Colors as explainers?

Abstract

Byrne & Hilbert (B&H) argue that colors are reflectance properties of objects. They also claim that a necessary condition for something's being a color is that it causally explain – or be causally implicated in the explanation of – our perceptions of color. I argue that these two positions are in conflict.

Perception, Color, and Realism

“…However, those reflectance-types seem ill-suited to playing a causal-explanatory role when it comes to the kinds of color experiences we have. Given how they are characterized, unless one has an antecedent commitment to PE, there is no reason to understand a given reflectance-type as a physical property to be type-identified with a given perceived color (with the reflectance-type being reconstructed in color experience), rather than as an equivalence class that is unified solely by the shared potential effects on our visual system (rather than shared nature) of certain heterogeneous token spectral reflectance profiles; see Botterell (2003) and van Gulick (2003). However, not only is PE susceptible to the doubts set out herein, but, as previously noted, the truth of PE depends on the truth of color physicalism.…”