ABSTRACT
Colour relationalism is the view that colours are constituted in terms of relations to perceiving subjects and perceptual circumstances. The leading motivation for colour relationalism, in both its historical and contemporary forms, is a non-deductive argument form concerning perceptual variation. Though this argument form generalizes over a very wide set of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and interspecies phenomena, it is best appreciated, at least initially, in its application to single cases. In short, then, the facts about perceptual variation motivate colour relationalism via a pair of non-deductive inferences–the first from the empirical data to ecumenicism, and the second from ecumenicism to relationalism. By contrast, given colour relationalism, there is a reason for expecting that peripherally perceived colours will behave quite differently from ordinary visual-system-independent properties. Colour relationalism merits philosophical interest not only because of its continuity with historically important positions, but because it attempts to respect and to reconcile the deliverances of two of our most important pictures of the world.
