Abstract
Michael Tye’s considered position on visual experience combines representationalism with externalism about color, so when considering spectrum inversion, he needs a principled reason to claim that a person with inverted color vision is seeing things incorrectly. Tye’s responses to the problem of the inverted spectrum (2000, in: Consciousness, color, and content, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and 2002a, in: Chalmers (ed.) Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings, Oxford University Press, Oxford) rely on a teleological approach to the evolution of vision to secure the grounds upon which people with normal color vision can be justly called ‘right’ and those with inverted color vision can be called ‘wrong’. I demonstrate that since the inverted spectrum thought experiment requires that both sorts of vision be behaviorally indistinguishable, no biologically acceptable concept of teleology will allow Tye to draw the distinction he needs.
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Notes
Representationalism is also sometimes called ‘intentionalism’, but I prefer ‘representationalism’ for purely personal reasons. Minimal representationalism requires that the representational content of an experience determines its qualitative character, and that any two experiences that share the same representational content will also have the same qualitative features. Externalism (or ‘objectivism’, or ‘physicalism’) about colors locates the colors themselves out in the world, on surfaces or films. If that is the correct account of the nature of colors, then no surface can have contradictory color properties. No patch of a surface can be entirely red and entirely green at the same time, from a particular observer’s viewpoint. For contrast, internalism about colors locates the nature of colors in the minds of perceivers—we ascribe colors to a world that is essentially colorless.
Qualia are sometimes called the ‘what it is like’ feature of our experience. For example, the way that a sip of red wine tastes would be the quale of that tasting experience. Likewise for the way that the sky looks on a clear blue day, the way that a trumpet blowing a C-sharp sounds, and so on.
As presented in Consciousness, color, and content and ‘Visual Qualia and Visual Content Revisited’. Tye is an excellent exemplar of externalist representationalism.
The idea that different people might see colors differently goes back to Locke, at least. In its modern form (Shoemaker 1975), spectrum inversion is a thought experiment with the following features. We can imagine a person whose color experiences are opposite to our own (where we see red, he sees green; likewise for yellow and blue, etc.). We can also imagine that this person has learned their native language in the normal way, and behaves just like a person with normal color vision (some tinkering at the edges might be required to make sure the relationships with dark and light colors, warm and cool colors, and other emotional associations with colors were also swapped—thus preserving the inability to detect people with inverted color vision via any behavioral test).
It seems possible that some person, call him ‘Tom’ (Tye does, and I will follow for convenience, with apologies to any Toms in the reading audience), could have his color experiences inverted with respect to yours. Tom’s phenomenal experience of green, for example, is caused always and only by the same physical objects that cause you to have red visual experiences, his experience plays the same role in his psychological economy that red experience plays in yours (it causes him to believe that ripe tomatoes are red, etc.), and his experience causes the same behavioral outputs (measured by colorblindness tests, color sorting and matching tests, and uttering verbal reports like, “That tomato is red, its probably ripe.”).
Though Tye seems inclined towards the origin-centered view of the source of a feature’s telos, as seen in the reference to ‘ancestors’ in the passage quoted above.
What should we say if it turns out that one sort of color vision provides an advantage that is wholly unrelated to its effectiveness as a perceptual mechanism? Suppose, for example, that the genetic arrangement that produces color vision also reduces the incidence of retinoblastoma (a type of cancer of the retina, often with a genetic cause) by about 20%, when compared with those people who have inverted color vision. Would we then say that the purpose of color vision is to confer resistance to retinoblastoma, and not to allow us to navigate the world visually? That certainly sounds odd, but one might be able to make a case for it. Either way, that sort of teleological explanation would be of no help to Tye—color vision would not be selected on the basis of representational accuracy.
I tend to imagine them as tree-going primates, but I have no real reason to believe that is when color vision developed. One may imagine them as Jurassic quasi-rodents without altering the thought experiment in any significant respects.
The Generation Zero Spectrum Inversion scenario might also raise problems for teleofunctionalist approaches like Millikan’s—issues that are interesting but beyond the scope of the current paper.
In personal correspondence, Tye suggests that this response is at least a live option for him. “Color vision evolved because of what it is capable of telling its possessors about the colors of things. In our distant ancestors, Mother Nature installed internal states whose job it is to track the colors.”
Tye also considers this response to be viable, in personal communication. “Spectrum inversion simply becomes normal color vision after some number of generations. If the trait for inverted color vision becomes encoded in the genes of Group B, then distant descendents of the initial population may represent ripe tomatoes as red, unlike the initial members.” Further, Tye makes a similar claim in Ten Problems of Consciousness: “So it is possible that, with variations in biological function across environments, phenomenally relevant representational differences arise without any internal physical difference,” (Tye 1995, p. 153, my emphasis added).
Almost any phenomenological vehicle will do the job, because the job in Generation Zero is just to convey the information that there is a red thing in the visual field. The qualia of colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., will all do that well enough to pass the trait along by conferring an advantage. Some phenomenological vehicles would not confer any advantage, and some would be decidedly detrimental (like the feeling of blinding-agony-so-fierce-that-I-must-now-curl-up-into-a-ball-and-do-nothing-but-whimper).
This result will be congenial to a whole host of non-externalist positions about colors (internalism, relationalism, projectionism, subjectivism, etc., with specific variations of each having devoted advocates), but adjudicating among them is a task for another occasion. Ruling Tye’s externalist representationalism out doesn’t automatically rule any particular one of his competitors in.
If this is true of radical differences like spectrum inversion, it will also hold true for the smaller, real-world differences between people in assigning unique hues to particular wavelengths of light, of the sort discussed in the recent “True blue” thread of articles in Analysis. Therein, one of Tye’s responses to the peril that true-blue poses to his position mirrors his response to the peril of the inverted spectrum, so at minimum, Tye is forced to the second of his true-blue responses (Tye 2006b, p. 343). I plan to explore the impact that this has on Tye’s remaining response, in the near future.
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Acknowledgements
I would especially like to thank Michael Tye for his comments and discussion on an earlier draft of this paper. I am very grateful to the following people for their helpful comments and perceptive questions: Jeremy Anderson, Francisco Ayala, Derek Brown, David Cole, Donald D. Hoffman, Tristram McPherson, Michelle Montague, Mark Newman, Wade Savage, David W. Smith, P. Kyle Stanford, Sean Walsh, Martin Young and an anonymous reviewer at Philosophical Studies. I am also indebted to the audiences at U. C. Irvine, University of Minnesota, Duluth, the National Postgraduate Analytic Philosophy Conference (at Magdalene College, Cambridge), the Third Annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, the Southern California Philosophy Conference, the Minnesota Philosophical Society Conference, and the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association; who heard various versions of the paper and whose questions and comments I benefited from. I am also grateful to the College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, Duluth, for support.
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Ford, J. Tye-dyed teleology and the inverted spectrum. Philos Stud 156, 267–281 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9580-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9580-6