Joshua Gert presents an original account of color properties, and of our perception of them. He employs a general philosophical strategy - neo-pragmatism - which challenges an assumption made by virtually all other theories of color: he argues that colors are primitive properties of objects, irreducible to physical or dispositional properties.

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)

Musica-Colore-Tratto ©· un percorso epistemologico, una volont©¿ di tentare di comprendere la musica non come realt©¿ a s©♭ stante, bens©Ơ in relazione ad altre fonti del sapere che, in qualche modo, le si possano affiancare: sia per la ricerca di un kantiano tutto-insieme-connesso, sia per una pretesa hegeliana di un pensiero umano tricotomico. La volont©¿ di chi scrive ©· quella di far trasparire un'involontaria logica che permea l'idea umana generale (a prescindere da ci©ø in cui essa si cimenti) e di (...) ribadire il forte teleo℗Ưlogismo nel quale essa trova i suoi limiti. Pittori o litografi come Kandinsky o Escher ne erano ben consci, se arrivarono, tra i loro aforismi, ad affermare che "il colore ©· come la musica", o "adoriamo il caos perch©♭ amiamo produrre l'ordine". [Testo dell'editore]. (shrink)

Determinants of synesthetic color choice for the Japanese logographic script, Kanji, were studied. The study investigated how synesthetic colors for Kanji characters, which are usually acquired later in life than other types of graphemes in Japanese language , are influenced by linguistic properties such as phonology, orthography, and meaning. Of central interest was a hypothesized generalization process from synesthetic colors for graphemes, learned prior to acquisition of Kanji, to Kanji characters learned later. Results revealed that color choices for Kanji characters (...) depend on meaning and phonological information. Some results suggested that colors are generalized from Hiragana characters and Arabic digits to Kanji characters via phonology and meaning, respectively. Little influence of orthographic information was observed. The findings and approach of this study contributes to a clarification of the mechanism underlying grapheme-color synesthesia, especially in terms of its relationship to normal language processing. (shrink)

In Rediscovering Colors: A Study in Pollyanna Realism, Michael Watkins endorses the Moorean view that colors are simple, non-reducible, properties of objects. Consequently, Watkins breaks from what has become the received view that either colors are reducible to certain properties of interest to science, or else nothing is really colored. What is novel about the work is that Watkins, unlike other Mooreans, takes seriously the metaphysics of colors. Consequently, Watkins provides an account of what colors are, how they are related (...) to the physical properties on which they supervene, and how colors can be causally efficacious without the threat of causal overdetermination. Along the way, he provides novel accounts of normal conditions and non-human color properties. The book will be of interest to any metaphysician and philosopher of mind interested in colors and color perception. (shrink)

I respond to the separate commentaries by Jacob Berger, Charlie Pelling, and David Pereplyotchik on my paper, “Color-Consciousness Conceptualism.” I resist Berger’s suggestion that mental colors ever enter consciousness without accompaniment by deployments of concepts of their extra-mental counterparts. I express concerns about Pelling’s proposal that a more uniform conceptualist treatment of phenomenal sorites can be gained by a simple appeal to the partial overlap of the extensions of some concepts. I question the relevance to perceptual consciousness of the arguments (...) for demonstrative concepts that Pereplyotchik attacks. (shrink)

Consistent discriminatory practices associated with dark and black skin color underpin the persistence of colorism and racism in the Indian subcontinent. To understand better how skin color ideologies occupy the mind of people with the effect of marginalizing those with dark skin color and promoting whiteness as a social capital, we will apply the paradigm of situated affectivity. The conceptual tools developed in this framework will help to see how the environmental structures that perpetuate colorism have a pervasive influence on (...) individuals’ values and their emotional repertoire from a very young age. After having documented how the minds of individuals are invaded with discriminatory colorist positions, we will present how people indulge in processes of _user-resource_ interactions assumed to help regulating their affect, that in turn, result in re-enforcing again colorist and racist ideologies and practices. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn’s reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environments are political matters of life and death. Via the themes of invisibility, colors, and snow, the article traces semiotic relations (...) between different living beings and their Arctic ecologies to weave a semiotic understanding of contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic and the role of climate change therein. The article defines the violence of climate change as a violence of not being able to recognize oneself, and builds on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinaturalism to explain what it means that one world ruins other worlds. (shrink)

In previous work, I have defended a non-standard version of intentionalism about perceptual experience. According to the doxastic account, visual experience is a peculiar kind of belief: belief with “phenomenal” or looks-content. In this paper, I investigate what happens if this account of experience is combined with another idea I find very plausible: That the colors are to be understood in terms of color experience. I argue that the resulting phenomenal account of color experience captures everything essential to what has (...) been called the “natural concept of color”. And I show that circularity worries are not aggravated by adopting this account instead of more standard forms of intentionalism—rather, they can be dispelled along the same lines. (shrink)

The Hurvich-Jameson (H-J) opponent-process network offers a familiar account of the empirical structure of the phenomenological color space for humans, an account with a number of predictive and explanatory virtues. Its successes form the bulk of the existing reasons for suggesting a strict identity between our various color sensations on the one hand, and our various coding vectors across the color-opponent neurons in our primary visual pathways on the other. But anti-reductionists standardly complain that the systematic parallels discovered by the (...) H-J network are just empirical correspondences, constructed post facto, with no predictive or explanatory purchase on the intrinsic characters of qualia proper. The present paper disputes that complaint, by illustrating that the H-J model yields some novel and unappreciated predictions, and some novel and unappreciated explanations, concerning the qualitative characters of a considerable variety of color sensations possible for human experience, color sensations that normal people have almost certainly never had before, color sensations whose accurate descriptions in ordinary language appear semantically ill-formed or even self-contradictory. Specifically, these "impossible" color sensations are activation-vectors (across our opponent-process neurons) that lie inside the space of neuronally possible activation-vectors, but outside the central 'color spindle' that confines the familiar range of sensations for possible objective colors. These extra-spindle chimerical-color sensations correspond to no reflective color that you will ever see objectively displayed on a physical object. But the H-J model both predicts their existence and explains their highly anomalous qualitative characters in some detail. It also suggests how to produce these rogue sensations by a simple procedure made available in the latter half of this paper. The relevant color plates will allow you to savor these sensations for yourself. (shrink)

According to color realism, object colors are mind-independent properties that cover surfaces or permeate volumes of objects. In recent years, some color scientists and a growing number of philosophers have opposed this view on the grounds that realism about color cannot accommodate the apparent unitary/binary structure of the hues. For example, Larry Hardin asserts, the unitary-binary structure of the colors as we experience them corresponds to no known physical structure lying outside nervous systems that is causally involved in the perception (...) of color. This makes it very difficult to subscribe to a color realism that is supposed to be about red, green, blue, black, and white—that is, the colors with which we are perceptually acquainted.1 Similarly, Evan Thompson says. (shrink)

The sensory colors that figure in visual perceptual experience are either properties of the object of consciousness (naïve realism, sense-data theory), or properties of the subject of consciousness (adverbialism) (Section 1). I consider an argument suggested by the work of A. D. Smith that the existence of certain kinds of perceptual constancies shows that adverbialism is correct, for only adverbialism can account for such constancies (Section 3). I respond on behalf of the naïve realist that naïve realism is compatible with (...) the existence of such constancies, so long as naïve realism adopts the view that sensory colors are relational properties of physical objects, not intrinsic properties (Section 4). In other words, the naïve realist should adopt the theory of appearing (Section 5). (shrink)

It remains highly controversial whether Plato sympathized with the existence of chromatic Forms. I argue that the naturalistic interpretation of Plato’s conception of colors as flames does not depend on his approval of their existence.

This paper illustrates what a philosophical and a logical investigation of colors amounts to in contrast to other kinds of color analysis such as physical, physiological, chemical, psychological or cultural analysis of colors. Neither a philosophical nor a logical analysis of colors is concerned with specific aspects of colors. Rather, these kinds of color analysis are concerned with what one might call “logical foundations of color theory”. I will illustrate this first by considering philosophical and then logical analysis of colors.

Arguments from perceptual variation challenge the view that colors are objective properties of objects, properties that objects have independent of how they are perceived. This paper attempts, first, to diagnose one central reason why arguments from perceptual variation seem especially challenging for objectivists about color. Second, we offer a response to this challenge, claiming that once we focus on determinate colors rather than the determinables they determine, a response to arguments from perceptual variation becomes apparent. Third, our nominal opponents are (...) relationalist (like Cohen in The red and the real: an essay on color ontology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) and we will argue that the main argument for rejecting objectivism commits the relationalist to a position that is more radical than the one he would wish to endorse. Fourth, we suggest that insight into which properties could be relational may be found by looking to our best scientific theories. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain thinking (...) activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

This article, based on original research from 57 villages in four provinces from North and East India, sheds light on a hitherto unexplored gendered impact of colorism in facilitating noncustomary cross-region marriage migrations in India. Within socioeconomically marginalized groups from India’s development peripheries, the hegemonic construct of fairness as “capital” conjoins with both regressive patriarchal gender norms governing marriage and female sexuality and the monetization of social relations, through dowry, to foreclose local marriage options for darker-hued women. This dispossession of (...) matrimonial choice forces women to “voluntarily” accept marriage proposals from North Indian bachelors, who are themselves faced with a bride shortage in their own regions due to skewed sex ratios. These marriages condemn cross-region brides to new forms of gender subordination and skin-tone discrimination within the intimacy of their marriages, and in everyday relations with conjugal families, kin, and rural communities. Because of colorism, cross-region brides are exposed to caste-discriminatory exclusions and ethnocentric prejudice. Dark-skin shaming is a strategic ideological weapon employed to extract more labor from them. The article extends global scholarly discussion on the role of colorism in articulating new forms of gendered violence in dark-complexioned, poor rural women’s lives. (shrink)

Michael Tye has recently been a vocal defender of color realism or, as I shall call it, color objectivism. Objectivism about color is the view that color properties are identical to intrinsic physical properties of the surfaces of objects. Subjectivism about color is the denial of color objectivism. Objectivists argue that color claims must be taken at face value. In this paper I forego the usual bickering about whether there are surface reflectance properties that can be identified with colors as (...) the objectivist theory requires. Supposing that some such properties could be found, I argue that if objectivism about color were correct it would have the unsavory consequence that we are rarely if ever right—perhaps never right—about the particular colors of particular things. So objectivism does not bear out common attribution of colors to the surfaces of things, after all. (shrink)

Several religious traditions of South Asia understand that mental activities produce colors (leśyās) that are associated with the mind or with the soul itself. In Jain texts, there are three theories about how leśyās are produced: that leśyās are a product (parināma) (1) of the passions (kasāyas), (2) of vibrations of the soul (yoga), and (3) of all eight varieties of karmas. The views of various Śvetāmbara and Digambara commentators regarding leśyās are compared.

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)

Determinants of synesthetic color choice for Japanese phonetic characters were studied in six Japanese synesthetes. The study used Hiragana and Katakana characters, which represent the same set of syllables although their visual forms are dissimilar. From a palette of 138 colors, synesthetes selected a color corresponding to each character. Results revealed that synesthetic color choices for Hiragana characters and those for their Katakana counterparts were remarkably consistent, indicating that color selection depended on character-related sounds and not visual form. This Hiragana–Katakana (...) invariance cannot be regarded as the same phenomenon as letter case invariance, usually reported for English grapheme-color synesthesia, because Hiragana and Katakana characters have different identities whereas upper and lower case letters have the same identity. This involvement of phonology suggests that cross-activation between an inducer brain region and that of the concurrent area in grapheme-color synesthesia is mediated by higher order cortical processing areas. (shrink)

In his Time and Narrative, Ricœur introduces the term of “third time” to designate the middle ground between human and natural time. This time is synonymous with historical time, which is the main source of historical discourse. The third time consists of inscribing human time onto the time of nature. While historiography must strictly follow this structure, works of fiction have the freedom to explore and even create imaginative variations of time. Despite the constraints this seems to impose on historical (...) writing, this article shows that even within the tight structure of historical time, a palette of various colors and shades, akin to imaginative variations, can be observed. Historical time possesses depth and speed; it can contract and relax, motivate or prevent action, or gain various dynamics in relation to the ending it offers. (shrink)

University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06279-2054. Recent versions of objectivism can reply to the argument from metamers. The deeper rift between subjectivists and objectivists lies in the question of how to explain the structure of qualitative similarities among the colors. Subjectivism grounded in this fashion can answer the circularity objection raised by Dedrick. It endorses skepticism about the claim that there is some one property of objects that it is the function of color vision to detect. Color vision may enable (...) us to detect differences in spectral composition without granting us the capacity to detect identities. (shrink)

In a plenary presentation on structural racism at the 2019 American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Annual Meeting, invited speaker Mary T. Bassett asserted that there is no solidarity without...

There is no doubt that colors play a crucial role in the fine arts. Both the phenomenology and the interpretation of paintings, photographs, and films change dramatically depending on the colors that are used to compose them. A black and white reproduction of a Rothko painting loses one of the central traits of the work. It is similarly a crucial aesthetic choice by photographers or filmmakers to have their work shot in color or in black and white. This choice will (...) constrain the phenomenology of the resulting photographs and films and how viewers will eventually perceive and interpret them. Less clear, however, is the significance, the meaning of colors in the fine arts. In this paper, I argue that colors have no absolute meaning in the arts, but the effect they are supposed to engender in viewers, the significance that colors have in various pieces, will change as we consider different works, even, in some cases, if they belong to the same period. Despite the relatively uniform phenomenology of colors, their meaning varies dramatically in painting, photographs, and films. This makes colors behave in far more conventional ways, that is, representing via conventional codes rather than via recognitional prompts, than we may initially think in light of how relatively stable color phenomenology tends to be. It is, thus, important to distinguish the way colors represent from the way they are present in these various media. And by examining the implications of this distinction, I argue, we obtain a suggestive framework to examine colors in the fine arts. To support this conclusion I examine the meaning and significance of colors in selected paintings, photographs, and films, identifying some similarities but particularly several differences among various works. (shrink)

Accustomed as we are to wearing clothes and to using colors in artistic and utilitarian ways, we often forget that the first “monument” offered to color is the human body and that the first “canvas” for the artist was his own skin. Man has created a distance between skin and colors by introducing clothes, which have a meaning that works to the detriment of both skin and colors. Clothes are a kind of second skin which is far more versatile than (...) the first one and with which tailors and fashion designers may cheat to the full extent of their fantasy and in accordance with how we wish to appear. Colors play an infinite game of combinations which enhance and transform clothes. No skin lends itself to such a range of aesthetic manipulations as cloth does. (shrink)

We are concerned here with recursive function theory analogs of certain problems in chromatic graph theory. The motivating question for our work is: Does there exist a recursive (countably infinite) planar graph with no recursive 4-coloring? We obtain the following results: There is a 3-colorable, recursive planar graph which, for all k, has no recursive k-coloring; every decidable graph of genus p ≥ 0 has a recursive 2(χ(p) - 1)-coloring, where χ(p) is the least number of colors which will suffice (...) to color any graph of genus p; for every k ≥ 3 there is a k-colorable, decidable graph with no recursive k-coloring, and if k = 3 or if k = 4 and the 4-color conjecture fails the graph is planar; there are degree preserving correspondences between k-colorings of graphs and paths through special types of trees which yield information about the degrees of unsolvability of k-colorings of graphs. (shrink)

Realists about color, be they dispositionalists or physicalists, agree on the truth of the following claim: (R) x is red iff x is disposed to look red under standard conditions. The disagreement is only about whether to identify the colors with the relevant dispositions, or with their categorical bases. This is a question about the representational content of color experience: What kind of properties do color experiences ascribe to objects? It has been argued (for instance by Boghossian and Velleman, 1991) (...) that truths like (R) cannot be used in an account of the colors as they would result in ‚circular’, and therefore empty, contents. It has also been argued (for instance by Harman, 1996) that switching to an account of color in terms of a functional account of color sensations would result in a circular, and therefore empty, account. In this paper, I defend a realist account of color in terms of a (non-reductive) functional account of color sensations. Such an account of sensations has been suggested by Pagin (2000), and it can be applied to color sensations without the resulting account of the colors themselves being circular or empty. I argue that the so-called transparency of experience does not provide any argument against such an account. I also argue that on such an account, the issue of physicalism vs. dispositionalism boils down to the question of the modal profile of the color concepts. (shrink)

This paper examines the color symbolic values in two different and unrelated languages, Arabic and English. It analyses the colors mentioned in the Qur’an semiotically and their translation based on Peirce’s semiotic model of sign interpretation, while considering the socio-cultural differences that influence the understanding and rendering of color signs, informed by corpus-based analysis. Although the Qur’an contains the most basic colors like other languages, the semiotic values of some colors are different. The study shows that colors in the Qur’an, (...) and Arabic in general, are tightly linked to the environment and culture of the early Muslims who received the Qur’an first-hand from the Prophet. These colors as situated in their culture could appear positively or negatively to users in other languages in a way that is not intended in the source text. Therefore, the translator’s awareness of the socio-cultural signs could bridge the gap between the different systems of codification and recodification of signs. (shrink)

The Dangerous Book for Boys Abstract: Seventeenth and eighteenth century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. In particular, colors are secondary qualities: for example, an object is green iff it is disposed to look green to standard perceivers in standard conditions. After rebutting Boghossian and Velleman’s argument that a certain kind of secondary quality theory is viciously circular, we discuss (...) three main lines of argument for the secondary quality theory. The first is inspired by an intuitively compelling picture of perception articulated by Reid; the second is that the secondary quality theory is a conceptual truth; the third line of argument is presented in Johnston’s influential paper ‘How to speak of the colors’. We conclude that all these arguments fail, and that the secondary quality theory is unmotivated. Keywords: color, secondary quality, disposition, vision, perception.. (shrink)

Regier, Kay, and Khetarpal report the results of computer simulations that cluster color stimuli on the basis of their coordinates in CIELAB space, one of two commonly used perceptual color spaces. Regier and coauthors find partitions of those stimuli that are strikingly similar to the way actual color lexicons partition color space. They do not argue for the custom-made clustering method used in their simulations, nor for the assumption of CIELAB space. The present paper aims to answer the question to (...) what extent their computational results depend on these assumptions. It does this by applying a great variety of known clustering methods to Regier et al.’s stimuli, and by assuming not only CIELAB space but also CIELUV space, the other main color space. (shrink)

It is standard to suppose that, whether or not they are actually instantiated in our environment, colors are properties. Presumably those who are convinced of this thesis are convinced because they think that’s how we see colors--how visual experience represents them. I argue, in contrast, that there are cases of illusory color perception in which it is more plausible to suppose colors are represented as kinds of stuff or substance rather than as properties. I then show how to extend this (...) result to support the conclusion that colors are always represented in vision as kinds of stuff rather than as properties. In a concluding section, I consider further ways to explore and test the “stuff theory” of visual color representation. I also extract a moral from this investigation about our ability to draw accurate conclusions about our conscious visual experience. (shrink)

The Dangerous Book for Boys Abstract: Seventeenth and eighteenth century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. In particular, colors are secondary qualities: for example, an object is green iff it is disposed to look green to standard perceivers in standard conditions. After rebutting Boghossian and Velleman’s argument that a certain kind of secondary quality theory is viciously circular, we discuss (...) three main lines of argument for the secondary quality theory. The first is inspired by an intuitively compelling picture of perception articulated by Reid; the second is that the secondary quality theory is a conceptual truth; the third line of argument is presented in Johnston’s influential paper ‘How to speak of the colors’. We conclude that all these arguments fail, and that the secondary quality theory is unmotivated. Keywords: color, secondary quality, disposition, vision, perception.. (shrink)

The main point of our hypothesis “coloration undermines camouflage” is that many color patterns in plants undermine the camouflage of invertebrate herbivores, especially insects, thus exposing them to predation and causing them to avoid plant organs with unsuitable coloration, to the benefit of the plants. This is a common case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” and a visual parallel of the chemical signals that plants emit to call wasps when attacked by caterpillars. Moreover, this (...) is also a common natural version of the well‐known case of industrial melanism, which illustrates the great importance of plant‐based camouflage for herbivorous insects and can serve as an independent test for our hypothesis. We claim that the enormous variations in coloration of leaves, petioles and stems as well as of flowers and fruits undermine the camouflage of invertebrate herbivores, especially insects. We assume that the same principle might operate in certain animal–parasite interactions. Our hypothesis, however, does not contrast or exclude other previous or future explanations of specific types of plant coloration. Traits such as coloration that have more than one type of benefit may be selected for by several agents and evolve more rapidly than ones with a single type of advantage. BioEssays 26:1126–1130, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference, Ananda Abeysekara, pp. xvi+271. ISBN 1-57003-467-2.

We examine the pros and cons of color realism, exposing some desiderata on a theory of color: the theory should render colors as scientifically legitimate and correctly individuated, and it should explain how we have veridical color experiences. We then show that these desiderata can by met by treating colors as properties of the special sciences. According to our view, some of the major as properties of the special sciences. According to our view, some of the major disputes in the (...) literature about color -- anti-realism versus dispositionalism versus reductionism -- are not well-founded at this stage of scientific inquiry. Our account of color is designed to be of use in the sciences and as such is driven largely by considerations of what the various sciences need in order to proceed appropriately. We argue that a scientific theory of colors need not regard colors as anything more than high-level statistical constructs built out of correlations between color experiences and other phenomena. (shrink)

I defend a version of color subjectivism — that colors are sortals for certain neural events — by arguing against a sophisticated form of color objectivism and by showing how a subjectivist can legitimately explain the phenomenal fact that colors seem to be properties of external objects.

We investigate the existence of perfect homogeneous sets for analytic colorings. An analytic coloring of X is an analytic subset of [X]N, where N>1 is a natural number. We define an absolute rank function on trees representing analytic colorings, which gives an upper bound for possible cardinalities of homogeneous sets and which decides whether there exists a perfect homogeneous set. We construct universal σ-compact colorings of any prescribed rank γ<ω1. These colorings consistently contain homogeneous sets of cardinality γ but they (...) do not contain perfect homogeneous sets. As an application, we discuss the so-called defectedness coloring of subsets of Polish linear spaces. (shrink)

The Dangerous Book for Boys Abstract: Seventeenth and eighteenth century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. In particular, colors are secondary qualities: for example, an object is green iff it is disposed to look green to standard perceivers in standard conditions. After rebutting Boghossian and Velleman’s argument that a certain kind of secondary quality theory is viciously circular, we discuss (...) three main lines of argument for the secondary quality theory. The first is inspired by an intuitively compelling picture of perception articulated by Reid; the second is that the secondary quality theory is a conceptual truth; the third line of argument is presented in Johnston’s influential paper ‘How to speak of the colors’. We conclude that all these arguments fail, and that the secondary quality theory is unmotivated. Keywords: color, secondary quality, disposition, vision, perception.. (shrink)

This paper argues that the distinctiveness of the Hering primary hues – red, green, blue, and yellow – is already evident at the retina. Basic features of spectral sensitivity provide a foundation for the development of unique hue perceptions and the hue categories of which they are focal examples. Of particular importance are locations in color space at which points of minimal and maximal spectral sensitivity and extreme ratios of chromatic to achromatic response occur. This account builds on Jameson & (...) D’Andrade’s (1997) insight about the relationship between the Hering primaries and chromatic/achromatic ratios, Romney & Chiao’s (2009) color appearance model, and Thornton’s (1971; 1999) research on artificial lighting. (shrink)

How deeply does action influence perception? Does action performance affect the perception of object features directly related to action only? Or does it concern also object features such as colors, which are not held to directly afford action? The present study aimed at answering these questions. We asked participants to repeatedly grasp a handled mug hidden from their view before judging whether a visually presented mug was blue rather than cyan. The motor training impacted on their perceptual judgments, by speeding (...) participants’ responses, when the handle of the presented mug was spatially aligned with the trained hand. The priming effect did not occur when participants were trained to merely touch the mug with their hand closed in a fist. This indicates that action performance may shape the perceptual judgment on object features, even when these features are colors and do not afford any action. How we act on surrounding objects is therefore not without consequence for how we experience them. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that those who claim that the dispositionalist theory of color has even a prima facie advantage over color physicalism in accommodating the similarity relations that seem to hold among the colors are mistaken. The appearance that dispositionalists can handle the relevant similarity claims stems from the unexamined assumption that the similarity of two dispositions is simply a matter of the similarity of the manifestations of those dispositions. A more careful treatment of the ways in (...) which two dispositions can be similar to, or different from, one another must consider both the bases and the manifestation conditions of those dispositions in addition to their manifestations. After examining cases of dispositions from outside the domain of colors, it is argued that attention to conditions of manifestation provides a particularly strong reason for rejecting the assumption that similarity of manifestations entails similarity of dispositions. Without this assumption, dispositionalists about color are shown to be in the same position as non-dispositionalists regarding similarity relations among the colors. This way of responding to color dispositionalism is compared with two other responses [offered by Byrne :641–665, 2003) and McLaughlin ], and shown to be a candidate to strengthen, rather than replace, either one. (shrink)

A strong coloring on a cardinal$\kappa $is a function$f:[\kappa ]^2\to \kappa $such that for every$A\subseteq \kappa $of full size$\kappa $, every color$\unicode{x3b3} <\kappa $is attained by$f\restriction [A]^2$. The symbol$$ \begin{align*} \kappa\nrightarrow[\kappa]^2_{\kappa} \end{align*} $$asserts the existence of a strong coloring on$\kappa $.We introduce the symbol$$ \begin{align*} \kappa\nrightarrow_p[\kappa]^2_{\kappa} \end{align*} $$which asserts the existence of a coloring$f:[\kappa ]^2\to \kappa $which isstrong over a partition$p:[\kappa ]^2\to \theta $. A coloringfis strong overpif for every$A\in [\kappa ]^{\kappa }$there is$i<\theta $so that for every color$\unicode{x3b3} <\kappa $is (...) attained by$f\restriction ([A]^2\cap p^{-1}(i))$.We prove that whenever$\kappa \nrightarrow [\kappa ]^2_{\kappa }$holds, also$\kappa \nrightarrow _p[\kappa ]^2_{\kappa }$holds for an arbitrary finite partitionp. Similarly, arbitrary finitep-s can be added to stronger symbols which hold in any model of ZFC. If$\kappa ^{\theta }=\kappa $, then$\kappa \nrightarrow _p[\kappa ]^2_{\kappa }$and stronger symbols, like$\operatorname {Pr}_1(\kappa,\kappa,\kappa,\chi )_p$or$\operatorname {Pr}_0(\kappa,\kappa,\kappa,\aleph _0)_p$, also hold for an arbitrary partitionpto$\theta $parts.The symbols$$ \begin{gather*} \aleph_1\nrightarrow_p[\aleph_1]^2_{\aleph_1},\;\;\; \aleph_1\nrightarrow_p[\aleph_1\circledast \aleph_1]^2_{\aleph_1},\;\;\; \aleph_0\circledast\aleph_1\nrightarrow_p[1\circledast\aleph_1]^2_{\aleph_1}, \\ \operatorname{Pr}_1(\aleph_1,\aleph_1,\aleph_1,\aleph_0)_p,\;\;\;\text{ and } \;\;\; \operatorname{Pr}_0(\aleph_1,\aleph_1,\aleph_1,\aleph_0)_p \end{gather*} $$hold for an arbitrary countable partitionpunder the Continuum Hypothesis and are independent over ZFC$+ \neg $CH. (shrink)