ABSTRACT
Synaesthesia is a condition in which an experience of one thing in one sensory or cognitive stream causes a non-veridical experience (or image or thought) of another thing in a different sensory or cognitive stream. ‘Colour synaesthesia’ refers to forms of the condition in which colour experiences trigger or are triggered by experiences, images, or thoughts in aberrant sensory or cognitive streams. It is unlikely that there is a single mechanism underlying synaesthesia. The two dominant mechanisms proposed for the condition suggest that synaesthesia sometimes takes the form of perceptual experience and in other cases is more like imagination, memory, or thought. Synaesthesia has potential consequences for a number of different views in philosophy of mind, including representationalism, functionalism, and theories of colour.
