ABSTRACT
Since the time of Newton and Locke, the received view among philosophers has been that colours are not found among the fundamental properties of things. Things as they are in themselves do not have colours; they have colours only by virtue of how they appear to us. Thus being coloured consists simply in being the kind of thing that looks or would look coloured to us in normal perceptual circumstances. In other words, things do not look coloured because they really are coloured; they are coloured only because they look to be so. This view can be stated with a good deal more philosophical precision. According to Locke (1690/1975) and those who have developed his analysis (for example, Jackson 1968), colour consists in a power or disposition of something to produce sensory experiences of colour in a perceiver. The fundamental or so-called primary qualities of things, on the other hand, do not consist merely in dispositions to produce sensory experiences. According to this view, colour
corresponds to a type of property that is both dispositional and subjective: being coloured consists solely in having the disposition to look coloured. Colour is therefore a relational property in two distinct ways. First and most generally, since dispositional properties typically involve relations between at least two things (for example, salt has the dispositional property of being soluble in water), colour is a relational property simply because it is dispositional. Second and more specifically, colour is a relational property because it can be specified only in relation to the visual experiences of a perceiver. Since the dispositional property in which colour consists is that of having the power to look coloured, and since something can look a certain way only in relation to the visual experiences of a perceiver, it follows that colour must be specified in relation to the colour experiences of a perceiver.
