Abstract
Inter-species variation in colour perception poses a serious problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties. Given that colour perception varies so drastically across species, which species perceives colours as they really are? In this paper, I argue that all do. Specifically, I argue that members of different species perceive properties that are determinates of different, mutually compatible, determinables. This is an instance of a general selectionist strategy for dealing with cases of perceptual variation. According to selectionist views, objects simultaneously instantiate a plurality of colours, all of them genuinely mind-independent, and subjects select from amongst this plurality which colours they perceive. I contrast selectionist views with relationalist views that deny the mind-independence of colour, and consider some general objections to this strategy.
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Notes
The nature, and even number, of the dimensions of colour space is controversial. The use of hue, saturation and lightness to describe colours-as-they-appear, for instance, extends the use of these terms to describe purely physical stimuli. Whether this extension is appropriate is far from clear. Indeed, it is not even clear that three dimensions are sufficient to completely describe colours-as-they-appear: at least as far as colours of material objects in an illuminated scene are concerned, for instance, we are able to distinguish between an object’s lightness, or where it is located on the series of achromatic colours ranging from white to black, and its brightness, or how well it is illuminated. For discussion, see e.g. Mausfeld (2004). Without wanting to prejudge any of these empirical questions, I will continue to talk of human colour space as a three-dimensional space whose axes are hue, saturation and lightness; but these should be understood as placeholders for the axes that turn out to best characterise colour space. This should not affect the main argument of the paper, as any problems describing human colour space will have analogues in the inter-species case: if, for instance, more than three-dimensions (like brightness, in addition to lightness) are needed to describe human colour space, then they are likely to have analogues in the colour spaces of members of other species.
Byrne and Hilbert (2007b) describe the view that the relations of similarity and difference between the hues are essential to them as “in one version of another, something of a consensus view amongst philosophers”. This is not to say that it is entirely uncontroversial (e.g. Cohen 2003). But far more controversial is what the properties that stand in these essential relations are: whether they are properties of mind-independent material objects (and if so, properties of what kind: are they themselves mind-independent or relational, physical or sui generis etc.); or if they are not properties of material objects, whether they are properties of the brain, the visual field, sense-data, experience itself, or non-existent properties represented in the content of experience? Just as the default assumption is that colours are properties of mind-independent material objects (and not properties of experience, etc.), I take it that the default assumption is that the similarities are similarities between properties of mind-independent objects. Byrne and Hilbert (2007b) themselves argue that in some relatively minimal sense, colour-blind humans perceive objects to be differently coloured to normal human perceivers: red-green colour blind subjects (for example) perceive objects to be yellowish and bluish, without thereby perceiving them to be more determinate hues like unique yellow or orange. Even if we accept this description of the phenomenology (although see footnote 4), this appears to be consistent with the claim that the structural properties of the colours are essential to them; what they deny is just that determinate properties like yellow and orange, and thereby the relations of similarity and difference in which they stand, have to be represented in the content of experience.
Compare Thompson’s attempt to make sense of a human perceiver, Fred, who perceives novel colours: “whereas we are trichromats and have a colour space of three dimensions, Fred is a tetrachromat and has a four dimensional colour-hyperspace” (1992, p. 336). Note that Thompson does not have to contend with the problems raised by the Wright-Cummings experiments, because he is only considering the possibility of human perceivers who perceive extra colours. Indeed, elsewhere, Thompson makes a strong case for thinking that the colours that members of different species perceive are incommensurable.
The standard assumption that colour-blind human subjects are absolutely unable to perceive either red and green, or blue and yellow, is in fact questionable. Colour blind subjects usually appear to experience only a greater or lesser degree of ‘collapse’ of the normal trichromatic colour space. Jameson et al. (2001), for instance, found that red-green colour blind protanopes divide the visible spectrum into an average of 5.3 colours, in contrast to the average 7.3 colours into which normal trichromatic subjects divide it: although there is a reduction in the number of colours that these subjects are able to perceive, it is inconsistent with the view that red-green protanopes perceive only blue, yellow and grey. This conclusion is supported by the experiments of Wachtler et al. (2004), who found that red-green colour blind subjects were consistently able to use the full range of elemental hue terms (red, green, yellow and blue) to describe 2° patches of monochromatic light. Still more compelling evidence that people who are colour blind can perceive the same colours that normal trichromats perceive—given that there can be no suggestion that these results might be explained by exposure to trichromatic linguistic practices in normal contexts—is that colour experiences corresponding to those described by normal trichromatic subjects can be induced in colour blind subjects using Benham disks: disks that are half black and half white, and that when rotated at about 6–8 Hz generate ‘subjective colours’ which appear as desaturated bands of different hues depending on the exact speed of the disk (Shepard 1992, pp. 338–339). For a philosophical discussion of these issues see Broackes (2005); and for a slightly different perspective, Byrne and Hilbert (2007b).
Cognate ideas appear elsewhere. Wiggins’s claim that the identity and individuation of material objects depends upon the sortal concepts we use to think about them, for instance, is certainly selectionist in spirit. For Wiggins, to say that the individuation of objects depends upon the concepts that we possess is consistent with the claim that these objects are not metaphysically dependent on the existence of conscious subjects with our conceptual scheme. As Wiggins puts it: “what sortal concepts we bring to bear upon experience determines what we can find there—just as the size and mesh of a net determine, not what fish are in the sea, but which ones we shall catch” (2000, p. 152). A similar idea is perhaps implicit in Wiggins’s accounts of colour and value in ‘A Sensible Subjectivism?’ (1987), and more explicit in his recent discussion of objectivity in ethics (2007). For a recent application of the selectionist approach to grammatical properties, see Longworth (ms.).
As part of his defence of a relationalist theory of colour, Cohen (2004) argues for a ‘counterfactualist’ account of colour constancy, according to which colour constancy is not a literally perceptual phenomenon: we do not actually perceive colours to remain constant as the perceptual conditions vary, but merely judge that an object would look a certain way in a certain counterfactual situation. Cohen’s argument for this view turns on the claim that the judgement that coloured objects are in some way the same and yet in some way different as the perceptual conditions vary cannot be grounded in the perception of coloured objects as in some way the same and yet in some way different as the perceptual conditions vary. This claim is questionable. In particular, it is not clear why perceiving an object as different in one respect should preclude perceiving it as being the same in some other respect; it is certainly not being assumed that we perceive (say) a white object in shadow to be both white and grey: rather we perceive it to be a white object that (merely) looks grey in this light (cf. Hilbert 2007). But even if Cohen’s account of colour constancy is correct, something at least in the spirit of the constancy condition for colour-hood can be salvaged: properties can be grouped together as colours in terms of the immediately post-perceptual judgments of perceiving subjects. This similarity would not be directly grounded in the phenomenology of experience, but it would not be far off.
Other properties such as shape and size do not count as colours according to this criterion because although they exhibit perceptual constancy, they do not exhibit colour constancy. Colour constancy differs from other kinds of perceptual constancy in respect of the feature of the perceptual conditions to which colour appearance is peculiarly sensitive: whereas colour appearance is sensitive to the nature of illumination (and a lesser extent the colour of the background), shape appearance is sensitive to an object’s orientation with respect to the eye, and size appearance is sensitive to the distance of the object from the eye.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank audiences in London, Manchester and Warwick; an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies; and Jon Barton, Justin Broackes, Mazviita Chirimuuta, Dave Hilbert, Paul Noordhof and Scott Sturgeon for their very helpful comments and questions. Special thanks are due to Tim Crane, Mark Kalderon and Mike Martin for countless discussions of these issues. This research was made possible by a Jacobsen Research Fellowship at the University of London.
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Allen, K. Inter-species variation in colour perception. Philos Stud 142, 197–220 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9183-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9183-z