The target article is an attempt to make some progress on the problem of color realism. Are objects colored? And what is the nature of the color properties? We defend the view that physical objects (for instance, tomatoes, radishes, and rubies) are colored, and that colors are physical properties, specifically, types of reflectance. This is probably a minority opinion, at least among color scientists. Textbooks frequently claim that physical objects are not colored, and that the colors are “subjective” or “in the mind.” The article has two other purposes: First, to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to some distinctively philosophical tools that are useful in tackling the problem of color realism and, second, to clarify the various positions and central arguments in the debate.The first part explains the problem of color realism and makes some useful distinctions. These distinctions are then used to expose various confusions that often prevent people from seeing that the issues are genuine and difficult, and that the problem of color realism ought to be of interest to anyone working in the field of color science. The second part explains the various leading answers to the problem of color realism, and (briefly) argues that all views other than our own have serious difficulties or are unmotivated. The third part explains and motivates our own view, that colors are types of reflectances and defends it against objections made in the recent literature that are often taken as fatal.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

In the dark ages perceptual experiences were supposed to consist in the direct awareness of sense data, which are as they appear to be. Perceptual infallibility was the creed, with error blamed solely on the intellect. Eventually these doctrines were swept aside by the reformation. Perceptual experiences were conceived instead as fallible, testifying (sometimes wrongly) about the subject's familiar external environment. The thesis that experiences have representational content was firmly nailed to the seminar-room door.Early reformers took this thesis to consist in the subject's acquisition of dispositions to believe propositions about her environment, but later reformers rejected any such reduction.Then came the recent (and inevitable) counter-reformation. While conceding that the reformers had a point against sense data, the reactionary counter-reformers reaffirmed the doctrine of perceptual infallibility. Perceptual experience itself, they said, despite concerning ordinary physical objects, is not itself capable of error. 1 Counter-reformers may well claim that perceptual experience is not capable of correctness either-it is not in the business of either truth or falsity, and so 'infallible' is a tendentious label. Whether this position is plausible is briefly discussed in section III. I. The Content View (CV) introducedAccording to the reformation, "experiences" (or "perceptual experiences"), and in particular "visual experiences", have representational content. Following Brewer, let us call this the content view, or CV.2 One of the first explicit statements of CV (restricted to the visual case) is in Searle's Intentionality (p. 43):Visual experiences, like beliefs and desires, are characteristically identified and described in terms of their Intentional content. 3Searle gives an example of looking at "a yellow station wagon" (p. 37). At "a first step", he says, his visual experience has the Intentional content, or "conditions of satisfaction", "that there is a yellow station wagon there" (p. 41). 4Another well-known statement of CV, published in the same year, is in Peacocke's Sense and Content (p. 5):A visual perceptual experience enjoyed by someone sitting at a desk may represent various writing implements and items of furniture as having particular spatial relations to one another and to the experiencer, and as themselves having various qualities…The representational content of a perceptual experience has to be given by a proposition, or set of propositions, which specifies the way the experience represents the world to be. It is a bit difficult to know how one would argue for the existence of perceptual experiences to someone who denied their existence. It would be a bit like arguing for the existence of pains: if their existence is not obvious already, no philosophical argument could convince one.Is the existence of perceptual experiences obvious? The next section argues that it isn't. II. Experiences6 Michael Hinton's book Experiences is not exactly a shining example of philosophical clarity. 7 But b...