Abstract
This paper outlines and defends a novel position in the color realism debate, namely structural realism. This position is novel in that it dissociates the veridicality of color attributions from the claim that physical objects are themselves colored. Thus, it is realist about color in both the semantic and epistemic senses, but not the ontic sense. The generality of this position is demonstrated by applying it to other “secondary qualities,” including heat, musical pitch, and odor. The basic argument proceeds by analogy with the theory of measurement. I argue that perceptual experiences are analogous to numerical structures in that they are suitable for measurement, but only report measured values after they have been linked to states of a measurement device via calibration. Since the calibration of our sensory apparatus varies with context, it is inappropriate to identify specific experiences with specific properties in the world. Rather, it is structural relations between possible experiences which represent relations between possible external properties, and it is at the level of these structural relationships that veridicality is appropriately assessed.
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Notes
I use the term “secondary quality” throughout to refer merely to a well-known category of epistemologically worrisome properties. I do not intend to thereby endorse any substantive theory of the primary/secondary quality distinction.
This view should not be confused with the view that secondary qualities are “relational” in the sense that they are defined in terms of the relation between the organism and the environment.
Although the analogy between perception and measurement has been much discussed, including the comparison between thermometry and color vision (e.g. Tye 2006), these discussions differ radically from that presented here. In particular, even when calibration has been discussed (e.g. Matthen 2005, 260ff), its significance for revealing the context relativity of measurement values is not recognized (Sect. 4.3.1).
Recently, the standard view has come under fire from philosophers who argue that a full theory of measurement must also take into account the intentions of the scientist developing the measurement procedure (van Fraassen 2008) or more details of the empirical procedure itself than just the axiomatic characterization of its presuppositions (Frigerio et al. 2010). I set these subtleties aside here, but note in passing that the development of the analogous measurement procedure in perceptual systems took place on an evolutionary time scale, and the appropriate analog to scientist’s intentions on the picture offered here would thereby be something like selective evolutionary pressures.
It is important not to confuse the presuppositions of our current theoretical analysis of temperature with the presuppositions of naïve thermometry as described in this section. While the former imply a natural zero point, the latter do not. This issue is discussed further in the following section, which contrasts naïve thermometry with other types of measurement, including thermometric measurement in degrees Kelvin.
Obviously, this is a caricature of the history, but the basic point is correct. Thermometry begins around 1600 and the differences in calibration procedures across researchers meant (a) that only claims of relative temperature could be communicated, and (b) that the establishment of fixed point standards for calibration became the primary goal of early thermometry (Chang 2004, Ch. 1).
Arguably, the only direct form of scientific measurement is length measurement (George Smith, personal communication); we measure the height (length) of the column of mercury directly, but only in an indirect way measure some value of the body against which we hold the thermometer. For a detailed discussion of measurement by proxy using the example of Thomson’s measurement of the charge of the electron, see Smith 2001.
Translated in Müller and Weiss (2005, 224).
For a survey of the many proposed color solids and a discussion of their respective virtues, see Kuehni and Schwarz 2008. For a discussion of the history of experimental methods for investigating the color solid and an assessment of the evidence for similarities in color experience across observers, see Isaac 2013.
Note that for any pair of surface metamers, there will be some illuminant under which they appear different. To see this, note that in order to be physically different, they must differ with respect to the reflectance of at least one wavelength of light. Now consider the surfaces as illuminated by monochromatic light at precisely this wavelength. The one which reflects more will appear lighter. In general, even relatively minor changes in illuminant are enough to distinguish formerly metameric surface pairs.
In fact, the accusation that realists (in particular, physicalists) are guilty of a “Rylean category mistake” has been made by MacLeod (2003). Specifically, he argues that talk of estimation and recovery (see Sect. 4.2) encourages a category mistake since “the ‘estimated’ quantity may have no simple and well-defined physical referent” (433). He is commenting here on Mausfeld (2003), who criticizes not only physicalism, but also analogies with measurement in general. Mausfeld’s critique, however, applies only to measurement analogies which fail to make the representational/artifactual distinction, and so does not undermine structural realism.
See p. xiv: “We can all agree that, at least typically, a red-feeling experience is red-representing, and conversely.” I believe that, on a broader historical analysis, the endorsement of this claim no longer appears so universal, and there are in fact many antecedents to the structural realist position, see for instance Köhler: “I cannot identify the final products, the things and events of my experience, with the physical objects from which the influences come. If a wound is not the gun which emitted the projectile, then the things which I have before me, which I see and feel, cannot be identical with the corresponding physical objects” (1947, 22). Most influential on my own thinking here has been Hermann von Helmholtz. In the interests of brevity, however, I shall set aside further historical discussion for a future venue.
Modulo some additional nuances and qualifications which are irrelevant for the present discussion. The following section draws heavily on Wright (2010), Sect. 5. Although I find Wright’s criticism of physicalist accounts very compelling, his own view (as he acknowledges) is not yet fully worked out, so I refrain from discussing that here (if anything, however, it falls closest to the ecological accounts discussed in Sect. 4.3).
This last sentence is clearly intended as a dig at the “unknowable” (21) and physical, but “uninteresting from the point of view of physics” (11) color categories of Byrne and Hilbert (2003a).
Alternatively, they may be antecedently committed to collapsing semantic and epistemic questions about realism into metaphysical ones via their endorsement of the single property reading of CR. If this is the case, then the arguments above apply, and the correct interpretation of vision science is simply not at issue.
i.e. relations between color experiences tell us something about relations between surface properties—again, not to be confused with the view that color is a relational property, also endorsed by Hatfield, c.f. footnote 2.
For a recent summary of data on the Weber fraction for pitch see Moore (2008), 196–204.
The contrast here is with purely rhythmic forms of music. Although cultures differ in the number of notes and the size of intervals they identify within an octave, they always assign some musical significance to the octave interval itself. (I am omitting here discussion of some subtle questions about how precisely human octave assessments match physical octaves.)
Of course, I elide many details here. To mention just one example, similarity judgments between stimuli which are not “pure” sine waves, but more complex waves exhibiting harmonics, have a physical basis in the agreement of the harmonics across different base frequencies. This consideration provides a physical basis for the assessment of fifths as “similar”.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is dedicated to Patrick Suppes and John Perry, the former for the carrot, the latter for the stick. It has benefitted greatly from the helpful comments of Johanna Wolff, Gary Hatfield, and two anonymous reviewers. This research was supported by NSF Grant No. 1028130.
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Isaac, A.M.C. Structural Realism for Secondary Qualities. Erkenn 79, 481–510 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9519-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9519-3