Abstract
“Can’,t we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?” That, of course, means: Can’,t we imagine people having colour concepts other than ours? And that in turn means: Can’,t we imagine people who do not have our colour concepts but who have concepts which are related to ours in such a way that we would also call them “colour concepts”?
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Notes
Much of this chapter is taken from my ‘Do Animals See Colors? An Anthropocentrist’,s Guide to Animals, the Color Blind, and Far Away Places’, (1999). I thank Philosophical Studies for permission to use that work here.
C.L. Hardin (1988: 134-54) and Evan Thompson, Adrian Palacios, and Francisco Varela (1992) warn against employing human color categories in describing the color experiences of many animals, especially animals that have radically different perceptual systems. The first thesis of this chapter, however, goes considerably further than either Hardin or Thompson, et. al. The second thesis goes further still.
By ‘causal history’, I mean to include the causal chain leading from the distal objects perceived to and including the physiological processes of the organisms.
The argument here concerns the representational content of color experience. I have nothing to say here about the nonrepresentational features of color experience (a.k.a. qualia), assuming there are such features, nor do I have anything to say about qualitative beliefs, i.e., beliefs about such nonrepresentational features.
See Dennett (1991: 375-83) for a discussion of the evolutionary development of both color perception and colors, as well as for some of the philosophical implications of these phenomena for the philosophy of consciousness. Also see Menzel and Backhaus (1991).
I thank Duncan Macintosh and Richmond Campbell for pushing me on this point.
Something like this intuition motivates Averill’,s (1992) and Smart’,s (1963: 75-84) treatments of ideal color observers. For detailed criticism see Chapter 6, §1.3.
Diana Raffman (1994) presents a compelling argument that category-discrimination and difference-discrimination are psychologically separate, and largely independent, processes. The discussion above owes much to that work.
Cf. Hardin (1988), Charles Landesman (1989), Paul Boghossian and David Velleman (1989 and 1991), and Barry Maund (1995).
This is especially true since Averill appeals to common usage to criticize competing accounts of colors (1985: 294).
We learned in Chapter 4 that (C) is not true if the conditional is replaced with a biconditional. Since some objects that appear blue, for instance, under most normal conditions will not appear blue under all normal conditions, replacing the conditional in (C) with a biconditional would have (C) entail that some objects belong to no color category. For directions out of this maze, see Chapter 4.
Cf. Armstrong (1978) and Hardin (1988).
I should say that the results are often poorly described, though not always. Some investigators, including some of those cited earlier in this chapter, are (at least at times) very careful in their descriptions of animal “color” perception. More often than not, however, descriptions of an animal’,s perceptual abilities appeal to human color categories. And even when investigators are careful, their descriptions often mislead since talk of color experiences immediately brings to mind experiences of red, blue, and so forth.
Additional evidence that animals see some of the colors that we see is that, on the basis of psychophysical studies, we can construct sensory quality spaces for some animals comparable to ours on the basis of their behavior. For a discussion of these studies and their findings, see Thompson (1995a,b) and Thompson, et. al. (1995). Once again, however, phenomenological similarity does not entail similarity in perceptual content. See §6.
I thank Averill for this objection, offered in conversation.
The empirical evidence concerning colorblindness, and especially the evidence concerning rare cases like unilateral dichromats, does not conclusively support any position about what dichromats see. For discussion of colorblindness, see Robert Boynton (1979: 335-89) and Yun Hsia and C.H. Graham (1997).
I take it that there’,s a clear connection between the position defended above and our discussion of Boghossian and Velleman’,s (1991) argument in Chapter 2 (§1.3). Boghossian and Velleman, recall, claim that attempts to identify colors with physical properties of objects (i.e., identity theories) fail because they do not respect the epistemology of color experience. According to Boghossian and Velleman, identity theories entail “that your experience of something’,s looking red might have been exactly as it is, in all respects internal to you, while failing to represent anything as red. And this consequence has the corollary that there are circumstances under which you couldn’,t tell, by mere reflection on the experience of something’,s looking red, whether it is being represented as having the property red” (88). The intuition they support is that color experiences wear their representational contents on their sleeves: if two experiences are phenomenologically indiscernible, then if one experience represents redness so does the other. If I am correct, however, color experiences do not wear their representational contents on their sleeves. Thus, the principle assumption of Boghossian and Velleman’,s argument is false.
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Wittgenstein, L. (2002). Animals, The Color Blind, and Far Away Places 1,. In: Rediscovering Colors. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0562-3_7
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