Color Irrealism

Edited by Alex Byrne (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
About this topic
Summary Color irrealism (or eliminativism) is the view that physical objects like lemons and tomatoes are not colored. Color irrealism may be partial, holding that "mental objects", sense data, are colored. Or it may be total, holding that nothing whatever is colored. Irrealism traces back to the ancient Greek atomists, and is usually supported by a variety of objections to all realist theories of color. 
Introductions For short overviews of the competing theories of color, see the introduction to Byrne & Hilbert 1997, Hilbert 1996 and Byrne & Hilbert 2002. For a more substantial introduction see Maund 2008. A useful annotated bibliography is Brogaard 2010.
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  1. On Debunking Color Realism.Daniel Z. Korman & Dustin Locke - 2023 - In Diego E. Machuca (ed.), Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 257-277.
    You see a cherry and you experience it as red. A textbook explanation for why you have this sort of experience is going to cite such things as the cherry’s chemical surface properties and the distinctive mixture wavelengths of light it is disposed to reflect. What does not show up in this explanation is the redness of the cherry. Many allege that the availability of color-free explanations of color experience somehow calls into question our beliefs about the colors of objects (...)
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  2. Colour variation without objective colour.Derek Brown - 2022 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 3:1-31.
    Colour variation is the fact that what colour physical objects look to have depends on viewing conditions and a perceiver’s visual system. Both Colour Relationalists and Colour Eliminativists regard their analyses of colour variation as central to the justification for their respective views. Yet the analyses are decidedly different. Colour Relationalists assert that most instances of colour variation are veridical and infer from this that colours are relational properties of objects that are partly determined by perceivers. By contrast, Colour Eliminativists (...)
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  3. Is Representationalism Committed to Colour Physicalism?Daniel Mario Weger - 2022 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 22 (64):1-20.
    The circularity problem states that the representationalist about phenomenal consciousness gives a circular explanation if she adopts the classic view about secondary qualities, such as colours, that characterises them as dispositions to produce experiences with a specific phenomenal character. Since colour primitivism faces severe difficulties, it seems that colour physicalism is the only viable option for the representationalist. I will argue that the representationalist is not committed to colour physicalism because she can adopt an anti-realist theory of colour. My diagnosis (...)
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  4. Science and Philosophy of Color in the Modern Age.Jacob Browning & Zed Adams - 2021 - In Anders Steinvall & Sarah Streets (eds.), Cultural History of Color in the Modern Age. Bloomsbury. pp. 21-38.
    The study of color expanded rapidly in the 20th century. With this expansion came fragmentation, as philosophers, physicists, physiologists, psychologists, and others explored the subject in vastly different ways. There are at least two ways in which the study of color became contentious. The first was with regard to the definitional question: what is color? The second was with the location question: are colors inside the head or out in the world? In this chapter, we summarize the most prominent answers (...)
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  5. The Myth of the Common Sense Conception of Color.Zed Adams & Nat Hansen - 2020 - In Teresa Marques & Åsa Wikforss (eds.), Shifting Concepts: The Philosophy and Psychology of Conceptual Variability. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 106-127.
    Some philosophical theories of the nature of color aim to respect a "common sense" conception of color: aligning with the common sense conception is supposed to speak in favor of a theory and conflicting with it is supposed to speak against a theory. In this paper, we argue that the idea of a "common sense" conception of color that philosophers of color have relied upon is overly simplistic. By drawing on experimental and historical evidence, we show how conceptions of color (...)
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  6. Color in a Material World: Margaret Cavendish against the Early Modern Mechanists.Colin Chamberlain - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (3):293-336.
    Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...)
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  7. Is the Eye Like What It Sees? A Critique of Aristotle on Sensing by Assimilation.Mohan Matthen - 2019 - Vivarium 57 (3-4):268-292.
    Aristotle held that perception consists in the reception of external sensory qualities (or sensible forms) in the sensorium. This idea is repeated in many forms in contemporary philosophy, including, with regard to vision, in the idea (still not firmly rejected) that the retinal image consists of points of colour. In fact, this is false. Colour is a quality that is constructed by the visual system, and though it is possible to be a realist about colour, it is completely misleading to (...)
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  8. How Colours Matter to Philosophy. [REVIEW]Dimitria Gatzia - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 6 (8).
    This is volume is ambitious both with respect to the number of contributions and its scope: it contains 18 papers, which cover a wide variety of topics within metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, logic, mathematics, and aesthetics. It is divided into three parts: (i) history of philosophy, (ii) aesthetics and philosophy of mind, and (iii) philosophy of language and logic, although there is a nice overlap among these areas. Unlike other anthologies on colour (e.g., Readings on Color by Alex Byrne (...)
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  9. (1 other version)Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour.Derek Brown & Fiona Macpherson (eds.) - 2017 - New York: Routledge.
    From David Hume's famous puzzle about 'the missing shade of blue' to current research into the science of colour, the topic of colour is an incredibly fertile region of study and debate, cutting across philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and aesthetics as well as psychology. Debates about the nature of our experience of colour and the nature of colour itself are central to contemporary discussion and argument in philosophy of mind and psychology, and philosophy of perception. This outstanding Handbook contains (...)
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  10. World to Word: Nomenclature Systems of Color and Species.Tanya Kelley - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Missouri
    As the digitization of information accelerates, the push to encode our surrounding numerically instead of linguistically increases. The role that language has traditionally played in the nomenclature of an integrative taxonomy is being replaced by the numeric identification of one or few quantitative characteristics. Nineteenth-century scientific systems of color identification divided, grouped, and named colors according to multiple characteristics. Now color identification relies on numeric values applied to spectrographic readings. This means of identification of color lacks the taxonomic rigor of (...)
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  11. Realism, Relativism, Adverbialism: How Different are they? Comments on Mazviita Chirimuuta's Outside Color.Mohan Matthen - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 95 (1):236-243.
    Mazviita Chirimuuta proposes a new “adverbialist” ontology of color. I argue that ontological disputes in the philosophy of color are uniformly terminological. Chirimuuta's proposal too is a terminological variant on others, though it has some hortatory value in directing attention to aspects of color science that have hitherto been neglected. On a side note, I also take issue with Chirimuuta's laudatory take on early modern theories of color.
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  12. How Does Colour Experience Represent the World?Adam Pautz - 2017 - In Derek Brown & Fiona Macpherson (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour. New York: Routledge.
    Many favor representationalism about color experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Once you view color experience along these lines, you face a big question: do our color experiences represent the world as it really is? For instance, suppose you see a tomato. Representationalists claim that having an experience with this sensory character is necessarily connected with representing (...)
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  13. Colour.Laura Gow - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (11):803-813.
    The view that physical objects do not, in fact, possess colour properties is certainly the dominant position amongst scientists working on colour vision. It is also a reasonably popular view amongst philosophers. However, the recent philosophical debate about the metaphysical status of colour properties seems to have taken a more realist turn. In this article, I review the main philosophical views – eliminativism, physicalism, dispositionalism and primitivism – and describe the problems they face. I also examine how these views have (...)
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  14. Color Relationalism, Ordinary Illusion, and Color Incompatibility.Pendaran Roberts - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (4):1085-1097.
    Relationalism is a view popularized by Cohen according to which the colors are relational properties. Cohen’s view has the unintuitive consequence that the following propositions are false: (i) no object can be more than one determinate or determinable color all over at the same time; (ii) ordinary illusion cases occur whenever the color perceptually represented conflicts, according to (i) above, with the object’s real color; and (iii) the colors we perceive obey (i). I investigate Cohen’s attempt to address these intuitive (...)
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  15. Reliable Misrepresentation and Tracking Theories of Mental Representation.Angela Mendelovici - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):421-443.
    It is a live possibility that certain of our experiences reliably misrepresent the world around us. I argue that tracking theories of mental representation have difficulty allowing for this possibility, and that this is a major consideration against them.
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  16. Perceived colors and perceived locations: A problem for color subjectivism.Peter W. Ross - 2012 - American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (2):125-138.
    Color subjectivists claim that, despite appearances to the contrary, the world external to the mind is colorless. However, in giving an account of color perception, subjectivists about the nature of perceived color must address the nature of perceived spatial location as well. The argument here will be that subjectivists’ problems with coordinating the metaphysics of perceived color and perceived location render color perception implausibly mysterious. Consequently, some version of color realism, the view that colors are (physical, dispositional, functional, sui generis, (...)
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  17. The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour, by Barry Stroud.Keith Allen - 2011 - Mind 120 (480):1306-1309.
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  18. Locating The Unique Hues.Keith Allen - 2010 - Rivista di Estetica 43:13-28.
    Variations in colour perception have featured prominently in recent attempts to argue against the view that colours are objective mind-independent properties of the perceptual environment. My aim in this paper is to defend the view that colours are mind-independent properties in response to worries arising from one type of empirically documented case of perceptual variation: variation in the perception of the «unique hues». §1 sets out the challenge raised by variation in the perception of the unique hues. I argue in (...)
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  19. Color Eliminativism and Intuitions about Colors.Valtteri Arstila - 2010 - Rivista di Estetica 43:29-45.
    The philosophical debate over the nature of color has been governed by what we have learnt from color vision science and what color phenomenology suggests to us. It is usually thought that color eliminativism, which maintains that physical objects do not have any properties that can be identified with colors, can account for the former but not the latter. After all, what could be more obvious than the external world to be colored? Here I outline one color eliminativistic response to (...)
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  20. Colour Fictionalism.Dimitria Electra Gatzia - 2010 - Rivista di Estetica 43:109-123.
    In "How to Speak of the Colors", Mark Johnston’s claims that eliminativism would require us to jettison colour discourse. In this paper, I challenge Johnston’s claim. I argue that a particular version of eliminativism, i.e., prescriptive colour fictionalism, allows us to continue employing colour discourse as we have thus far in the absence of colours. In doing so, it employs statistical models in its base discourse to derive high-level statistical constructs that can be linked to the fiction via bridge principles.
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  21. The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology.Jonathan Cohen - 2009 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    Color provides an instance of a general puzzle about how to reconcile the picture of the world given to us by our ordinary experience with the picture of the world given to us by our best theoretical accounts. The Red and the Real offers a new approach to such longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into nature. It is responsive to a broad range of constraints --- both the ordinary constraints of color experience and the (...)
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  22. Die Natur der Farben.Fabian Dorsch - 2009 - De Gruyter.
    Farben sind für uns sowohl objektive, als auch phänomenale Eigenschaften. In seinem Buch argumentiert Fabian Dorsch, daß keine ontologische Theorie der Farben diesen beiden Seiten unseres Farbbegriffes gerecht werden k ann. Statt dessen sollten wir akzeptieren, daß letzterer sich auf zwei verschiedene Arten von Eigenschaften bezieht: die repräsentierten Reflektanzeigenschaften von Gegenständen und die qualitativen Eigenschaften unserer Farbwahrnehmungen, die als sinnliche Gegebenheitsweisen ersterer fungieren. Die Natur der Farben gibt einen detaillierten Überblick über die zeitgenössischen philosophischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Theorien der Farben und (...)
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  23. Truest blue.A. Byrne & D. R. Hilbert - 2007 - Analysis 67 (1):87-92.
    1. The “puzzle” Physical objects are coloured: roses are red, violets are blue, and so forth. In particular, physical objects have fine-grained shades of colour: a certain chip, we can suppose, is true blue (unique, or pure blue). The following sort of scenario is commonplace. The chip looks true blue to John; in the same (ordinary) viewing conditions it looks (slightly) greenish-blue to Jane. Both John and Jane are “normal” perceivers. Now, nothing can be both true blue and greenish-blue; since (...)
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  24. Fictional Colors.Dimitria Electra Gatzia - 2007 - Sorites (21).
    In this paper, I propose a fictionalist approach to the problem of color. On my view, which I call prescriptive color fictionalism, we can continue to employ our color discourse as we have thus far even if it turns out that there are no colored objects. My proposal is a species of error theory. As such, it does not describe our current practices. It is rather proposed as a prescription to a problem, namely that the color theory we accept (according (...)
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  25. Color, error, and explanatory power.Jonathan Ellis - 2006 - Dialectica 60 (2):171-179.
    Error theorists about color argue that our ordinary judgments ascribing color to material objects are all false. The error theorist proposes that everything that is so, including the fact that material objects appear to us to have color, can best be explained without ever attributing color to objects (for instance, by appealing to surface reflectance properties, the nature of light, the neurophysiology of perceivers, etc.). The appeal of this view stems in significant part from the prevalent thought that such explanations (...)
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  26. The illusory theory of colours: An anti-realist theory.Barry Maund - 2006 - Dialectica 60 (3):245-268.
    Despite the fact about colour, that it is one of the most obvious and conspicuous features of the world, there is a vast number of different theories about colour, theories which seem to be proliferating rather than decreasing. How is it possible that there can be so much disagreement about what colours are? Is it possible that these different theorists are not talking about the same thing? Could it be that more than one of them is right? Indeed some theorists, (...)
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  27. Introduction.Vivian Mizrahi & Martine Nida-Rumelin - 2006 - Dialectica 60 (3):209-222.
    In November 2003, the University of Fribourg hosted a symposium on the ontology of colors. The invited participants included Justin Broackes, Alex Byrne, David Chalmers, Larry Hardin, Joe Levine and Barry Maund. The points of view presented by the participants in their thought-provoking papers were highly divergent. The presentation of each paper was followed by a long and intense discussion. Despite the divergence of the views proposed, the discussion during the symposium was highly focused. Several specific issues came up repeatedly (...)
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  28. Colour irrealism and the formation of colour concepts.Jonathan Ellis - 2005 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (1):53-73.
    According to colour irrealism, material objects do not have colour; they only appear to have colour. The appeal of this view, prominent among philosophers and scientists alike, stems in large part from the conviction that scientific explanations of colour facts do not ascribe colour to material objects. To explain why objects appear to have colour, for instance, we need only appeal to surface reflectance properties, properties of light, the neurophysiology of observers, etc. Typically attending colour irrealism is the error theory (...)
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  29. Stroud’s Quest for Reality. [REVIEW]Bill Brewer - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2):408-414.
    Barry Stroud begins his investigation into the metaphysics of colour with a discussion of the elusiveness of the genuinely philosophical quest for reality. He insists upon a distinction between two ways in which the idea of a correspondence between perceptions or beliefs and the facts may be understood: first, as equivalent to the plain truth of the perceptions/beliefs in question; second, as conveying the metaphysical reality of the corresponding features of the world. I begin by voicing some suspicion about this (...)
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  30. (1 other version)A green thought in a green shade.C. L. Hardin - 2004 - Harvard Review of Philosophy 12 (1):29-39.
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  31. Reality and Colours: Comment on Stroud.John Mcdowell - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2):395-400.
    Any brief comment on Barry Stroud’s fine book risks bringing some of its virtues into relief precisely by lacking them. The book’s epigraph is a passage from Wittgenstein advising philosophers to take their time. Stroud never papers over difficulties, and he allows himself to be sketchy only when it does not matter for the main line of his argument. Anyone without space constraints should take him as a model. Pleading space constraints, I shall sketch two reservations.
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  32. Replies. [REVIEW]Barry Stroud - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2):423-442.
    In The Quest for Reality I investigate the prospects of achieving a certain kind of general philosophical understanding of ourselves and the world. The idea is to determine how much of our everyday conception of the world is due to the way the world actually is and how much is due only to us. The answer would tell us how things really are, or what is really so, independently of any special human ‘perspective’ we happen to have on the world, (...)
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  33. Barry Stroud, the Quest for reality: Subjectivism and the metaphysics of colour.Jonathan Cohen - 2003 - Noûs 37 (3):537-554.
    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 (...)
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  34. A Spectral Reflectance Doth Not A Color Make.C. L. Hardin - 2003 - Journal of Philosophy 100 (4):191-202.
  35. Perception.Barry Maund - 2003 - Chesham, Bucks: Routledge.
    The philosophical issues raised by perception make it one of the central topics in the philosophical tradition. Debate about the nature of perceptual knowledge and the objects of perception comprises a thread that runs through the history of philosophy. In some historical periods the major issues have been predominantly epistemological and related to scepticism, but an adequate understanding of perception is important more widely, especially for metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. For this reason Barry Maund provides an account of (...)
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  36. Have Byrne & Hilbert answered Hardin's challenge?Adam Pautz - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1):44-45.
    I argue that Byrne & Hilbert (B&H) have not answered Hardin's objection to physicalism about color concerning the unitary-binary structure of the colors for two reasons. First, their account of unitary-binary structure seems unsatisfactory. Second, pace B&H, there are no physicalistically acceptable candidates to be the hue-magnitudes. I conclude with a question about the justification of physicalism about color.
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  37. Seeking The Real.Paul Boghossian - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 108 (1-2):223-238.
    A critical discussion of Barry Stroud's claim, in his book The Quest for Reality, that we could never rationally arrive at the conclusion that, for example, the world is not really colored.
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  38. Yes, Virginia, Lemons are Yellow.Alex Byrne - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 108 (1-2):213-222.
    This paper discusses a number of themes and arguments in The Quest for Reality: Stroud's distinction between “philosophical” and “ordinary” questions about reality; the similarity he finds between the view that coloris “unreal” and the view that it is “subjective”; his argument against thesecondary quality theory; his argument against the error theory; and the “disappointing” conclusion of the book.
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  39. Color Eliminativism and Color Experience.Emmett L. Holman - 2002 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (1):38-56.
    Anyone who is a color eliminativist‐i.e., believes that the physical world is colorless‐must explain how our sense experience of color can be so systematically illusory. As it turns out, it is difficult to do this without committing oneself to dualism. In this paper I explore the options available to the color eliminativist in this regard, and argue that his/her prospects are more promising, though still far from certain, if s/he adopts the position that sense experience is strictly intentional.
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  40. Explaining the Quest and its prospects: Reply to Boghossian and Byrne.Barry Stroud - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 108 (1-2):239-247.
    A brief description of the goal and main lines of argument of The Quest for Reality, in reply to the responses of Paul Boghossian and Alex Byrne.
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  41. Subjectivism, physicalism or none of the above? Comments on Ross's The Location Problem for Color Subjectivism.Jonathan Cohen - 2001 - Consciousness and Cognition 10 (1):94-104.
    In “The Location Problem for Color Subjectivism,” Peter Ross argues against what he calls subjectivism — the view that “colors are not describable in physical terms, ... [but are] mental processes or events of visual states” (2),1 and in favor of physicalism — a view according to which colors are “physical properties of physical objects, such as reflectance properties” (10). He rejects an argument that has been offered in support of subjectivism, and argues that, since no form of subjectivism is (...)
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  42. Spatial location in color vision.Ian Gold - 2001 - Consciousness and Cognition 10 (1):59-62.
    Ross argues that the location problem for color-the problem of how it is represented as occupying a particular location in space-constitutes an objection to color subjectivism. There are two ways in which the location problem can be interpreted. First, it can be read as a why-question about the relation of visual experience to the environment represented: Why does visual experience represent a patch of color as located in this part of space rather than that? On this interpretation, the subjectivist can (...)
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  43. Locating color: Further thoughts.Peter W. Ross - 2001 - Consciousness and Cognition 10 (1):146-156.
    "The Location Problem for Color Subjectivism" response to commentators.
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  44. The location problem for color subjectivism.Peter W. Ross - 2001 - Consciousness and Cognition 10 (1):42-58.
    According to color subjectivism, colors are mental properties, processes, or events of visual experiences of color. I first lay out an argument for subjectivism founded on claims from visual science and show that it also relies on a philosophical assumption. I then argue that subjectivism is untenable because this view cannot provide a plausible account of color perception. I describe three versions of subjectivism, each of which combines subjectivism with a theory of perception, namely sense datum theory, adverbialism, and the (...)
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  45. The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism & the Metaphysics of Colour.Barry Stroud - 2000 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
    Distinguished scholar Barry Stroud presents a sustained and intricate philosophical argument based upon the question of whether physical objects are 'actually' coloured, or whether they merely appear to be so. He demonstrates how this specific question is inextricably linked to some of the most fundamental issues in metaphysics. He also questions the very nature and constitution of these specific metaphysical issues. This long-awaited model of subtle, elegant, and rigorous philosophical writing ahould have a wide readership among philosophers working in all (...)
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  46. True theories, false colors.Austen Clark - 1996 - Philosophy of Science (Supplement) 63 (3):143-50.
    University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06279-2054. Recent versions of objectivism can reply to the argument from metamers. The deeper rift between subjectivists and objectivists lies in the question of how to explain the structure of qualitative similarities among the colors. Subjectivism grounded in this fashion can answer the circularity objection raised by Dedrick. It endorses skepticism about the claim that there is some one property of objects that it is the function of color vision to detect. Color vision may enable (...)
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  47. (1 other version)Can color be reduced to anything?Don Dedrick - 1996 - Philosophy of Science Supplement 3 (3):134-42.
    C. L. Hardin has argued that the colour opponency of the vision system leads to chromatic subjectivism: chromatic sensory states reduce to neurophysiological states. Much of the force of Hardin's argument derives from a critique of chromatic objectivism. On this view chromatic sensory states are held to reduce to an external property. While I agree with Hardin's critique of objectivism it is far from clear that the problems which beset objectivism do not apply to the subjectivist position as well. I (...)
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  48. (1 other version)The evolution of color vision without colors.Richard J. Hall - 1996 - Philosophy of Science Supplement 63 (3):125-33.
    The standard adaptationist explanation of the presence of a sensory mechanism in an organism--that it detects properties useful to the organism--cannot be given for color vision. This is because colors do not exist. After arguing for this latter claim, I consider, but reject, nonadaptationist explanations. I conclude by proposing an explanation of how color vision could have adaptive value even though it does not detect properties in the environment.
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  49. Constant colors in the head.James A. McGilvray - 1994 - Synthese 100 (2):197-239.
    I defend a version of color subjectivism — that colors are sortals for certain neural events — by arguing against a sophisticated form of color objectivism and by showing how a subjectivist can legitimately explain the phenomenal fact that colors seem to be properties of external objects.
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  50. Interior colors.Joseph Thomas Tolliver - 1994 - Philosophical Topics 22 (1/2):411-41.
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