Abstract
Using the results of the latest neurophysiological research on colour, the article rejects outright physicalism and dispositionalism as appropriate approaches to solving the problem of colour realism. Physicalism sees colour as a real property of objects, i.e. the reflectance profile, while dispositionalism takes subjects, objects and light as necessary elements for colour production. First, it briefly outlines the historical development of the theory of colour, pointing towards dispositionalism which, in some sense, considers colour as a real entity of the world, and then introduces the problem of colour realism, focusing on objections to physicalism as well as dispositionalism. After delineating the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the visual experience of colour, and with the help of the concrete results of practical neurophysiological experiments, the article points to why the physicalist and any dispositionalist theories of colour in the light of a new physiological objection do not present credible views on the nature of colour.
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Notes
We are greatly indebted to our colleague Boris Vezjak for his useful suggestions as well as references on atomism.
Since our goal is neither a defence nor a rejection of the atomistic view on colour, this short historical overview of atomism serves only as an introduction to a discussion on the plausibility of the response-dependence theory of colour; we do not pursue it here or in what follows in more detail.
Boghossian and Velleman (1997a), for example, characterize Locke as the colour dispositionalist with respect to causal powers of primary qualities (objects’ texture brings about colour experience) and as the colour projectivist with respect to what colour experience represents (it does not represent properties that objects really have).
Descartes also seems to be a dispositionalist on the causation of colour experience and a projectivist on the real existence of colour in objects.
The main argument for such realism is the so-called argument from the constancy of colour, which says that colour stays the same regardless of environmental changes (all corrections influenced by changed circumstances take place in the brain).
For more versions of physicalism, see Boghossian and Velleman (1991/1997b).
Johnston (1992/1997) illustrates the fallibility of viewing colour as a primary quality by the following question: is it really so that we have to wait for results of scientific inquires in order to know that canary yellow is not a shade of blue, i.e. that canary yellow is not as similar to blue as they are among themselves?
A classic version of dispositionalism is sometimes labelled intentionalism, see, for example, Boghossian and Velleman (1989/1997a).
Johnston (1992/1997) assumes that Locke understood ‘disposition’ in exactly the same way.
Another example allegedly showing that colours are not dispositions are after-images, i.e. images remaining in the mind after their object has gone, since something that is in my head cannot be a disposition, i.e. it cannot have the power to produce something in me, e.g. fear or joy (Boghossian and Velleman 1989/1997a, p. 86). However, this is far from being clear because an erotic fantasy, for example, which is also a residue or a form in my head, has the power to stimulate passion in me and is therefore a disposition. Why should not the same also be true for after-images? (We owe this point to our colleague Nenad Miščević.)
By stipulating colour-presenting property being a property of our visual field and not of our sensation, Peacock would rather qualify for projectivism than dispositionalism.
Miščević’s dispositionalism, thus, differs from Jackson and Pettit’s dispositionalism (2002) which says that colour is response-dependent epistemologically but objective metaphysically and is called “response-dependence without tears”.
The field (covered in this case by cones) from which a sensory neuron (in this case a ganglion cell) receives sensory input (in this case from cones).
All yellow-green point sources in Fig. 1a together could represent a leaf of a tree, for instance.
E.g. a discrete nature of the neural circuitry for colour vision at later stages of processing following the absorption of photons by photoreceptors
Lasting less than 4 ms
From a physiological point of view and less relevant to the foregoing discussion, the results of this study also show that excitation of different cones of the same type (e.g. two different red cones) can lead to different colour sensations. Specifically, the excitation of only three different types of cones produced six to eight different colour sensations, meaning that at least one of the three types of cones had to produce more than one different colour sensation (if only one cone type produced more than one different colour sensations, it would have to produce four to six exactly).
300 ms long
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Stožer, A., Bregant, J. Physicalist and Dispositionalist Views on Colour: a Physiological Objection. Acta Anal 32, 73–93 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0296-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-016-0296-x