I didn’t intend it to be a dichotomy. I simply presented two competing and popular opinions on the nature of colours.
That part of my post wasn’t addressing your post. It was explaining my position (and @Mijin1 ‘s?) and its primary opponent. The parts of my post that were addressing your post were:
Once again, someone sat right in front of the screen doesn’t see yellow; they see green and red. So wherever yellow is “manifesting”, it’s not on the screen.
I’ll try another example:
I can see black with zero photons reaching my eye, with no object in front of me. So where does black exist? If it’s “out there” how does it get to my eye? Are there photons of black that travel to my eye? How can the absence of something hold a property of having a color? (yes black is not a hue but it is still a visual experience; someone blind from birth cannot imagine black)
That only shows that disposition to be seen as red is coextensive with the class of red things as identified by physics, i.e. the class of illumination events sharing a certain spectral profile. “To be red is to be classed as red by spectral analysis is to be disposed to be classed as red by spectral analysis” is obviously harmless recursion. So is “to be red is to be classed as red by human visual perception stroke culture is to be disposed to be classed as red by… etc.”
Obviously we want to explore better and worse ways of unpacking the human perceptual and cultural classification system. Internal mental paint chips isn’t necessarily one of the worse ways, but neither is a policy of deliberately avoiding that assumption.
Yes, and obviously their point was that sitting further back you see a larger illumination event with a different spectral profile and a different disposition to classification by the visual system.
To be clear, the position I defend is based on the following;
All colors are out there (direct realism).
The red and green are relational properties between photons (specific frequencies) and the observer under close-range conditions of satisfaction.
Also the yellow is a relational property between the spatial pattern of red+green photons and the observer under distant-viewing conditions.
The pixels don’t possess colors intrinsically. They possess physical dispositions to emit certain photons, and colours manifest only when the observer meets the conditions.
The spatial pattern of red+green photons that appears yellow under distant viewing-conditions is like the spatial resolution that makes a rocky planet appear smooth when it’s seen from far away.
What do you mean by “out there” in (1)? If you mean that colours are mind-independent properties of light or material surfaces, similar to their wavelengths or molecular composition, then this seems inconsistent with (2).
The point I was making is that this “colour manifestation” happens in the human body/brain/mind, not on the television screen.
A knife possesses the physical disposition to cause me to feel pain when I meet certain conditions (e.g. being stabbed by it), but this pain is a mental/neurological phenomenon, not something that exists “out there” (e.g. as a property of the knife)
Similarly, the television screen possesses the physical disposition to cause me to see colours when I meet certain conditions (e.g. looking at it with my eyes open), but these colours are a mental/neurological phenomenon, not something that exists “out there” (e.g. as a property of the television screen).
Colours are the same kind of thing as pain, even though they seem to be something else. We are simply being bewitched by the complexity of visual experience.
A colour is a relational property, and the relation is mind-independent. But the seeing arises under conditions of satisfaction including the mind. You won’t see the colour unless all conditions are satisfied. But the colour is out there in the sense of a relation (or disposition) waiting to be satisfied.
By lumping them as “the same kind of thing” you ignore their different intentional structures and satisfaction conditions.
Pain is purely somatic, its “object” is its own feeling. Colour depends on the observer’s relation to other objects, distance and angle of view etc.
We program a spectral analyser to output the word “red” when it detects light with a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm.
So in this case, the predicate “is red” is being used to mean one of several things:
None of these meanings work when the word “red” is used in the sentence “this thing is seen as red”. I’m not saying “this thing is seen as having a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm”, I’m not saying “this thing is seen as reflecting light with a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm”, and I’m not saying “this thing is seen as disposed to reflect light with a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm”.
Any reasonable person understands that the word “red” in the phrase “this thing is seen as red” is referring to the qualitative characteristic of the visual experience, and is how we can make sense of the fact that some people see the dress to be white and gold and others black and blue. This isn’t people seeing different wavelengths or seeing different physical dispositions; this is just people having visual experiences with different qualitative characteristics.
The relevant question concerns the nature of these qualitative characteristics. Are they mind-independent properties of light and or/material surfaces, as the naive colour primitivist claims? Are they mental/neurological phenomena as the subjectivist claims? Are they something else? What they certainly aren’t is reducible to “dispositions to be seen a certain way”.
If by this you just mean that the colour I ordinarily see is causally determined by my relation to other objects, distance and angle of view etc, then you’re correct, but that doesn’t entail what you’re suggesting it does, and still does not distinguish it from the pain I feel when I’m stabbed in the back, which is also causally determined by my relation to the knife.
That they have different “intentional structures” and “satisfaction conditions” isn’t that they aren’t both mental phenomena. Smells and tastes have different “intentional structures” and “satisfaction conditions” but they too are just mental phenomena.
What does that mean? Let’s say that every person alive has cortical blindness. Their eyes react to light just as ours do, but they don’t see anything. Does this “relational property” continue to obtain such that objects are coloured red and blue but we’re just unable to see them?
And how does this account for the fact that different people can see different colours when looking at the same thing, such as with the dress? Are the black, blue, white, and gold colours all mind-independent relations that already exist “out there”, and it just so happens to be that some people only see these black and blue colours and others only see these white and gold colours?
This argument appears to develop the first half of this but not the second:
To be seen as red is, developing the first half, to exemplify images of scientific instruments. Which I agree is not what we mean. Developing the second half, though: to be seen as red is to exemplify images of red things and events, and allude thereby to actual red things and events in generality. A class roughly coextensive with any of your 1, 2 or 3. Just not exemplifying images of scientific measuring devices or optical diagrams, but referring instead to images related to and created through human visual recognition and comparison.
Then it’s incorrect to say that it’s determined by the ratio of glutamate in the eye, because the eye-event is insufficient. All conditions for the experience must be satisfied, or else you don’t see the colour.
A knife is not an object that appears in your conscious awareness of pain. Being stabbed doesn’t feel “knifey” or the like. It hurts, and if the pain-experience has any object at all it’s the wound.
Colours don’t manifest in the dark either. They’re real even when we can’t see them.
The dress-photo is an exceptionally vivid case, and also one and the same observer can explore how the colours shift depending on conditions of observation, ambience, calibration of screen etc. However, in ordinary cases there is usually agreement on what the colours are in our shared environment.
There’s another reason I picked yellow for the example.
I mean, usually when I give this example, and point out that there are zero 570-590nm photons coming from the TV, most people get it that the vivid yellowness of the banana cannot be “out there”.
But there’s another issue with your claim of it being a “relational property” or whatever: seeing yellow here is actually a quirk of human vision.
You see, usually when two cone cells are activated the result is in some sense a product of the two primaries e.g. red + blue = purple; which could be described as a reddish-blue or bluish-red.
However, since there is a red–green opponent channel in the human visual cortex, there is no reddish-green or greenish-red. Instead there is a different primary color (a “unique hue”), even though it can be produced as the product of two other hues.
So it gets extra silly in terms of color realism. The object, or “relation between objects” has to have coded within it the potential to be seen as very different visual phenomena, accounting for the specific quirks of whatever species is doing the viewing, at whatever distance. And then this “true color” gets “revealed” by being at the right distance by a human with a particular convergence of neurons that remap these colors into one primary color by being in color opposition. And that’s one scenario among infinite others.
…or we accept that color is a mental phenomenon.
Finally, did you see my post about black upthread? When I look out into deep space, and zero photons are entering my eye, what object or objects is holding the property of black? How is that property entering my eye?
It’s not incorrect. Something doesn’t have to be a sufficient cause to be a cause. Me typing on my keyboard causes the words to appear on my screen, even though internal computer stuff needs to happen in between.
What does it mean for an object to “appear” in my conscious awareness?
Regardless, wavelengths of light and the electron arrangement of an apple’s surface also don’t “appear” in my conscious awareness. These are the things that are (usually) causally responsible for the colours I experience.
Even if it seems to you that apples “appear” in my conscious awareness, and that their surfaces are coloured red or green, it is still the case that colours are a mental phenomenon like pain. How things naively seem isn’t always how things actually are. Again, you are simply being bewitched by the complexity of vision. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, or pain, it all works the same way; some sense organ on or in our body reacts to some proximal stimulus by releasing neurotransmitters, which then activate certain areas of the brain and we have an experience of some modality or other with qualitative characteristics that distinguish them — with colours being one such qualitative characteristic.
That doesn’t answer the question. It doesn’t matter that there is “usually agreement”, just as it doesn’t matter that there is “usually agreement” about the smell or taste of chocolate. What matters is that in this case the colours I see are not the colours someone else sees. It’s not the case that all of these colours are “out there” and that each of us only sees some of them, or that one of us is seeing the colours that are “out there” and the other is hallucinating; it is just that my eyes and brain react one way to this light, someone else’s eyes and brain react a different way to this same light, and so that we have different colour experiences, with these colours being qualitative characteristics of the visual experience.
No they’re not, because colours are a qualitative characteristic of visual experience.
The apple is real even when we can’t see it, the electron arrangement on its surface is real even when we can’t see it, and it is really disposed to reflect a certain wavelength of light even if there is no light available, but none of these things are colours. They are the things that causally determine the colours we experience (in conjunction with the cone cells in our eyes, our optic nerve, and the behaviour of our visual cortex), but colours are the end-product, not properties of these distal causes.
I don’t understand what you’re saying.
I’m saying that seeing something as red and seeing something as blue is not seeing two things as having two different dispositions (what does a disposition look like?); it’s having visual experiences with two different qualitative characteristics — from which we deduce that the object looked at is disposed to cause us to have visual experiences with these qualitative characteristics.
This is exactly how we understand some people seeing the dress as white and gold and others as black and blue.
I’m saying that seeing something as red is explained in Goodman’s terms as the organism slightly adjusting its own and to a lesser extent society’s colour classification system by allowing the thing to exemplify red: stand, at least momentarily, as a standard, or at least candidate standard, for red as a class of stimuli.
A linguistic animal, at least, will be able to monitor and debate with its peers the subsequent systematic effect of the (perhaps temporary) exemplification.
That’s a big and holistic view, sure. You could perhaps embrace it, though, conditional on admitting qualia as internal exemplars? To better explain the livelier debates? (I mean, I think Goodman was preferring to offer an alternative to qualia. But I’m not entirely sure. Structure of Appearance, after all.)
Or of course you could brush exemplification aside and say, e.g., any normal seeing of red is seeing as red. Never mind systematic adjustment, just admit the internal instance of the specific colour in the normal brain.
Still, I think (?) you introduced the as talk, and it seems to me to confirm the relevance of exemplification, and the relative importance of sharable comparisons over, or at least in concert with, un-sharable.
Say that there are no scientific instruments because we’re a primitive society and that we don’t have much in the way of a language (or at least not much in the way of a colour vocabulary).
Do we still see colours, and if so what are they and where are they “located”?
I say that we do still see colours, and that these colours are not “classifications”, are not the microstructural properties of an object’s surface, and are not an object’s disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light.
The colours that we see are “sui generis, simple, qualitative, sensuous, intrinsic, irreducible properties”1, certainly (in most waking cases) causally determined in part by the microstructural properties of an object’s surface and its disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light — and also by the behaviour of our eyes and brains — but they are the end-product of this causal chain such that if everything in the universe were cortically blind then colours would not exist in the universe.
Physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology are really clear that this is the case, and it just seems to me that the philosopher is either being stubborn in refusing to accept this (i.e. the naive colour primitivist) or is avoiding the issue by talking about something else entirely — yes, it is true that in the English language we can and do use the predicate “is red” to mean something like “has a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm” or “[has a disposition to] reflect[s] light with a wavelength between 620nm and 750nm”, but this is uninteresting and unrelated to the actual topic, which concerns the nature of visual experience, and not some given language’s grammar or vocabulary.
they are sui generis, simple, qualitative, sensuous, intrinsic, irreducible properties.This view has come to be called “Color Primitivism”. (SEP)
Exactly which if any of the positions on that page do you subscribe to?
Eliminativism, subjectivism, and projectivism (explained within the section on eliminativism)
I agree with the colour primitivist that colours are sui generis, simple, qualitative, sensuous, intrinsic, irreducible properties (exactly like smells and tastes and pain). I disagree with the realist that these colours are properties of material surfaces. Instead I believe that these colours are properties of the visual experience, and that it only seems as if these colours are properties of material surfaces.
Ok, I don’t see that’s any clearer than just defending qualia.
This is better. I’ll think about it.