ABSTRACT
Philosophical discussions about the ontology of colour typically proceed by attempting to determine whether colours can be identified with some set of perceiver-independent physical properties. Thus philosophers have argued that the colours of objects can be identified with the wavelengths of light that objects reflect (Armstrong 1968a), or with the surface spectral reflectances of objects (Hilbert 1987). This kind of view about colour is known as objectivism. The position I am calling computational objectivism results when objectivism is defended by appealing to the computational level of explanation for vision. Most philosophers since Newton’s time have found objectivism to be unsatisfactory, and so have argued for some version of subjectivism. The traditional version was explored in Chapter 1; it is the view that things are coloured only in so far as they have the disposition to cause sensations of colour in a perceiver.1 There is another version of subjectivism, however. According to this view, nothing is strictly speaking coloured at all, not even dispositionally. Rather, colours are entirely ‘in the head’; they are nothing but sensations of a certain type. Colours are ‘projected’ on to the world, but there is no further sense in which the world is coloured (see the quotations from Gouras and Zeki at the end of the last chapter). In philosophical terms, this extreme version of subjectivism can
be termed eliminativism about colour as a property (whether dispositional or intrinsic) of objects (Hardin 1988:112; Landesman 1989). Combining this view with a reductionist, neurological treatment of colour experience yields the view I am calling neurophysiological subjectivism.2 The main task of this chapter is to evaluate computational objectivism and neurophysiological subjectivism about colour. Because these positions draw expressly on types of explanation in visual science, I shall begin with some methodological considerations about explanation and descriptive vocabularies for colour.
