Online research in philosophy

Philosophy has long struggled to understand the nature of color. The central role color plays in our lives, in visual experience, in art, as a metaphor for emotions, has made it an obvious candidate for philosophical reflection. Understanding the nature of color, however, has proved a daunting task, despite the numerous fields that contribute to the project. Even knowing how to start can be difficult. Is color to be understood as an objective part of reality, a property of objects with a status similar to shape and size? Or is color more like pain, to be found only in experience and so somehow subjective? Or is color more like what some have said about time--that it seems real until we reflect enough, where we come ultimately to dismiss it as mere illusion? If color is more like shape and size, can we give a scientific account of it? Various strategies exist for this option--taking the color of an object to be just a complicated texture of that object, one that reflects certain wavelengths. Or perhaps color is merely a disposition to cause experiences in us, as salt has a disposition to dissolve. On the other hand, if color is more like pain, and found only in subjective experience, what is the nature of color experience? How, for instance, does an experience of red differ from an experience of blue, or from an experience of pain for that matter? Finally, if color is mere illusion, how do we continue to be so taken in by that illusion and how can something unreal seem so real and important to us?

This paper proposes a subjectivist approach to color within the framework of an externalist form of representationalism about phenomenal consciousness. Motivations are presented for accepting both representationalism and color subjectivism, and an argument is offered against the case made by Michael Tye on behalf of the claim that colors are objective, physical properties of objects. In the face of the considerable difficulties associated with finding a workable realist theory of color, the alternative account of color experience set out, projectivist representationalism, claims that the color properties we encounter in experience exist only in the representational contents of our experiences. Color experiences are caused by the physical structure of objects, but objects are never actually colored and color experiences systematically misrepresent objects as colored. However, despite being an error theory of color, projectivist representationalism does not do violence to our everyday use and understanding of color concepts and terms, nor does it undermine the role of color experience in aiding the perceiving subject in navigating through the world.

Pluralism—the incommensurability and, at times, incompatibility of objective ends—is not relativism, nor, a fortiori, subjectivism, nor the allegedly unbridgeable differences of emotional attitude on which some modern positivists, emotivists, existentialists, nationalists and, indeed, relativistic sociologists and anthropologists found their accounts.

Pluralism—the incommensurability and, at times, incompatibility of objective ends—is not relativism, nor, a fortiori, subjectivism, nor the allegedly unbridgeable differences of emotional attitude on which some modern positivists, emotivists, existentialists, nationalists and, indeed, relativistic sociologists and anthropologists found their accounts.

In The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour [Stroud, 2000], Barry Stroud carries out an ambitious attack on various forms of irrealism and subjectivism about color. The views he targets - those that would deny a place in objective reality to the colors - have a venerable history in philosophy. Versions of them have been defended by Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Locke, and Hume; more recently, forms of these positions have been articulated by Williams, Smart, Mackie, Ryle, and Hardin, among others. Stroud's aim is to argue not only that these writers fail to make their cases, but that no conceivable argument could ever convince us that colors are not a part of objective reality.

According to scientific realism, the aim of science is to discover the truth about both observable and unobservable aspects of the mind-independent, objective reality, which we inhabit. It has been objected by Putnam and others that such a metaphysically realist position presupposes a God’s Eye point of view, of which no coherent sense can be made. In this paper, I will argue for two claims. First, scientific realism does not require the adoption of a God’s Eye point of view. Instead, scientific realism is a hypothesis about the relationship between scientific theory and reality which may be proposed from within our human perspective. Second, even if scientific realism did require a God’s Eye point of view, this would not necessarily be to the detriment of realism. For it is possible to develop an intelligible external perspective on human epistemic relations to our environing reality.

The representation of color by pictures raises worthwhile questions for philosophers and psychologists. Moreover, philosophers and psychologists interested in answering these questions will benefit by paying attention to each other's work. Failure to recognize the potential for interdisciplinary cooperation can be attributed to tacit acceptance of the resemblance theory of pictorial color. I argue that this theory is inadequate, so philosophers of art have work to do devising an alternative. At the same time, if the resemblance theory is false, then color depiction has interesting implications for color science. Empirical researchers must rethink the widespread assumption that color recognition requires color constancy. I suggest that a neuropsychological account of color recognition will be instrumental to completing the philosophical task, but by the same token scientists might do well not to proceed without casting an eye to the work of philosophers of art.

John Hyman has used the objective character of occlusion shapes and of relative occlusion sizes to develop a more objective approach both in the analysis of linear perspective and in the theory of depiction. To this end Hyman develops two Occlusion Principles, plus an Aperture Colour Principle (which I do not discuss), which, together with our knowledge of appearances, are supposed to tell us what a picture depicts. I argue that Hyman underestimates the crucial role of the psychological element in the work that the objective occlusion shape and relative occlusion sizes are assigned to do. Two pictures may have different contents in spite of the same occlusion shapes and the same (relative) occlusion sizes. It is the operation of constancy scaling in pictorial space which frustrates Hyman’s objectivism both in the domain of linear perspective and in the domain of depiction.

How, if at all, does the internal structure of human phenomenological color space map onto the internal structure of objective reflectance‐profile space, in such a fashion as to provide a useful and accurate representation of that objective feature space? A prominent argument (due to Hardin, among others) proposes to eliminate colors as real, objective properties of objects, on grounds that nothing in the external world (and especially not surface‐reflectance‐profiles) answers to the well‐known and quite determinate internal structure of human phenomenological color space. The present paper proposes a novel way to construe the objective space of possible reflectance profiles so that (1) its internal structure becomes evident, and (2) that structure’s homomorphism with the internal structure of human phenomenological color space becomes obvious. The path is thus reopened to salvage the objective reality of colors, in the same way that we preserved the objective reality of such features as temperature, pitch, and sourness—by identifying them with some objective feature recognized in modern physical theory.

The questions tackled here are fundamental ones: Is our experience of color an illusion? How does the metaphysical status of colors differ from that of shapes?