ABSTRACT
For Wilfrid Sellars, there are two ways to give an account of the ontological status of color: on the order of being ( ordo essendi ) and on the order of knowing ( ordo cognoscendi ). Moreover, there is an important sense in which the former account is justified and supported by conclusions arrived at in investigation of the latter. 1 Sellars concludes his intricate mythological story of our evolving knowledge of color with the claim that, in the final analysis, colors exist only at the level of sensations: we falsely project them from the mind as properties of physical objects, but physical objects possess no such properties. When we properly understand the circumstances of this projection, we may come to appreciate it as false, and though Sellars is not so clear about this, it seems that we could potentially refrain from such unwarranted projections. However, after sketching Sellars’ story about color on the order of knowing, I will argue that his conclusion that we can knowingly and meaningfully experience qualities such as color (whether or not we attribute them to physical objects) despite believing that physical objects actually possess no such properties, is incoherent.
