ABSTRACT
During the middle part of the twentieth century, in the 1950s and 1960s, though to a lesser extent also earlier, there was a significant debate in philosophy about a problem that came to be known as the problem of the ‘incompatibility of colours’. Whether one thinks there really is something called ‘the logic of colour concepts’ or ‘the logic of colour’ will depend on what one makes of the earlier tendency in philosophy according to which philosophy is analysis. Why was it to be called ‘logic’ or ‘the logic of colour concepts’? The answer is simply it that does the job that should have been performed, after a suitable analysis, by a contradiction, had there been a contradictory relationship between ‘red’ and ‘green’. The idea of a logic of colour concepts, and the use of the phrase ‘the logic of colour concepts’, came into philosophy.
