Abstract
In this paper, it is argued that those who claim that the dispositionalist theory of color has even a prima facie advantage over color physicalism in accommodating the similarity relations that seem to hold among the colors are mistaken. The appearance that dispositionalists can handle the relevant similarity claims (e.g. that red is more similar to orange than it is to green) stems from the unexamined assumption that the similarity of two dispositions is simply a matter of the similarity of the manifestations of those dispositions. A more careful treatment of the ways in which two dispositions can be similar to, or different from, one another must consider both the bases and the manifestation conditions of those dispositions in addition to their manifestations. After examining cases of dispositions from outside the domain of colors, it is argued that attention to conditions of manifestation provides a particularly strong reason for rejecting the assumption that similarity of manifestations entails similarity of dispositions. Without this assumption, dispositionalists about color are shown to be in the same position as non-dispositionalists regarding similarity relations among the colors. This way of responding to color dispositionalism is compared with two other responses [offered by Byrne (Philos Phenomenol Res 66(3):641–665, 2003) and McLaughlin (Consciousness: new philosophical perspectives, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003)], and shown to be a candidate to strengthen, rather than replace, either one.
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Notes
Johnston does not endorse a sharp analytic/synthetic divide with all five of these claims on the analytic side. “Speaking ever so inclusively,” for colors to exist each of those claims must be true of them, but Johnston does not claim that speaking ever so inclusively is necessarily preferable to speaking slightly less inclusively. For present purposes, all that matters is that there is some intuitive force behind the unity claim.
Traditionally, dispositionalist treatments of color relied on the notions of normal observers and standard viewing conditions (for example, McGinn (1983) and Locke (1979)). Hardin (1988) shows quite persuasively why no workable notion of a normal observer or standard viewing conditions is likely to be developed.
This passage, attributed to Delacroix by Signac (1921, p. 46) is likely the root of several other similar (often more poetic) attributions, like the passage involving the “radiant flesh of Venus” that appears in Hardin (1988). Even this, however, is quite possibly borrowed from an earlier quote from a friend of Delacroix. In 1876, the critic Charles Blanc wrote that a friend of Delacroix once said, “Vous seriez bien surpris si vous saviez quelles sont les couleurs qui ont produit ces chairs roses dont l’effet vous ravit. Ce sont des tons qui, vus séparément, vous auraient paru aussi ternes, Dieu me pardonne, que la boue des rues….” (Blanc 1876, p. 568) Thanks to Susan Wager for helping me track down the original French sources.
Nothing significant in the following discussion requires that we adhere to only a subject-relative unity thesis.
This is intended to be a case of a behaviorally detectable red/green color inversion, not of the more controversial functionally identical qualia inversion. Invert says that grass is red and ripe tomatoes are green.
Nothing in the arguments that follow actually requires this restriction. Those who remain unpersuaded can require unity hold across (types of) subjects even when colors are relativized to (types of) subjects.
The importance stems from simultaneous contrast effects. The colors of other objects in the visual field effect the color an object looks to have.
As McLaughlin (2003) points out, a physicalist about color experiences may still have an analogous problem here. If my red-experience and orange-experience are simply microphysical states of my brain, then the essential and intrinsic similarity between them would be a microphysical similarity, something that is not obviously available to me in introspection alone.
Compare Watkins (2005) “Supposedly dispositionalism can accommodate the intuition that we can tell, by experience, that scarlet objects are more similar in color to crimson objects than they are to green objects. After all, if we experience objects as similar, then we can tell that they are disposed to appear similar.”
While I agree with Byrne that it is correct to say that a tomato and a peach are similar in respect of color, I am not so sure that it is wrong to say that the colors themselves are similar. In other cases of similarities between objects, like my two pens being similar in length, it does also seem correct to say that their lengths are similar. At least some accounts of the metaphysics of properties can accommodate this. On Lewis’s (1983) account according to which properties are sets of possibilia, the similarity of lengths would be a matter of the individual members of the set that is the longer length being divisible into parts such that some of those parts are members of the set that is the shorter length. Degree of similarity between lengths would then correspond to the proportion of each longer length object that is in the shorter length set—the more of each object that is in the set, the more similar the lengths. Similarly, according to Armstrong’s (1978) account, similarity between universals is a matter of partial overlap. It is worth noting, however, that there may well be a problem extending Armstrong’s general treatment to the case of colors.
Jackson (1998, p. 111) tries to defend physicalism against the worry arising from unity by holding that it is part of the representational content of visual experience that, e.g. red is more similar to orange than it is to green in some respect. See Byrne (2003, p. 653ff) for a discussion of some problems with Jackson’s defense.
See McKitrick (2003) for a discussion of bare dispositions. Even if there are no categorical properties (it is dispositions all the way down) and so no dispositions have categorical bases, still there is no good reason to think that the color dispositions are bare. Among plausible candidates to be the bases of (surface) color dispositions are complex light dispositions of surfaces of objects (see, for example, Byrne and Hilbert 1997; Hilbert 1987; Tye 2000).
The basis of sucrose’s water solubility also disposes it to dissolve in alcohol, while neither NaCl nor KCl is significantly alcohol-soluble.
I do not intend to endorse an account of properties that individuates properties by their causal powers (see, for example, Shoemaker (1997)). My point is merely that the current discussion of dispositions would not be a sufficient reason to require such an account.
An example of why the subject in which the manifestation occurs must be included is the difference between the disposition a glass has to shatter (itself) when struck with a hard mallet, and the disposition a gong tuned to the glass’s resonant frequency might have to shatter (a glass) when struck with a hard mallet.
This should not be read as a commitment to universals. On any plausible account of the metaphysics of properties, there will be some way of preserving claims of perfect resemblance between two property instances.
It is worth noting that the reason that proponents of the dispositional theory have thought their view handled the unity condition is that they focused on the similarity of the manifestations of dispositions. But the manifestations of dispositions to look colored are color qualia, not colors themselves. Perhaps this is a further indication McLaughlin’s approach to the problem is correct—that the real intuition behind unity does not concern the colors, but rather our experiences of them.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to my former colleagues at the University of Vermont and several anonymous referees for comments on previous drafts; and to Mark Moyer for helpful discussions on the metaphysics of dispositions.
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Wager, A. Colors, Dispositions, and Similarity. Erkenn 81, 335–347 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9742-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9742-1