“It was one of those days when some particular quality in the light
and not merely the brilliance of the sun makes colours glow and sing…”
Patrick O’Brian, The Ionian Mission
Abstract
Arguments from perceptual variation challenge the view that colors are objective properties of objects, properties that objects have independent of how they are perceived. This paper attempts, first, to diagnose one central reason why arguments from perceptual variation seem especially challenging for objectivists about color. Second, we offer a response to this challenge, claiming that once we focus on determinate colors rather than the determinables they determine, a response to arguments from perceptual variation becomes apparent. Third, our nominal opponents are relationalist (like Cohen in The red and the real: an essay on color ontology, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009) and we will argue that the main argument for rejecting objectivism commits the relationalist to a position that is more radical than the one he would wish to endorse. Fourth, we suggest that insight into which properties could be relational may be found by looking to our best scientific theories.
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Notes
Particularly, color (like length, temporal duration, shape, etc.) will be a frame-dependent property.
See Burnyeat (1979) for an interesting history of the various ways in which things go.
The position we take here has been greatly influenced by Kalderon (2011a).
What we have in mind here about colors is akin to what J.L. Austin (1962) has in mind when he reminds us that straight sticks appear differently when in the water; otherwise, they wouldn’t appear to be in the water. They have a bent look; which is not to say that they look bent.
Mark Johnston (1992) argues that the nature of colors is revealed to us by color experiences. There is considerable debate about just what that revelation comes to and whether it is true.
We set aside further ambiguities concerning “same color.” Two objects might be the same color for all humans, but not for some creature that is sensitive to light outside our visual range. In what follows, we limit our discussion to those (ultimately determinate) colors determinate of (those more determinable) human colors.
Unique blue, then, is not an ultimately determinate shade. Two objects might match under some lighting condition, and, under that lighting condition, both appear to be blue with no green or red in it; but when we see them under different lighting, their differences become manifest. And surely, intuitively, the difference we see is a color difference. Indeed, with Joshua Gert (2006), we doubt that there is a fact of the matter about which objects are unique blue, and we agree with Gert that this should not lead us to doubt that there are colors. Our agreement is only superficial, however. Gert’s claim is that something might be blue, although it has no determinate color. Our claim is that anything that is colored has a determinate color, although there may be no fact of the matter as to which determinable color it has. Compare: the water has whatever determinate temperature it has, but there may not be a fact of the matter as to whether it is slightly warm or merely tepid.
As an analysis, this is circular. We would have analyzed two things having the same color by appeal to their matching in color. But we do not intend this as an analysis, as we’ll try to make clearer in the end. In any case, an understanding of what it is for objects to appear the same or different with respect to color is assumed by proponents of arguments from perceptual variation. If one doesn’t understand perceptual variation, then one doesn’t understand the argument to which we are responding to in this paper. And if one can’t understand that argument, then we can’t understand why anyone would be worried.
Aristotle, p. 936 (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk 1, Ch. 2, 194b, lines 13–14).
To be clear, and following Cohen (2009, 9), “it is essential that we limit the scope of relationalism to those theories that construe colors in terms of relations to subjects (possibly inter alia)” [our emphasis].
Cohen (2009, 9), for instance, notes that the point of contention between relational and non-relational accounts of color can be expressed in terms paradigm examples of non-relational properties: “the question is whether being red is more like being the sister of b (i.e., a relation that yields relational properties when relevant parameters are filled in) or being cubical (i.e., a non-relational property for which there are no parameters in need of filling).” Our point here is that if the argument from perceptual variation ought to convince us that color is a relational property, then most (if not all) paradigm examples of non-relational properties will be demoted to relational properties.
It will not do, for example, in the context of the Special Theory of relativity (to be discussed below) and from your frame of reference, to maintain that “the object is truly 1 m long because I measured it” when another observer holds that, from her reference frame, the object is of a different length. Thus, it isn’t the case that an appeal to empirical observation and measurement can break the symmetry between color properties and the type of paradigmatic non-relational and objective properties (such as length) that we have been discussing.
As an anonymous reviewer notes, Cohen (2009) has a sophisticated theory of the semantics of color terms that attempts to address this kind of objection.
Not to say that science determines metaphysics. At best, metaphysics is constrained but underdetermined by science. Moreover, what a scientific theory actually tells us about what the world is a highly controversial and complicated matter, quantum mechanics being a case in point. Still, looking to our best scientific theories is essential for the purposes of ascertaining the nature of, say, color properties.
See Hyman (2005) for an interesting discussion of the ontology of colors that is also grounded in Einstein’s special relativity theory and suggests a notion of frames of reference (viz., our system of color concepts) that is relevant for evaluating the relationality/objectivity of colors. Our own discussion, however, emphasizes the observer/frame dependence of color properties (or their appearance) due to the relativistic Doppler effect and gravitational redshift.
You are no doubt familiar with the (non-relativistic) Doppler effect as it manifests in sound, viz., an ambulance siren will sound differently depending on whether the ambulance is driving toward you (shorter sound waves, higher frequency) or away from you (longer sound waves, lower frequency). However, in the context of classical physics in which the classical Doppler effect manifests, there can be a preferred (absolute) reference frame as Newton maintained, so that it follows that the Doppler effect is epistemic in character. In the STR there is no preferred reference frame so that, on a standard interpretation of the theory, the relativistic Doppler effect takes on a metaphysical character.
The relativistic Doppler effect, which can be derived in the context of the special theory of relativity, is different from a similar effect found in the context of the general theory of relativity. Namely, light is redshifted or blueshifted in the presence of gravity depending on whether it is going up or down, respectively, in a gravitational field. The gravitational redshift of light was experimentally confirmed by Pound and Rebka (1959).
How did Einstein discover the STR and its consequences? The story is complex, but Einstein’s key clue was to notice that there is an asymmetry between the ways that classical electromagnetism describes certain states of the world that is not inherent in the observable phenomena—a difference with no difference, so to speak. For further details see, for instance, Norton (2014).
Leibniz, of course, would and did disagree.
As an anonymous reviewer notes, one may worry that our suggested strategy does not generalize well. Humor, for instance, is often taken to be paradigmatic example of a mind-dependent property. However, it seems dubious that scientific theory allows us to settle whether or not this is true, and certainly this doesn't seem like a question that special relativity theory has a bearing on. In reply, we admit that there may be some properties for which little to no ontological insight can be gained by appealing to our best and current scientific theory, let alone relativity theory. Afterall, our suggestion is that insights into, say, which properties are relational may be found by looking to our best scientific theories. However, it doesn’t follow that future science won’t have consequences for such properties. Nor does it follow that arguments from perceptual variation suddenly gain purchase.
Hardin (1992, p. 371) claims that the unique hues (and phenomenal structure more generally) are the “central reason” for rejecting any objectivist theory of color.
We take this to be Burnyeat’s (1979) position, which he attributes to Heraclitus.
We also suspect that once we have a way to identify the determinate colors, those colors that presumably realize the more determinable colors, plausible responses to arguments from perceptual variation concerning determinable colors will be more apparent. Showing that would require another paper, but for hints at how it might go see Watkins (forthcoming(b)), Shoemaker (2007), Kalderon (2007), and Allen (2017, especially chapter 3).
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Watkins, M., Shech, E. Colors, Perceptual Variation, and Science. Erkenn 89, 1157–1181 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00574-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00574-2