Cohen - The red and the real: an essay on color ontology

THE RED AND THE REAL

An Essay on Color Ontology

JONATHAN COHEN

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Jonathan Cohen 2009

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For my son, Aaron Gabriel Cohen.

It was not always thus. Colour, if Tradition speaks the truth, once for the space of half a dozen centuries or more, threw a transient splendour over the lives of our ancestors in the remotest ages. Some private individual a Pentagon whose name is variously reported having causally discovered the constituents of the simpler colours and a rudimentary method of painting, is said to have begun decorating first his house, then his slaves, then his Father, his Sons, and Grandsons, lastly himself. The convenience as well as the beauty of the results commended themselves to all. Wherever Chromastites, for by that name the most trustworthy authorities concur in calling him, turned his variegated frame, there he at once excited attention and attracted respect. No one now needed to feel him; no one mistook his front for his back; all his movements were readily ascertained by his neighbours without the slightest strain on their powers of calculation; no one jostled him, or failed to make way for him; his voice was saved the labour of that exhausting utterance by which we colourless Squares and Pentagons are forced to proclaim our individuality when we move amid a crowd of ignorant Isoceles.

(Abbott, 1884, 3940).

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Why Color Matters

A brief glance at recent philosophical journals, book catalogs, conference schedules, or graduate seminar offerings reveals that color has recently returned to its place at the center of philosophical inquiry after many years of receiving relatively scant attention from philosophers. Color had, of course, been of central importance at many periods in the history of philosophy (notably during the modern period), but it is fair to say that color had receded in philosophical interest and importance in recent decades. The current resurgence in philosophical work on color can be traced to a series of articles and monographs published in the late 1980s and early 1990s (e.g., Hardin, 1988; Hilbert, 1987; Thompson, 1995); one respect in which these works were so significant and stimulating to so many is that they showed how a large and exciting body of results drawn from the contemporary color sciences (including physics, colorimetry, computational vision, physiology, psychophysics, and evolutionary biology) bear on traditional ontological and epistemological questions about color. This was important and exciting news for philosophy and cognitive science more generally speaking. Here, for once, the oft-made promises of interdisciplinary research actually panned out: ideas from color science really did foster novel evaluations of old positions, and suggested new arguments and theories. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly in the long run, this work had the salutary effect of increasing the empirical sophistication of later philosophical discussion of color.

Recent philosophical work on color shows that these lessons have been largely taken to heart by academic philosophers. Why, then, should philosophers care about color in particular, when there are other pressing philosophical matters that deserve our attention?

A first reason is that colors are pervasive and salient features of the world as we ordinarily experience it: normal observers cannot help but notice that objects (in a very broad sense) appear to be red, green, and so on. If it is part of the job of an adequate ontology to account for the features we find in the world, then providing an account of colors is a necessary condition of success for such a theory. This is not to say that our ontology must take the reality of colors as a datum: it must be admitted that irrealism about being red is, at the very least, less inducing of blank stares than irrealism about tables and chairs. Rather, it is to say that our ontology must take the appearance of colors as a datum, for which one particularly simple and salient explanation is that colors are genuine features of the world.

Second, and notwithstanding the first point, colors are prima facie difficult to locate with respect to our best understanding of the fundamental physical properties in our world. There is good reason to think that red, blue and their ilk will not show up alongside and on a par with mass, charge and their ilk on the list of fundamental physical properties recognized by our best scientific accounts of the world. But if colors are not among the fundamental physical properties, then we need to find some other way of explaining how colors are related to them. Philosophers have defended a range of explanations of this sort explanations involving supervenience, reduction, elimination, dualism, primitivism, and more. Providing an account of the nature of color, therefore, requires consideration of these notions, and evaluation of the theories that employ them.

In fact, the two reasons I have just given provide yet a third reason for being interested in color. If the first reason arose from the need to fit color into the description of the world given by our ordinary experience of it, then the second reason arose from the need to fit color into the description of the world given by our best scientific and theoretical description of it. Presumably, however, our ultimate explanatory goal is not to fit color into this or that proprietary description, but to find a single, unified description of the world that makes room for color