Abstract
What is colour vision for? In the popular imagination colour vision is for “seeing the colours” — adding hue to the achromatic world of shape, depth and motion. On this view colour vision plays little more than an ornamental role, lending glamour to an otherwise monochrome world. This idea has guided much theorising about colour within vision science and philosophy. However, we argue that a broader approach is needed. Recent research in the psychology of colour demonstrates that colour vision is integral to a variety of visual processes, helping us to perform many types of visual tasks. We discuss some of this research and consider its implications for philosophical theories of colour.
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Notes
Though Mausfeld (2010) describes how the model—“the entire conceptual framework underlying the idea of a homogeneous and autonomous attribute of ‘colour per se’”—faced substantial criticism from the Gestalt school early in the twentieth century.
There are different versions for colour realism. Physicalism is the view that colours can be identified with certain physical properties, such as spectral surface reflectance (e.g. Byrne and Hilbert 2003). Primitivism is the view that colours are sui generis, non-physical properties of objects (e.g. Watkins 2002, Allen 2015).
It is doubtful that anyone has explicitly proposed this hypothesis. However, as one of us argues elsewhere (Chirimuuta 2015, chap. 4) adherence to the colouring book model in science, and colour realism in philosophy, created a tendency to ignore the alternative functions.
In fact, trichromats are subject to a failure of lightness constancy in very dim light, known as the Purkinje effect. Because rod photoreceptors, used for night vision, are relatively more sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light than the average cone response, the apparent brightness of objects changes as cone-mediated day vision is substituted by rod-based scotopic vision. For example, Purkinje observed that red petals which in daylight are brightest, at early dawn appear dimmer than blue petals or surrounding leaves. (Wade and Brožek 2001). Note that rod vision is effectively monochromatic.
As Hume (Hume 1975/1777, App. I, p.294) wrote in a different context, we have a “productive faculty”, which by, “gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation”.
This is the notion of “ecologically relevant misperception” (Chirimuuta 2015, chap. 7).
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Acknowledgments
M. Chirimuuta would like to thank members of the 2012 and 2014 Perception seminars at the University of Pittsburgh for many helpful comments on this material. Supported by Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) grant #MOP 12339 given to F. A. A. Kingdom.
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Chirimuuta, M., Kingdom, F.A.A. The Uses of Colour Vision: Ornamental, Practical, and Theoretical. Minds & Machines 25, 213–229 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9364-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-015-9364-z