Locke’s Colors

Philosophical Review 112 (1):57-96 (2003)
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Abstract

What sort of property did Locke take colors to be? He is sometimes portrayed as holding that colors are wholly subjective. More often he is thought to identify colors with dispositions—powers that bodies have to produce certain ideas in us. Many interpreters find two or more incompatible strands in his account of color, and so are led to distinguish an “official,” prevailing view from the conflicting remarks into which he occasionally lapses. Many who see him as officially holding that colors are dispositions concede that some of his remarks imply that colors are in us rather than in objects. After raising some difficulties for these readings, I offer an alternative. I will argue that Locke takes colors to be relational, but not dispositional, properties of the objects around us. On his view, an object is red if and only if it is actually causing a certain sensation in some observer.

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Matthew Stuart
Bowdoin College

Citations of this work

Leibniz on the Metaphysics of Color.Stephen Puryear - 2011 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2):319-346.
Locke on individuation and the corpuscular basis of kinds.Dan Kaufman - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3):499–534.
Sensory qualities, sensible qualities, sensational qualities.Alex Byrne - 2009 - In Brian McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lockean Empathy.Colin Marshall - 2016 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 54 (1):87-106.

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Phenomenal character.Sydney Shoemaker - 1994 - Noûs 28 (1):21-38.
Prolegomena to any future metaphysics.Immanuel Kant - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy (16):507-508.

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