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Summary Dispositionalist theories of color identify colors with psychological dispositions, disposition to produce certain psychological effects in certain perceivers. For example: redness = the disposition to look red to normal perceivers in normal conditions. Dispositionalist theories descend from the discussion of primary and secondary qualities in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). One objection to dispositionalist theories is that the notion of a "normal perceiver" cannot be specified in a principled manner; another is that the account is not phenomenologically adequate because colors do not look like dispositions.
Key works McGinn 1983 sets out the (then) received view of colors as dispositions, later revised in McGinn 1996. For other defenses of the dispositionalist theory, see Peacocke 1984 and Johnston 1992. For criticism, see Boghossian & Velleman 1989 and Byrne & Hilbert 2011.
Introductions For short overviews of the competing theories of color, see the introduction to Byrne & Hilbert 1997, Hilbert 1998 and Byrne & Hilbert 2002. For a more substantial introduction see Maund 2008. A useful annotated bibliography is Brogaard 2010.
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  1. Theories of Color Perception.Ralph Schumacher (ed.) - forthcoming - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  2. Is Representationalism Committed to Colour Physicalism?Daniel Mario Weger - 2022 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 22 (64):1-20.
    The circularity problem states that the representationalist about phenomenal consciousness gives a circular explanation if she adopts the classic view about secondary qualities, such as colours, that characterises them as dispositions to produce experiences with a specifi c phenomenal character. Since colour primitivism faces severe diffi culties, it seems that colour physicalism is the only viable option for the representationalist. I will argue that the representationalist is not committed to colour physicalism because she can adopt an anti-realist theory of colour. (...)
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  3. Science and Philosophy of Color in the Modern Age.Jacob Browning & Zed Adams - 2021 - In Anders Steinvall & Sarah Streets (eds.), Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 21-38.
    The study of color expanded rapidly in the 20th century. With this expansion came fragmentation, as philosophers, physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and others explored the subject in vastly different ways. There are at least two ways in which the study of color became contentious. The first was with regard to the definitional question: what is color? The second was with the location question: are colors inside the head or out in the world? In this chapter, we summarize the most prominent answers (...)
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  4. Perceptual Variation and Relativism.John Morrison - 2020 - In Epistemology After Sextus Empiricus. pp. p.13–47.
    There is variation in how people perceive colors and other secondary qualities. The challenge of perceptual variation is to say whose perceptions are accurate. According to Sextus, Protagoras’ response is that all of our perceptions might be accurate. As this response is traditionally developed, it is difficult to explain color illusion and color constancy. This difficulty is due to a widespread assumption called perceptual atomism. This chapter argues that, if we want to develop Protagoras’ response, we need to give up (...)
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  5. Indeterminate perception and colour relationism.Brian Cutter - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):25-34.
    One of the most important objections to sense data theory comes from the phenomenon of indeterminate perception, as when an object in the periphery of one’s visual field looks red without looking to have any determinate shade of red. As sense data are supposed to have precisely the properties that sensibly appear to us, sense data theory evidently has the implausible consequence that a sense datum can have a determinable property without having any of its determinates. In this article, I (...)
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  6. Is the Eye Like What It Sees? A Critique of Aristotle on Sensing by Assimilation.Mohan Matthen - 2019 - Vivarium 57 (3-4):268-292.
    Aristotle held that perception consists in the reception of external sensory qualities (or sensible forms) in the sensorium. This idea is repeated in many forms in contemporary philosophy, including, with regard to vision, in the idea (still not firmly rejected) that the retinal image consists of points of colour. In fact, this is false. Colour is a quality that is constructed by the visual system, and though it is possible to be a realist about colour, it is completely misleading to (...)
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  7. Colouring for and Colour Relationalism.Derek H. Brown - 2017 - Analysis 77 (2):433-449.
    © The Authors 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Colour is a welcome work in history and philosophy of science.1 The opening chapters offer a fresh take on the history of perceptual theory and a broad overview of contemporary philosophy of colour. This is followed by the central fourth chapter, which introduces readers to a cluster of empirical data that to this point have not received explicit (...)
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  8. Invisible disagreement: an inverted qualia argument for realism.Justin Donhauser - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (3):593-606.
    Scientific realists argue that a good track record of multi-agent, and multiple method, validation of empirical claims is itself evidence that those claims, at least partially and approximately, reflect ways nature actually is independent of the ways we conceptualize it. Constructivists contend that successes in validating empirical claims only suffice to establish that our ways of modelling the world, our “constructions,” are useful and adequate for beings like us. This essay presents a thought experiment in which beings like us intersubjectively (...)
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  9. Normative reasons: response-dependence and the problem of idealization.Marko Jurjako - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (3):261-275.
    David Enoch, in his paper “Why Idealize?”, argues that theories of normative reasons that hold that normative facts are subject or response-dependent and include an idealization condition might have a problem in justifying the need for idealization. I argue that at least some response-dependence conceptions of normative reasons can justify idealization. I explore two ways of responding to Enoch’s challenge. One way involves a revisionary stance on the ontological commitments of the normative discourse about reasons. To establish this point, I (...)
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  10. Color and Shape: A Plea for Equal Treatment.Brian Cutter - 2016 - Philosophers' Imprint 16.
    Many philosophers, especially in the wake of the 17th century, have favored an inegalitarian view of shape and color, according to which shape is mind-independent while color is mind-dependent. In this essay, I advance a novel argument against inegalitarianism. The argument begins with an intuition about the modal dependence of color on shape, namely: it is impossible for something to have a color without having a shape. I then argue that, given reasonable assumptions, inegalitarianism contradicts this modal-dependence principle. Given the (...)
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  11. Relationalism about perceptible properties and the principle of charity.Pendaran Roberts & Kelly Ann Schmidtke - 2016 - Synthese 193 (9).
    Color relationalism holds that the colors are constituted by relations to subjects. The introspective rejoinder against this view claims that it is opposed to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. The rejoinder seems to be correct about how colors appear when looking at how participants respond to an item about the metaphysical nature of color but not when looking at an item about the ascription of colors. The present article expands the properties investigated to sound and taste and inspects the mentioned asymmetry, (...)
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  12. Colour Layering and Colour Relationalism.Derek H. Brown - 2015 - Minds and Machines 25 (2):177-191.
    Colour Relationalism asserts that colours are non-intrinsic or inherently relational properties of objects, properties that depend not only on a target object but in addition on some relation that object bears to other objects. The most powerful argument for Relationalism infers the inherently relational character of colour from cases in which one’s experience of a colour contextually depends on one’s experience of other colours. Experienced colour layering—say looking at grass through a tinted window and experiencing opaque green through transparent grey—demands (...)
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  13. Colour.Laura Gow - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (11):803-813.
    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 (...)
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  14. Color Relationalism, Ordinary Illusion, and Color Incompatibility.Pendaran Roberts - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (4):1085-1097.
    Relationalism is a view popularized by Cohen according to which the colors are relational properties. Cohen’s view has the unintuitive consequence that the following propositions are false: (i) no object can be more than one determinate or determinable color all over at the same time; (ii) ordinary illusion cases occur whenever the color perceptually represented conflicts, according to (i) above, with the object’s real color; and (iii) the colors we perceive obey (i). I investigate Cohen’s attempt to address these intuitive (...)
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  15. Parsing the rainbow.Pendaran Roberts - 2014 - Synthese 191 (8):1793-1811.
    Navigating the ontology of color used to be a simple affair. There was the naive view that colors really are in objects the way they appear, and the view that they are secondary qualities to cause certain experiences in us. Today, there are myriad well-developed views but no satisfactory taxonomy of philosophical theories on color. In this article, I first examine the two newest taxonomies on offer and argue that they are inadequate. In particular, I look at Brogaard’s taxonomy and (...)
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  16. Colour Relationalism and the Real Deliverances of Introspection.Pendaran Roberts, James Andow & Kelly Schmidtke - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (5):1173-1189.
    Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their (...)
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  17. The Aposteriori Response-Dependence of the Colors.Dan López De Sa - 2013 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1):65-79.
    The paper proposes and defends the following characterization of response dependent property: a property is response-dependent iff there is a response-dependence biconditional for a concept signifying it which holds in virtue of the nature of the property. Finding out whether a property is such is to a large extent a posteriori matter. Finally, colors are response dependent: they are essentially tied to issuing the relevant experiences, so that having those experiences does give access to their, dispositional, nature. Finally, some important (...)
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  18. Colour Relationalism, Contextualism, and Self-Locating Contents.Keith Allen - 2012 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 12 (3):331-350.
    In addressing the metaphysical question of what colours are, a consideration that is commonly appealed to is how colours are represented—typically in perceptual experiences, but also in beliefs and linguistic utterances. Although representations need not accurately reflect the nature of what they represent—indeed, they need not represent anything that actually exists at all—the way colours are represented is often taken to provide at least a defeasible guide to the metaphysics: all else being equal, it seems we should prefer a theory (...)
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  19. Functionalist response-dependence avoids missing explanations.D. J. Bradley - 2011 - Analysis 71 (2):297-300.
    I argue that there is a flaw in the way that response-dependence has been formulated in the literature, and this flawed formulation has been correctly attacked by Mark Johnston’s Missing Explanation Argument (1993, 1998). Moving to a better formulation, which is analogous to the move from behaviourism to functionalism, avoids the Missing Explanation Argument.
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  20. Kripke on Color Words and the Primary-Secondary Quality Distinction.Mario Gomez-Torrente - 2011 - In Alan Berger (ed.), Saul Kripke. Cambridge University Press. pp. 290-323.
    An exposition of Kripke's unpublished critique of dispositionalism about color, followed by a review of some recent defenses of dispositionalism and a sketch of some objections that could be made to these defenses from a broadly Kripkean perspective.
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  21. Do we sense modalities with our sense modalities?1.Bence Nanay - 2011 - Ratio 24 (3):299-310.
    It has been widely assumed that we do not perceive dispositional properties. I argue that there are two ways of interpreting this assumption. On the first, extensional, interpretation whether we perceive dispositions depends on a complex set of metaphysical commitments. But if we interpret the claim in the second, intensional, way, then we have no reason to suppose that we do not perceive dispositional properties. The two most important and influential arguments to the contrary fail.
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  22. Locating The Unique Hues.Keith Allen - 2010 - Rivista di Estetica 43:13-28.
    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 (...)
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  23. In defence of natural daylight.Keith Allen - 2010 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (1):1-18.
    Objects appear different as the illumination under which they are perceived varies. This fact is sometimes thought to pose a problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties: if a coloured object appears different under different illuminations, then under which illumination does the object appear the colour it really is? I argue that given the nature of natural daylight, and certain plausible assumptions about the nature of the colours it illuminates, there is a non-arbitrary reason to suppose that it (...)
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  24. Colour Resemblance and Colour Realism.Fabian Dorsch - 2010 - Rivista di Estetica 43:85-108.
    One prominent ambition of theories of colour is to pay full justice to how colours are subjectively given to us; and another to reconcile this first-personal perspective on colours with the third-personal one of the natural sciences. The goal of this article is to question whether we can satisfy the second ambition on the assumption that the first should and can be met. I aim to defend a negative answer to this question by arguing that the various kinds of experienced (...)
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  25. Being coloured and looking coloured.Keith Allen - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4):pp. 647-670.
    What is the relationship between being coloured and looking coloured? According to Alva Noë, to be coloured is to manifest a pattern of apparent colours as the perceptual conditions vary. I argue that Noë’s ‘phenomenal objectivism’ faces similar objections to attempts by traditional dispositionalist theories of colour to account for being coloured in terms of looking coloured. Instead, I suggest that to be coloured is to look coloured in a ‘non-perspectival’ sense, where non-perspectival looks transcend specific perceptual conditions.
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  26. Being Coloured and Looking Coloured.Keith Allen - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (4):647-670.
    Intuitively, there is an intimate connection between being coloured and looking coloured. As Strawson memorably remarked, it is natural to assume that ‘colours are visibilia or they are nothing’. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship?A traditionally popular view of the relationship between being coloured and looking coloured starts from the common place that the character of our perceptual experience changes as the conditions in which an object is perceived vary. For instance, our experience changes when we view (...)
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  27. The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology.Jonathan Cohen - 2009 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    Color provides an instance of a general puzzle about how to reconcile the picture of the world given to us by our ordinary experience with the picture of the world given to us by our best theoretical accounts. The Red and the Real offers a new approach to such longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into nature. It is responsive to a broad range of constraints --- both the ordinary constraints of color experience and the (...)
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  28. Die Natur der Farben.Fabian Dorsch - 2009 - De Gruyter.
    Farben sind für uns sowohl objektive, als auch phänomenale Eigenschaften. In seinem Buch argumentiert Fabian Dorsch, daß keine ontologische Theorie der Farben diesen beiden Seiten unseres Farbbegriffes gerecht werden k ann. Statt dessen sollten wir akzeptieren, daß letzterer sich auf zwei verschiedene Arten von Eigenschaften bezieht: die repräsentierten Reflektanzeigenschaften von Gegenständen und die qualitativen Eigenschaften unserer Farbwahrnehmungen, die als sinnliche Gegebenheitsweisen ersterer fungieren. Die Natur der Farben gibt einen detaillierten Überblick über die zeitgenössischen philosophischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Theorien der Farben und (...)
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  29. Response‐dependence.David Yates - 2008 - Philosophical Books 49 (4):344-354.
    The paper covers a range of topics of recent interest in relation to response-depdendence: its characterisation in terms of 'basic equations', its application to areas such as ethics, colour theory and philosophy of mind, and the 'missing explanation' argument.
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  30. The Mind‐Independence of Colour.Keith Allen - 2007 - European Journal of Philosophy 15 (2):137-158.
  31. Colors without circles?Kathrin Glüer - 2007 - Erkenntnis 66 (1-2):107--131.
    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) (...)
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  32. The reality of qualia.Gary Hatfield - 2007 - Erkenntnis 66 (1-2):133--168.
    This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and 'ordinary' grounds. I distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent 'representational' or 'intentional' theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia (...)
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  33. Is color-dispositionalism nasty and unecological?Nenad Miscevic - 2007 - Erkenntnis 66 (1-2):203 - 231.
    This article is a brief presentation and defense of response-dispositionalist intentionalism against a family of objections. The view claims that for a surface to have an objective stable color is to have a disposition to cause in normal observers a response, namely, intentional phenomenal-color experience. The objections, raised recently by M. Johnston, B. Stroud, and by Byrne and Hilbert, claim that any dispositionalist view is unfair to the naive perceiver-thinker, saddles her with massive error and represents her as maladaptated to (...)
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  34. Dispositional theories of the colours of things.Barry Stroud - 2007 - Erkenntnis 66 (1-2):271 - 285.
    Dispositional theories of the colours of objects identify an object’s having a certain colour with its being such that it would produce perceptions of certain kinds in perceivers of certain kinds under certain specified conditions. Without doubting that objects have dispositions to produce perceptions of certain kinds, this paper questions whether the relevant kinds of perceptions, perceivers, and conditions can be specified in a way that (i) does not rely on acceptance of any objects as being coloured in a non-dispositional (...)
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  35. Color and Perceptual Variation Revisited: Unknown Facts, Alien Modalities, and Perfect Psychosemantics.Jonathan Cohen - 2006 - Dialectica 60 (3):307-319.
    An adequate ontology of color must face the empirical facts about perceptual variation. In this paper I begin by reviewing a range of data about perceptual variation, and showing how they tell against color physicalism and motivate color relationalism. Next I consider a series of objections to the argument from perceptual variation, and argue that they are unpersuasive. My conclusion will be that the argument remains a powerful obstacle for color physicalism, and a powerful reason to believe in color relationalism (...)
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  36. Unmasking and Dispositionalism: Reply to Mark Johnston 1.Barry Stroud - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69 (1):202-212.
    Mark Johnston acknowledges the potential significance of investigating the nature and prospects of metaphysical ambition as I try to do with respect to the colors of things in The Quest for Reality. But he is not impressed with the actual achievement. He thinks I spend too much time rejecting views that nobody nowadays, or perhaps ever, would take seriously, and too little time—and in some cases no time at all—opposing views contrary to mine that almost everybody who is anybody nowadays (...)
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  37. Objectivity and subjectivity revisited: Colour as a psychobiological property.Gary Hatfield - 2003 - In Rainer Mausfeld & Dieter Heyer (eds.), Colour Perception: Mind and the Physical World. Oxford University Press. pp. 187--202.
    This chapter focuses on the notion of color as a property of the surfaces of objects. It considers three positions on what colors are: objectivist, subjectivist, and relationalist. Examination of the arguments of the objectivists will help us understand how they seek to reduce color to a physical property of object surfaces. Subjectivists, by contrast, seek to argue that no such reduction is possible, and hence that color must be wholly subjective. This chapter argues that when functional considerations are taken (...)
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  38. In favor of an ecological account of color.Scott Huettel - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1):33-33.
    B&H understate the difficulties facing their version of color realism. We doubt that they can fix reflectance types and magnitudes in a way that does not invoke relations to perceivers. B&HÂ’s account therefore resembles the dispositional or ecological accounts that they dismiss. This is a good thing, for a dispositional account is promising if understood in an ecological framework.
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  39. Color: A Functionalist Proposal.Cohen Jonathan - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 113 (1):1-42.
    In this paper I propose and defend an account of color that I call color functionalism. I argue that functionalism is a non-traditional species of primary quality theory, and that it accommodates our intuitions about color and the facts of color science better than more widely discussed alternatives.
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  40. Color Perception: Philosophical, Psychological, Artistic, and Computational Perspectives.Steven Davis (ed.) - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Color has been studied for centuries, but has never been completely understood. Digital technology has recently sparked a burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in color. The fact that color is a quality of perception rather than a physical quality brings up a host of interesting questions of interest to both artists and scholars. This volume--the ninth in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science series--brings together chapters by psychologists, philosophers, computer scientists, and artists to explore the nature of human color perception with the (...)
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  41. Colour-dispositionalism and its recent critics.J. Harvey - 2000 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61 (1):137-156.
    Dispositionalist accounts of colour concepts are now largely discarded. But a number of recent and influential objections to this type of theory can be readily answered providing the dispositionalist account contains the key elements it should---which actual versions in the literature do not. I explicate some of the conceptual components needed in such an account once we correctly understand the anthropocentricity of the colour concepts involved. When these components are incorporated into dispositionalism, including one crucial distinction in particular, some powerful (...)
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  42. Dispositions and the central problem of color.Ian Gold - 1999 - Philosophical Studies 93 (1):21-44.
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  43. The dispositional account of colour.Tony Pitson - 1997 - Philosophia 25 (1-4):247-266.
    The dispositional account of colour has recently come under fire from a number of different directions (reflecting the various alternative options mentioned at the beginning). I believe that in the above I have dealt with the principal objections raised against this account by those who reject it. I cannot pretend to have established that the account is true; but if I am right about the failure of the objections I have discussed, and the difficulites of alternative accounts of colour, then (...)
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  44. Another look at color.Colin McGinn - 1996 - Journal of Philosophy 93 (11):537-53.
    In The Subjective View,' I defended (unoriginally) a dispositional theory of color and drew out some consequences of that theory. The dispositional theory (DT) maintains, roughly speaking, that for an object to instantiate a color property is for it to have a disposition to cause experiences as of an object having that property in normal perceivers in normal conditions. This theory has notable merits in capturing (assuming one wants them captured) the subjectivity and relativity of ascriptions of color, while allowing (...)
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  45. Color perception and neural encoding: Does metameric matching entail a loss of information?Gary Hatfield - 1992 - In David Hull & Mickey Forbes (eds.), PSA 1992: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Volume One: Contributed Papers. Philosophy of Science Association. pp. 492-504.
    It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information, for spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. This intuition implicitly relies on a conception of the function of color vision and on a related conception of how color samples should be individuated. It assumes that the function of color vision is to distinguish among spectral energy distributions, and that color samples should be individuated by their physical properties. I challenge these assumptions by articulating a different (...)
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  46. Ways of coloring.Evan Thompson, A. Palacios & F. J. Varela - 1992 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (1):1-26.
    Different explanations of color vision favor different philosophical positions: Computational vision is more compatible with objectivism (the color is in the object), psychophysics and neurophysiology with subjectivism (the color is in the head). Comparative research suggests that an explanation of color must be both experientialist (unlike objectivism) and ecological (unlike subjectivism). Computational vision's emphasis on optimally prespecified features of the environment (i.e., distal properties, independent of the sensory-motor capacities of the animal) is unsatisfactory. Conceiving of visual perception instead as the (...)
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  47. Color as a secondary quality.Paul A. Boghossian & J. David Velleman - 1989 - Mind 98 (January):81-103.
    Should a principle of charity be applied to the interpretation of the colour concepts exercised in visual experience? We think not. We shall argue, for one thing, that the grounds for applying a principle of charity are lacking in the case of colour concepts. More importantly, we shall argue that attempts at giving the experience of colour a charitable interpretation either fail to respect obvious features of that experience or fail to interpret it charitably, after all. Charity to visual experience (...)
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  48. Colour concepts and colour experience.Christopher Peacocke - 1984 - Synthese 58 (March):365-82.
  49. Colors, normal observers and standard conditions.Clyde L. Hardin - 1983 - Journal of Philosophy 80 (December):806-13.
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  50. Color concepts and dispositions.Robert J. Swartz - 1967 - Synthese 17 (1):202-222.
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