ABSTRACT
This chapter describes critically some of the most popular views about the nature of color. Colors are extremely pervasive and salient features of the world. Color eliminativists believe that, strictly speaking, nothing in the actual world is colored: ripe lemons are not yellow and traffic stoplights are not red. Philosophers have offered several reasons for endorsing color eliminativism. Dispositionalism is a family of views of color ontology according to which colors are dispositions to have certain effects on the visual systems of certain perceivers in certain conditions. Color physicalism is best understood as a kind of identity theory of color analogous to identity theories familiar from philosophy of mind; it says that colors are identical to particular kinds. Questions about the ontology of color matter because colors matter. The most pressing objection against color eliminativism is that it convicts ordinary perception of an extremely widespread error, and so is obviously a deeply revisionary view.
