Color
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006)
| Abstract | 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? | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,664 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesPeter W. Ross (2010). Fitting Color Into the Physical World. Philosophical Psychology 23 (5):575-599.
Vivian Mizrahi (2006). Color Objectivism and Color Pluralism. Dialectica 60 (3):283-306.
Adam Pautz (web). Can Color Structure Be Explained in Terms of Color Experience? Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
Ian Gold (2001). Spatial Location in Color Vision. Consciousness and Cognition 10 (1):59-62.
Stephen E. Palmer (1999). On Qualia, Relations, and Structure in Color Experience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (6):976-985.
Wayne Wright (2003). Projectivist Representationalism and Color. Philosophical Psychology 16 (4):515-529.
Elizabeth Schier (2007). The Represented Object of Color Experience. Philosophical Psychology 20 (1):1 – 27.
Joseph Levine (2006). Color and Color Experience: Colors as Ways of Appearing. Dialectica 60 (3):269-282.
Mohan Matthen (2010). Color Experience: A Semantic Theory. In Jonathan Cohen & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Color Ontology and Color Science. MIT Press.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads19 ( #64,310 of 549,013 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,706 of 549,013 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
