ABSTRACT
Many favour representationalism about colour experience. To a first approximation, this view holds that experiencing is like believing. In particular, like believing, experiencing is a matter of representing the world to be a certain way. Galileo, for instance, famously said that “tastes, odours, colours, and so on reside in consciousness”, not the external world. In general, our colour experiences typically represent objects as they really are. This chapter looks at the different versions of representationalism. It explains in more detail the basic representationalist approach they share. Representationalism about colour experience has many virtues. It accommodates the undeniable fact that, necessarily, in having standard visual experiences, it seems that sensible colours are co-instantiated with certain shapes and location properties. It also explains how both veridical and non-veridical experience can provide a subject with the capacity to think about and learn truths about sensible colours and shapes, even when they aren’t instantiated by physical objects before the subject.
