Good point, and I agree, as far as a common use of “objective” goes. I suppose I just wanted to stand up for a better use of the term (and the subject-object relation generally). The view-from-nowhere variety of objectivity is not the only version available. I just think people go too far when they categorically reject subject-object.
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Yes, I think that’s the case.
It is a finding of physics and biology, as explained here:
One of the major problems with color has to do with fitting what we seem to know about colors into what science (not only physics but the science of color vision) tells us about physical bodies and their qualities. It is this problem that historically has led the major physicists who have thought about color, to hold the view that physical objects do not actually have the colors we ordinarily and naturally take objects to possess. Oceans and skies are not blue in the way that we naively think, nor are apples red (nor green). Colors of that kind, it is believed, have no place in the physical account of the world that has developed from the sixteenth century to this century.
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Palmer, a leading psychologist and cognitive scientist, writes:
People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored, just as we experience them. The sky looks blue because it is blue, grass looks green because it is green, and blood looks red because it is red. As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually “colored” in anything like the way we experience them. Rather, color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. The colors we see are based on physical properties of objects and lights that cause us to see them as colored, to be sure, but these physical properties are different in important ways from the colors we perceive. (Palmer 1999: 95)
I don’t think that this is a philosophical interpretation of the science; this just is the science. Again, I’ll present this picture:
How do you make sense of this? Do you say that the colours the bird sees are “external” properties of the bird and that we are incapable of seeing them, such that the colours we see the bird to be are in some sense “wrong”? Or do you accept that the bird isn’t really coloured in either of these two ways, and that the colours we see are just generated by our body’s response to light; a pragmatic evolutionary trait that allows us to distinguish things in the environment? The latter seems to be exactly what the science tells us.
That’s why I included “coupled with a reasonable understanding of physics and biology”. We have to amend our common sense where appropriate. As it stands this should lead us to accept that colours are a mental phenomena like pain but that fire engines aren’t.
Yes, the exact nature of mental phenomena is still an open question. We don’t exactly know what pain is, but we do know that it’s something generated by our bodies and not to be found somewhere in the fire — and the same with colour.
I’m inclined to not draw this distinction. Consider Molyneux’s problem: “if a man born blind can feel the differences between shapes such as spheres and cubes, could he, if given the ability to see, distinguish those objects by sight alone, in reference to the tactile schemata he already possessed?” The answer to this is apparently “no”:
Although after restoration of sight, the subjects could distinguish between objects visually almost as effectively as they would do by touch alone, they were unable to form the connection between an object perceived using the two different senses. The correlation was barely better than if the subjects had guessed. They had no innate ability to transfer their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain.
Given that there’s no inherent connection between the “feel” of a circle and the “look” of a circle, which of these — if either — is the “external” shape? I’d say neither. Most might think that the “look” of the circle is the “external” shape, but like with colour realism this just seems to be an unwarranted privileging of vision as being special amongst the senses.
I’ve made much the same point with respect to orientation; there’s no such thing as “true” up or down, and if some other species were to see the world in much the same way that I would see the world were my eyes rotated 180 degrees then they wouldn’t be seeing the world the “wrong” way up — just differently to me.
But even if the “look” of a circle is the same as the “external” shape of the object, I don’t see what that has to do with colour? Given that dreams and hallucinations and synesthesia are possible, we know that visual experiences can have shapes and colours even if our eyes are closed and we’re not looking at anything — so even if during veridical perception these mental-shapes are the same as the “external” shapes, it doesn’t follow that the object also has an “external” colour that is the same as the mental-colour; as above, we know from physics that ordinary objects have no such properties, only microstructural properties that reflect certain wavelengths of light.
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That’s what I think it is - fwiw. There is no ‘way it truly is’ but there’s enough commonality for us hominids to agree.
The Palmer quote is an example of the worst kind of pop-science “correction” to what is imagined to be the common sense view. The analysis required to show exactly what is bad about it is a tedious task that I’ll avoid at the moment, but in any case, the worst thing is that it’s philosophy masquerading as science. It’s an interpretation of results that do not themselves conclude with anything like “therefore colour is a mental phenomenon”.
And it doesn’t begin to do the job of supporting your philosophical point, because the details of the interpretation are not revealed, Palmer perhaps being unaware of them (to me it’s an example of ideology in the Frankfurt sense, but I won’t go into that).
Conveniently, the SEP article makes these points for me, immediately following the quotation:
This quote, however, needs unpacking. Palmer is obviously challenging our ordinary common-sense beliefs about colors. Specifically, he is denying that objects and lights have colors in the sense of colors-as-we-experience-them (or colors as we see them). As far as this goes, it is compatible with objects and lights having colors in some other sense, e.g., colors, as defined for scientific purposes. Secondly, he is saying that color (i.e., color-as-we-experience it) is a psychological property, which in turn, might be interpreted in different ways.
Thus the article treats Palmer as presenting an interpretation, and as not just presenting a scientific result.
Anyway, it’s quoted as part of a live debate, surveyed in the article—in a philosophical article, we should remember—which exists precisely because there is no unproblematic view among the professional philosophers who disagree with each other. It’s an odd thing to point to if you want to show that your view is beyond philosophy, or as you put it, unproblematic.
On a related note, do you think you can convincingly show that most colour realists—and other non-indirect-realists—are scientifically ignorant, or that their views result from scientific ignorance? This doesn’t seem credible on the face it.
I suggest that all you can actually show is that some philosophers interpret the science differently from you. I’ll concede that McGinn is an embarrassing exception.
That’s a false dichotomy. As you can see from the SEP article you’ve quoted from, there are other ways of making sense of it.
First, you’re right that the example does refute something, namely the view that colour is a fixed property that every person and every seeing creature sees identically. The thing is, no colour realist believes that anyway (again except for the embarrassing McGinn)—and your challenge actually smuggles this naive picture back in to a debate which has clearly (clearly from reading the SEP article, among other things) moved on a long way.
The other options are relationalism and good old physicalist reductionism.
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Relationalism: Colour is the relation between (a) the object’s surface properties and (b) visual systems. Neither the colours the bird sees nor those we see are in any sense “wrong”; the colours are different because they are different relations, being relations between coloured objects and different visual systems (perhaps in different environments).
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Physicalist reductionism: Colour is the objective physical property of reflectance of the object, which different visual systems detect differently.
Notice, incidentally, that physicalist reductionism says the opposite of Palmer, based on the same science.
I’m far from fully signed up to these theories (there are other, more interesting candidates), but I bring them up just to show that even restricting ourselves to your own source, we find views that dissolve your challenge without resorting to eliminativism. This should at the very least call into doubt the claim that this is just a matter of stubborn deluded naive realists, stuck in the past.
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What if we all seen the same colours?
What it boils down to is possibility; perhaps red, blue, green and yellow are the same for all of us. Are primary colors other than them possible?
It’s difficult making a new colour- perhaps other than those primary colors is impossible.
What can cones and light possibly produce?
Is there a yellow, other than the yellow, cones and light produces in my brain?
The problem is the idea that we are experiencing different sets of colours, when colours must be possible to exist.
We have an colour-anchor, the median of each our reality; there are nodes we experience, either the same each way or different.
There are a limited amount of major colors and many more minor colours.
If you believe that the colour yellow as I see it, can be totally different, the way you see it; to me, suggests something limited, as any other colour is a new colour to me and there can’t be infinite new colours.
I.e. some of us are experiencing the same colour set as each other.
Colours can be in different order, but I argue that there are no completely different colours per person, because that possibility, of a new colour, does not exist- nor is infinite.
These things go together. Hypotheses implicitly contain an interpretation e.g. that gravity is the warping of spacetime.
I don’t see either of those as contrary to the position that color is a mental phenomenon. They both explicitly describe color in terms of visual systems.
Click the above link to see a special effect of Cyan, there are no colours in the image bar Cyan- but you can see Red.
If we perceived Cyan differently, how would this effect be possible?
Physicalist reductionism being the more clear-cut case, I’ll deal with that first. It does not “describe color in terms of visual systems”. It says that colour just is reflectance, i.e., a “mind-independent” physical property of objects’ surfaces—no need to bring in eyes, brains, experience, or visual systems at all. I added the clause about visual systems just to clarify the theory’s consequences for perception.
As for relationalism, it’s defined without any reference to mental phenomena. What it defines—explicitly—is a property of the relation between an object and a visual system, not an internal property of one side of that relation taken alone. The latter is excluded by the former.
And it’s certainly the case that relationalism doesn’t positively entail mental phenomena. To see this, think of what it means for an item of food to be toxic or nutritious: it’s a relational property, but it’s still a property of the food, not of your mind.
EDIT: There’s a slight or apparent contradiction between my last two paragraphs. Strictly speaking, toxicity is not a property of the food, considered apart from the relation; like colour in relationalism, it’s a property of the relation between the substance and the eater. What I should have said is that toxicity is a property of the food as it stands to a certain consuming organism.
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Ah ok, thanks for the clarification.
I would disagree with both:
Seems pretty trivially refuted by examples like the red coke can in the above image and the perception of yellow on a TV screen. What object is holding that physical property of red and yellow respectively?
For this it depends what level of relation we mean.
Of course an object can have properties that are causally connected to me seeing red. But being causally connected is insufficient; fire might cause me to feel pain, but no-one is arguing that pain is a property of either the fire or of a relationship. Presumably you are comfortable with pain being a mental phenomenon?
Going to the example of toxicity, I think color, as an experience, is more akin to being ill. No-one would claim that illness is a property of spoiled milk, say.
I see the colour of Red coming through the Cyan, relative to lightning and the colour of electrics, but this is off topic.
Which is just to say that we can and do use the word “red” to mean “has a wavelength of 620-750nm” or "reflects light with a wavelength of “620-750nm”. This is uninteresting.
Our concern is the nature of “colors-as-we-experience-them (or colors as we see them)” given that we’re discussing visual perception.
If this is true then colours are not properties of material surfaces; if there are no visual systems then there is no relation between an object’s surface and a visual system, and so there are no colours. The reverse, however, is not true, as we can dream and hallucinate in colour and have synesthesia, and so objects (other than the brain and supporting organs) are unnecessary to see colours.
But really, it’s not entirely clear what it even means to say that colours are a “relation”. It’s like saying that pain is a “relation” between (a) the fire and (b) an organism’s pain receptors.
If all it means is that colour experiences are usually caused by an object reflecting light into our eyes, with the wavelength of light it reflects determining the type of colour experienced, then this doesn’t contradict subjectivism; the same is true of the fire and pain.
If it were this simple, and “red” only meant “has a wavelength of 620-750nm” or "reflects light with a wavelength of “620-750nm”, then — referring back to the comparison between the human and the bird (or the infamous dress) — it would make no sense to say that different species (or people) see different colours when looking at the same thing, and yet it both makes sense and is true (and, once again, we can dream and hallucinate in colour and have synaesthesia).
So even if you want to use colour terms to describe reflectance properties, they are also used to refer to how things look (or, to be more precise and to account for dreams, hallucinations, and synaesthesia, the qualitative characteristic of the visual experience) — and how things look is not a property of the thing but a product of an organism’s biology/neurology/psychology.
I think you’re supporting my point. I didn’t cite relationalism and physicalist reductionism because they’re my views. I cited them (from your own source) to show that “colour is a mental phenomenon” is a contested philosophical inference, not a finding delivered “unproblematically” by physics and biology.
And I didn’t even mention primitivism, dispositionalism, and the ecological/enactive accounts, also in the same article—some of them are probably more interesting than the two I chose.
I certainly think you are substantively wrong, but it’s ok to be wrong, and I’m not interested in debating that like I used to be. What I want to draw attention to is the rhetorical tactic of dismissing those who hold opposing views with the accusation that they just don’t understand the science, and claiming that your own view is just a direct and unproblematic inference from inarguable results—no philosophy required. This is a rhetorical move that I think is indefensible and fallacious, and I think I’ve exposed it adequately.
As to your substantive points: yeah, I may have poorly defined the two positions, but it doesn’t matter. They are set out in detail in the papers referenced in the SEP article’s bibliography, if you would like to explore the other views.
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I don’t think they show that “colour is a mental phenomenon” is a contested philosophical inference — rather, I think it shows that some philosophers contest the views of physics and cognitive science.
As another reference, there’s neural representations of perceptual color experience in the human ventral visual pathway:
There is no color in light. Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus. This distinction is critical for understanding neural representations, which must transition from a representation of a physical retinal image to a mental construct for what we see. Here, we dissociated the physical stimulus from the color seen by using an approach that causes changes in color without altering the light stimulus.
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Color is a perceptual construct that arises from neural processing in hierarchically organized cortical visual areas.
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Vision is effortless. We recognize faces, navigate a crowded sidewalk, or judge the ripeness of strawberries with ease. These behaviors depend on the light entering the eyes, but what we experience follows from biological responses to light that result in seeing. A sharp distinction between the physical image in the eye versus the biologically rendered percept from the image is essential for understanding vision.
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We now know that the colors we see follow from biological neural representations generated by light, but light itself carries no color.
This isn’t just some philosophical inference, but the only appropriate scientific interpretation of the empirical evidence.
Yes indeed, and I can say that color existing as a subjective experience, like pain, was a completely uncontroversial description when I studied neuroscience and the human visual system.
But we have a lot of common ground here I think. In terms of the title of this thread, I think we all appreciate that the sensation of color still has significant explanatory gap(s) (or, if anyone does want to question this, I’m happy to rattle off lots of questions we don’t have a model to answer yet). And no-one seems to want to defend colour realism.
It’s fine if someone wants to prefer other models than subjectivism, but I’d be keen to here the description of e.g. where yellow is when I’m watching TV. Not as a gotcha, but to learn what the model is bringing in terms of explanations or inferences.
Interesting paper.
It precisely is just some philosophical inference.
I think your response suffers from the same basic problem of the earlier posts. Now you’re asserting that the interpretation you favour is the “only appropriate” one—which is just doing the same thing as you did with Palmer. Because the thing is, the quotations you’re appealing to for support are of the same kind.
The paper shows that perceived colour can be experimentally dissociated from the retinal stimulus, that cortical activity tracks the percept rather than the raw input. Much of the rest, as presented in the abstract and introduction, is just framing according to certain conceptual schemes.
“Color is in the perceiver, not the physical stimulus,” “light itself carries no color,” “mental construct”—these are metaphysical interpretations and concepts which are not present in the results section of the paper or even in the carefully written discussion section. They’re more like click-bait, appearing at the start for those who don’t want to look at the actual science within. That they constitute the “only appropriate” metaphysical interpretation remains to be shown.
I expect you know this is coming, but …
We could alternatively say, while remaining compatible with the results of the paper, that a colour experience is standardly the effect produced when a reflectance-type acts on a visual system of a given type. Hallucinogens, direct cortical stimulation, and switch rivalry as in the reported experiments are all cases where that same type of experiential effect is caused by something other than its standard cause—internally, or by an engineered conflict between the eyes, rather than an ordinary object simply reflecting light into them.
The same kind of effect can have more than one kind of cause, and the existence of an abnormal cause doesn’t show the effect isn’t normally and correctly tied to the standard one.
(And this framing arguably explains the replay condition much better than the alternatives)
The empirical facts are neutral with respect to these interpretations, so I think there is a burden on you to demonstrate, rather than assert, why your preferred framing is the “only appropriate” one.
I’m not denying this. I’m saying that the science shows that colour is this effect, not the cause — which is precisely why it is possible for us to see colours despite non-standard causes, and why different people (or species) can see different colours despite the same causes.
In that case, we’re disagreeing over the definition. You insist that “colour” must refer to the effect in the perceiver, whereas I say it could equally refer to the standard cause, or to the relation between cause and effect.
I deliberately avoided saying “merely definitional”, because it’s not trivial—it determines whether ordinary sentences like “the apple is red” are true or false. You can’t settle the question with a stipulated definition, or based on an fMRI result, which is of course silent on which term in the causal chain gets to keep the name. We are thus taken back to the philosophical question again, just in a different guise—you can’t escape it.
I’m not saying that it must. As I said above, we can and do use the word “red” to mean “has a wavelength of 620-750nm” or "reflects light with a wavelength of “620-750nm” (and the word “colour” to refer to all such similar cases), but this is uninteresting.
Our concern — given that the discussion is on visual perception — is “colors-as-we-experience-them (or colors as we see them)”. These colours are not reflectances, wavelengths, or some additional sui generis qualitative property of material surfaces (contra the naive colour primitivist), but a biological/neurological/psychological/mental phenomenon (enter the Hard Problem).
On that bombshell, I am retiring for the evening and may pick this up tomorrow.
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This is a good line. But i don’t think it lifts a lot.
Firstly, why I think it’s good: This is the case, whether or not you’re an anti-realist or anything else. Even a true hallucination is reality. That is your immediate, felt experience and that is real in a sense that cannot be overcome linguistically, by arguments such as my own about hte visual system of humans. It is essentially an inarguable claim, as far as I am concerned.
But “perceived reality” stipulates this. Which is why it isn’t doing much lifting. If, as a fairly silly extension of a claim I would make, the visual system acutally does bastardize the information it receives before providing us with a picture to react to in a way that we know the “noumena” are not what they appear then this would still fall under this rubric. That would be “perceived reality”.
I think the more interesting question (and one which, for me, lands in an “i don’t know, but the science says X” type of position) is whether or not that can be considered “true”. Is it “true” that the bastardized image is out there? Clearly not, on this formulation. The issue is that this might be true. Its extremely unlikely, but it might be and given the way the visual system works, claims like this just don’t do the question justice imo. Again, a good line, and one which reveals osmething very important about human attitudes to perception. But I don’t think it deals with qualia in teh way the OP, or most discussions of it, require.
I’m sure this now seems like a pointless rant on a throwaway line, btu this seemed really important.
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