ABSTRACT
Primitivist Objectivism is the view that colours are irreducible, mind-independent, sui generis properties of objects, and that any normal eight-year-old in the developed world knows which of the objects they see have which ones. Proponents of Primitivism take it to be distinctive of their view that it supports virtually all of the simplest and most commonsensical beliefs about colour. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert have argued that the Primitivist cannot avoid a commitment to Revelation also points out, their argument relies on the false assumption that the Primitivist holds that all essential claims about the colours can be framed in “purely chromatic sentences”. Among theories of colour, Primitivism is uniquely consistent with all the simplest and most basic commonsense beliefs about colour. Reductive views of colour might seem more attractive than Primitivism to some philosophers because they endorse—whether explicitly or not—a set of assumptions about what real properties must be like, and about how reference must work.
