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Spectral Reflectances and Commensurateness

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Abstract

Yablo has argued (1995) the received view in philosophy, that spectral surface reflectances (SSRs) are the causes of color-experience, is mistaken. SSRs, he says, are not commensurate with our experiences and so are not their causes. This motivated Yablo to posit sui generis, “unscientific” color properties to fill the resultant causal lacunae (cf. Watkins in Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83:33–52, 2005;Watkins in Philosophical Studies 150:123–137, 2010; Gert, in: Brown & Macpherson (eds) Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, Routledge, 2021). This move, I argue, only works if no physical posits commensurate with our experiences exist to fill the same lacunae. And there are, today, familiar such posits: dispositions to reflect long-, medium-, and short-wavelength light (Bradley & Tye in Journal of Philosophy 98:469, 2001; cf. Koenderink in Color for the Sciences, MIT Press, 2010). Moreover, these dispositions are commensurate with our cone and opponent-neural states too, those states, more than our color-experiences, demanding paradigmatically physical causes. The above, conjoined with the platitude that colors are the causes of color-experience, motivates reducing colors to the noted (physical) dispositions.

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Notes

  1. The arguments differ, though, in their emphases. Whereas Yablo emphasizes the acausality of individual SSRs vis-à-vis color experience to reach the noted conclusion, Watkins and Gert emphasize the acausality of the disjunctions of SSRs which (they say) reduce the colors on reductionism (an issue we will come back to in the Objections). Crucial to both cases, however, is the thought that colors’ causal powers are distinct from individual SSRs’ (e.g., Watkins, 2005, pp. 45-46). Because of each argument’s debts to Yablo (1992), I focus throughout on Yablo’s argument.

  2. These mappings go through, at any rate, where i) relevant states are appropriately coarsened (an issue I elaborate on towards the end of §3) and ii) we abstract from the effects of noise. (This latter abstraction is innocent because the contribution of noise to the relevant matrix-multiplicative calculations are minor enough that the contribution of colorimetry to the industries which benefit from it—printing, digital displays, textiles, inter alia—are as effective as they are.).

  3. This all supposes we already know the ways in which subjects respond to their retinal states and what reports (and suchlike) they make in response to their opponent-neural states.

  4. Among certain further aspects of the viewing circumstances; see, e.g., Koenderink (2010, pp. 469–70).

  5. But see the second objection in the Objections & Replies.

  6. In a footnote, he also attributes the view to Horgan (2014).

  7. The ellipses serve just to emphasize the reflective case. He also mentions in the passage spectral energy and transmittance.

  8. This is a bit loose. On the popular, Kimian conception of events (Kim, 1976), the cause here is the event constituted by the instantiation of redness by the object at a time, or over an interval of time.

  9. Note that though I have emphasized the condition’s discontents, commensurateness is frequently relied on to resolve the Exclusion Argument against nonreductivism about the mind (popularized in Kim, 1998, 2005; cf. Papineau, 2000). The locus classicus is Yablo (1992); but for more recent uses see, for instance, List and Menzies (2009); Raatikainen (2010); Menzies (2013); Zhong (2014); Pernu (2016).

  10. It is notoriously difficult to specify normal viewing conditions, so I mean for the following only to be suggestive. In normal viewing conditions I mean to include such things as that the illuminant be roughly like CIE illuminant D65; that the object be viewed from head-on; that the object be at an appropriate distance from the perceiver and that it be surrounded by appropriately contrasting further colors; among other things. Regarding the ceteris paribus clause: I mean that the subject’s brain is not being tampered with; that the subject is attentive, not fatigued, or drugged—among other things like this.

  11. The cone fundamentals are the sensitivity functions of L, M, and S cones, which you can find here: http://www.cvrl.org/cones.htm.

  12. Of the reductionists so far cited, it just Byrne and Hilbert (2003b) who testify to the suitedness of describing the relevant dispositions in these terms (in response to a recommendation of Funt’s, 2003). But nothing in Tye (op. cit.) or Bradley and Tye (op. cit.) suggests they would reject the description.

  13. In the cited colorimetry, they are called “object colors”. This label, though, obfuscates certain otherwise clear claims made in metaphysics, claims like: “the colors of objects reduce to object colors”; or “objects’ colors supervene on object colors.”.

  14. Multiplying reflected signals with color-matching functions that are affine transformations of the cone fundamentals, like CIE XYZ or RGB, will output informationally equivalent properties.

  15. But see Cohen (2009, ch. 7.3.4).

  16. This is to say nothing of the unintuitiveness, noted by many (see Cohen, 2021, p. 324, fn. 16), of treating disjunctions of physical properties as causal in the first place, an insight of Watkins’s (2005, 2010) the reductionist is advised to retain.

  17. For argument against reductionism based on structural mismatch, see Pautz (2006); see Davies (2014) for discussion.

  18. But see Byrne and Hilbert (2003b, R2.3).

  19. In Sharp (in preparation), I set out to do just that.

  20. We may think that 3D-reflectances, for being tailored to human neural sensitivities, present unsurprising candidate causes of relevant neural states. Within the present dialectic, however, this should not count against their theoretic interest. For the colors of the primitivist, the reductionist’s tussle with whom provides the contours of our debate, share this same feature. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to reflect on this point.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers at Erkenntnis whose helpful comment sharpened the material greatly. I want also to thank Arieh Schwarz for conversations over early incarnations of this paper, Paul Centore for elucidating some of the colorimetry, and John Murphy for elucidating some of the physics.

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This research was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant No. 916/21).

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    William A. Sharp

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Sharp, W.A. Spectral Reflectances and Commensurateness. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00762-8

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