it is only when we have in play this kind of explanation of movement that action and agency appear on the scene. (shrink)

‘Like the shadow of one’s own head, [the referent of one’s ‘I’ thoughts] will not wait to be jumped on. And yet it is never very far ahead; indeed, sometimes it does not seem to be ahead of the pursuer at all. It evades capture by lodging itself in the very inside of the muscles of the pursuer. It is too near even to be within arm’s reach.’(C of M 177-89).