The reflectances represented will depend on the details of the visual system in question: human color and bee color vision, for instance, presumably represent quite different reflectance-types. Since a single surface falls under many different reflectance-types (in fact, infinitely many), there need not be any conflict between color appearances across species. Goldfish and human beings see objects as having different colors, but reflectance physicalism gives no reason to suppose that if one species is right then the other must be wrong. — Alex Byrne & David Hilbert
I want, if you do not mind, share here an important study of John Locke related to colour and our perception.Color is the subject of a vast and impressive body of empirical research and theory
We learn that there are three "primary colors," : magenta, yellow, and cyan, and that when we mix these colors, we get intermediate colors, like green, orange, and purple. Mixing them all gets something like black, but then adding black or white separately can produce a large variety of different shades and tones of color. This is what Isaac Newton himself did when he first understood the spectrum of light
If we match up the color wheel with the electromagic spectrum of light, it passes through all the colours, but not through purple. Violet may look a bit like purple, but it has nothing to do with red. What is going on? — John Locke.
Color is a psychological property of our visual experiences when we look at objects and lights, not a physical property of those objects or lights. (1999b, p. 95)
And:
There may be light of different wavelengths independent of an observer, but there is no color independent of an observer, because color is a psychological phenomenon that arises only within an observer. (1999b, p. 97)[3]
. If we're directly acquainted with productance surfaces, why does it take modern science to realize that? We're aware that objects looked colored. — Marchesk
If we block a child in a room all of his childhood teaching him the green colour while is actually yellow. Will he name all of his life “green” when he would actually see yellow? In this topic John Locke answered this is a perfect empirical experiment so he put the following sentence:
What you are trying to say is that complex terms like colours are not innate because we can teach children to misunderstand mixing them. I guess this is the same example of fearness. You can feel the fear because previously someone taught you what is darkness, witches, demons, etc... — John Locke
Physicalism is not a particularly popular theory of color. Sometimes philosophers malign it as the product of a "scientistic" ideology that unthinkingly takes science as the touchstone of what is real. Some color scientists would complain that physicalism does not respect science enough. Proper attention to the facts of color vision, they would say, shows that colors are really "in the brain."
But that source would be a combination of number, shape, mass, chemical composition or whatever that creates types of emission, transmission and reflectance. The colors themselves would remain secondary qualities. — Marchesk
It seems to me that Byrne and Hilbert are unwittingly defending the popular idea that colors are in the brain, by acknowledging them to be perceptual representations of some physical property in the world (productance or reflectance). — Marchesk
There is a direct chain of causal efficacy involved in the color perception of any species that can perceive that wavelength. — prothero
So the warmth or the sun and the redness of the sky are as much properties in the world as our descriptions of wavelength and molecular motion. — prothero
This is what Whitehead refers to as "the artificial bifurcation of nature". The artificial division of the "world or reality" into so called primary qualities and secondary qualities.Yes, but we're not aware of that chain. We're aware of things being colored. That chain is something science carefully teased out using properties of wavelength, frequency, molecular surfaces, cones, electrical impulses and neuronal activity. Color only comes into play as the resulting experience of all that for visual perceivers. — Marchesk
And this is the so called "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness" where mathematical formulas and conceptual abstractions like wavelength and taken to more real than our experiences in and of the world.Sure, when we take into account perceivers being part of the world. The problem is that warmth and redness are not part of the scientific explanations of the world, except as labels for temperature ranges humans typically find warm, or EM wavelengths humans can detect. If we say the world is physical, but physical does not include warmth or redness, then that is a conceptual problem for physicalism. — Marchesk
A further comment on this is what you mean is we are not "consciously aware" of the underlying chain of causal efficacy. The body (the organism) is aware and we intuitively know contrary to Hume and other skeptics that we are perceiving things in the external world. Without causual efficacy there is no explanation for "experience" whatsoever, it is implied in the very process of perception. Most awareness and experience of the world (by a variety of creatures and systems) is not conscious experience.Yes, but we're not aware of that chain. We're aware of things being colored. That chain is something science carefully teased out using properties of wavelength, frequency, molecular surfaces, cones, electrical impulses and neuronal activity. Color only comes into play as the resulting experience of all that for visual perceivers. — Marchesk
Whitehead spoke of the “bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality” (1920 [1986: 30]) to denote the strategy—originating with Galileo, Descartes, Boyle and Locke—of bifurcating nature into the essential reality of primary qualities and the non-essential reality of “psychic additions” or secondary qualities, ultimately to be explained away in terms of primary qualities. — prothero
A further comment on this is what you mean is we are not "consciously aware" of the underlying chain of causal efficacy. The body (the organism) is aware and we intuitively know contrary to Hume and other skeptics that we are perceiving things in the external world. — prothero
If bees and birds see the world colored in a different way than we do, then what makes color objective? — Marchesk
This starts into the area of so called hard core intuitions. The correctness of the chain causal efficacy and the interaction with a "real" external world is not altered by these minor nuances of the process. The ancients were right in their intuition just not in their details.Yes, but take vision for example. The ancient view of vision was we are looking out at the world through our eyes. And that's how it seems to be when we're not taking the science of vision into account. But we know that vision goes the other why. Light comes into the eyes and starts the perceptual process. It's also 2D and upside down. — Marchesk
↪prothero I agree it is, but that means the real world is more than physics. In the case of color realism, it means that colors are not physical, even if the thing they represent in the world is. — Marchesk
What is significant about this part of the spectrum, however, is that the particular spectrum of radiation emitted by the Sun peaks right in the yellow wavelengths of visible light. Of all the colors of light, yellow seems to us to be the closest in bightness and transparency to white light itself. This is not a coincidence. The Sun is a yellow star. — James Clerk Maxwell
The article linked below defends a view of colors being representative of real physical properties in the world. Most of the article focuses on types of reflectance. Section 3.1.2 broadens the scope to include dispositions to emit, transmit or reflect a proportion of light. So the colors we see represent surfaces emitting, transmitting or reflecting light. This includes filters. — Marchesk
to introduce an interdisciplinary audience to some distinctively philosophical tools that are useful in tackling the problem of color realism and, second, to clarify the various positions and central arguments in the debate.
When someone looks at a tomato in good light, she undergoes a visual experience. This experience is an event, like an explosion or a thunderstorm: it begins at one time and ends at a later time. The object of the experience is the tomato, which is not an event (tomatoes don't occur).
Meaning the experience is an event taking place in the perceiver, while the tomato is an object with potentially some property related to the perceiver seeing red. — Marchesk
the red we see, — Marchesk
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