Abstract
When we’,re asked “What do ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘black’, ‘white’, mean?” we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours, — but that’,s all we can do: our ability to explain their meaning goes no further. It is obvious, Pollyanna thinks, that we typically identify the colors of objects by observation. Moreover, we teach others to identify colors by getting them to notice certain features that they visually experience. If that’,s what we typically do, then we can do it and it is obvious that we can. That’,s why Pollyanna takes the following to be a truism: (D1) x is blue if and only if x would appear blue to normal observers under normal conditions.
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Notes
Parts of this chapter are taken from my (1994) and I thank Philosophical Studies for permission to use that article here. My views have changed considerably over the past few years, however. The most important difference between this chapter and my (1994) is that when I wrote my (1994) I thought of colors as relational properties of objects, a position I now disown. I was then merely a Pollyanna Realist in training. Another difference is that I then viewed my position as being an alternative to, and incompatible with, McGinn’,s (1983). I now see it as largely in league with McGinn (though not in league with his more recent venture (1996) (see §9 below)).
See C.B. Martin (1994) and §8 below.
Also see W.D. Wright (1972) and Günter Wyszecki and W.S. Stiles (1982).
An alternative account of colors might appeal to optimal conditions and/or ideal observers. I’,ll discuss this strategy in detail in Chapter 6.
In addition to the problems below, D1 leaves hidden certain alternatives not addressed in this chapter. For instance, Dl might be understood such that ‘normal observers’, and ‘normal conditions’, rigidly pick out the normal observers and normal conditions for our world. For those (like Pollyanna) who have the intuition that something which looks blue to normal observers (most of us at present) in normal conditions (conditions which are normal for us now) would still be blue even if changes in us or the environment altered the color that it appears, the rigidified version of D1 will seem most appealing. Intuitions vary, however, and for now I will leave open the question of whether the rigidified or the nonrigidified version of D1 (and its ancestors, which I discuss later) best captures the intuitions of common sense. For a discussion of this problem see Johnston (1992: 230ff) and Averill (1992), as well as Chapter 8.
My discussion in the previous paragraph benefits considerably from Gilbert Harman’,s (1990) very clear discussion of this issue. See also Sydney Shoemaker (1975 and 1991).
As we will see, such a property would most surely play some representational role. By calling the property ‘non-representational’, I mean merely that it is not purely representational.
McGinn (1996) no longer considers the circularity a virtue. He now thinks that colors are not dispositional properties, but rather supervene on dispositions. I’,ll discuss McGinn’,s current position later in this chapter (see §9).
This may require another assumption about God’,s epistemic state. It might be thought, for instance, that God’,s being omniscient entails that God has beliefs with infinite contents. We can ignore this additional complication.
McGinn (1983: 6) suggests, however, that D3 is really all the dispositionalist needs. Our discussion suggests, contrary to McGinn, that D3 is insufficient as it stands. At the very least it will need considerable buttressing. I begin that work in §4.
Despite what is often reported, Wittgenstein does not object to ostension. He does not argue that ostensive definitions are problematic in a way that other definitions are not. His contention is only that ostensive definitions are not privileged. See footnote 15 for further discussion.
Diana Raffman offered this suggestion to me in conversation. I am greatly in her debt given that the proposal developed in this chapter is largely a development of her idea. Any faults in that development are mine.
The account given in my (1994) is importantly different. There I claim that “it is constitutive of x’,s being blue that x would look like that …” Terry Tomkow (in conversation) rightly chided me for employing the hedge “constitutive of”. If “constitutive of ” means equals, then something’,s being blue could not be the cause of its appearing blue. If “constitutive of” tells us that, necessarily, something is blue if and only if it looks a certain way, then we are in the boat with McGinn that we earlier showed to be sinking: the necessary biconditional itself needs to be explained. What is it about blueness and us that makes it necessarily true that something is blue if and only if it looks blue? And if “constitutive of” doesn’t stand either for identity or a necessary biconditional, then what does it stand for? In my (1994) I had, I continue to believe, rightly thought that the circularity of McGinn’,s account could be avoided by ostension. But, as I now recognize, the cicularity is only part of the problem. Perhaps the more serious problem is explaining why the necessary biconditional holds. I tackle that problem in Chapter 5.
I am suggesting, then, that one can be mistaken about the color of something only if she, or the conditions she is in, is abnormal. The same may be true for primary properties like shapes. But one difference between colors and shapes, if I am correct, is that an account of colors can be given only by employing ostension.
Wittgenstein has often been interpreted here as raising a special problem for ostension. He is not, as the footnote after his §28 makes clear: “That it is ambiguous is no argument against such a method of definition. Any definition can be misunderstood.” Wittgenstein’,s point, then, is only that ostension is not privileged; it has no virtues not had by linguistic definitions.
I thank Bill Taschek for this criticism.
Actually, much more can be said. We can tell, in good time, a naturalistic story about ostension and how it enables us to learn the use of color predicates, for instance. But this story tells us nothing more about what it is to master these concepts or what these concepts are about. Rather, it tells us what it is about us that enables us to acquire this mastery. It tells us, to use Wittgenstein’,s famous phrase, what it is to share the relevant “form of life.” My purpose is only to say in what that mastery consists and what the concept is about. The rest, I suppose, is science. Notice also that there is a difference between the analysis being understood and its being correct. My claim is only that, in so far as someone knows what blueness is, they know that to be blue is to look like that (as I point to the relevant feature of Fred). 18 See Saul Kripke (1982). After writing this chapter, Simon Blackburn suggested to me that Philip Pettit (1990) floats a proposal similar to mine, though his concern is with rule-following and not with colors per se. Pettit says, for instance, that “the fact that any finite set of examples instantiates an indefinite number of rules does not mean that it cannot exemplify a determinate rule for a given agent” (1990: 13). A significant portion of my task has been to show both that, given the kinds of creatures we are, a finite number of ostensive definitions will exemplify a color property for a normal observer and that, given what colors are, there is no other way to’ say’, what a particular color is but to point at those relevant exemplars.
Indeed, we could have said “that is blue” while pointing to an instance of blue. Indeed, I think that is the best we can do if we want to say what blueness is. The reason I appeal to experience in my account is that I hope to say a bit more about blueness: I hope to say what is essential to blueness. My motivation will become clearer, I hope, in Chapter 5.
I thank William Taschek and Sydney Shoemaker for this objection.
See Hardin(1988: 155-186).
For a philosophically friendly discussion of basic color terms, as well as a nice discussion of much of the relevant literature, see Hardin (1988: 155-169).
See Lakoff (1987: 28).
See Lakoff (1987: 25) and Hardin (1988: 165-166). There is some controversy over the order in which color terms are acquired by cultures, but the evidence I am putting forward is only that the color categories of other cultures are, from our perspective, very ‘natural.’, For example, a culture will not have a term (much less a basic term) for orangish-red, but not have one for red and for orange.
See BerUn and Kay (1969), Kay and McDaniel (1978), and Lakoff (1987: 24-26).
See Kay and McDaniel (1978), Lakoff (1987: 26-27), and Hardin (1988: 156-165).
Again, there is more to say. We can give a naturalistic explanation for why some things look more like one exemplar than another. For part of this explanation, see Hardin (1988: 113-121).
We might, for instance, appeal to the Munsell color chart as the exemplars for these ostensive accounts.
For a small sample of the work on qualia see Thomas Nagel (1974), Jackson (1982), Lewis (1983c and 1990), Janet Levin (1986), Dennett (1990 and 1991), Shoemaker (1990 and 1991), Laurence Nemirow (1990), Raffman (1995), and Jolley and Watkins (1998).
The evidence for this is partly the fact that different human observers have different unique hues. That is, what counts as unique blue for me (i.e., that shade of blue with no green or red in it) will likely not be unique blue for you. You will likely see it as having either some red or green in it. For a discussion of the relativity of unique hues, see Hardin (1988: 36-40).
The difference in the way an object appears from one time to another to the same observer under the same condition will be slight. Nonetheless, for borderline cases, there is empirical evidence that an observer will judge borderline cases differently from one time to another. For a discussion of this fact and some of its philosophical consequences see Raffman (1994).
This is the option chosen by Keith Campbell (1969: 139) and Jackson and Pargetter (1987). One primary motivation for Campbell’,s choice is to square his account with the Color Incompatibility Claim.
To make this point more clear, we need only think of how this option serves as a response to the skeptic who claims that there are no colors. When the skeptic says that there are no blue objects, she means that, given the way we use ‘blue’, there is nothing which answers to our use of the predicate. The skeptic will allow, however, that there are properties that we can call ‘blue’, if we like.
The claim that something cannot appear as two different colors simultaneously is ambiguous. The two senses of ‘appears blue’, for instance, has never been made very precise, nor do I have much to offer by way of making the distinction more precise here. Nonetheless, there seems to be a distinction between what are sometimes termed ‘raw appearances’, and ‘judgmental appearances’,. We can get an intuitive handle on the distinction by thinking about the way objects look in certain settings. Take, for instance, the way shade affects the appearance of an object. Imagine that part of the object is in the shade while the other part is in the sunlight. Now we ask, does the part in the shade appear darker than the rest? It is not clear what the correct response should be. In one sense of ‘appears’, the object clearly appears darker. We recognize, we see the contrast between the object’,s two parts. Thus the object’,s raw appearance is that of something with two colors. In another sense, however, the entire object appears to be the same color. Our visual system is not duped by the shadow. It is the former sense of ‘appears’, that I employ when I claim that color appearances are incompatibles.
As Ed Johnson pointed out in conversation, it is still less than obvious why nothing can appear as two different colors at the same time, especially if this claim is taken to be a necessary truth. So even if we abandon the Incompatibility Claim, there may still be an incompatibility problem. See Jody Graham (1999) for one treatment of this problem.
Don Hubin pointed out, in conversation, that there is one further option. We could claim that objects that appear differently to different normal observers or under different normal conditions are not colored, though other objects have the colors they appear to have. This allows us to save the Incompatibility Claim, but the position has at least two unfortunate consequences. First, we would ‘lose’, many shades of color. For instance, any shade of blue that is on the border with green will look green to at least some normal observers under some normal conditions. Second, we could never be certain that an object is the color it appears, or even that it is colored, without the aid of some instrument like a spectrograph. And this will be true even if we are certain that we are normal and that we are viewing the object under normal conditions (unless, of course, we had every normal observer view the object under every normal condition). If there is some intuition offended by the denial of the Incompatibility Claim but not equally offended by this lack of epistemic seriousness, then I am not aware of it.
I thank Diana Raffman for this suggestion.
David Lewis (1997) offers a similar way out of these finkish difficulties, though Lewis’, aim is to reduce statements about dispositions to counterfactual claims. For discussion about why this cannot be done, see Martin (1994). Martin argues that such counterfactuals will appeal ineliminably to celeris paribus clauses. For responses to Martin, see Lewis and Stephen Mumford (1996). Also see Paul Pietroski and Georges Rey (1995).
As will become clear in the next chapter, colors and physical properties are metaphysically related as well, though that relation is not identity. Indeed, it is the metaphysical relation that underwrites our ability to determine, at least at times, an object’,s color by determining its physical properties.
Intuitions might differ according to the details of the case. If we have some poison which changes its chemical composition once another chemical is mixed with it, then it may seem more intuitive to say that it is no longer a poison. But if the chemical remains unaltered once the new chemical is introduced — if the new chemical merely acts as an antidote once both chemicals are in the body — then it is more intuitive to say that the chemical is still a poison (and that the liquid containing it is poisonous, though finkishly so).
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’,s Dream.
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Wittgenstein, L. (2002). Identifying Colors: Relationally Specifying a Nonrelational Property. In: Rediscovering Colors. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0562-3_4
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