J. LEVIN

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR AND THE CLAIMSOF COMMON SENSE

(Received in revised form on 19 December 1997)

Lockean dispositionalism about color, as I will understand it, is theview that the colors of objects are dispositions of their surfacesto produce perceptions of certain sorts, under standard conditions,in normal perceivers,1 and thus are more relative, or perceiver-dependent, than “primary” qualities such as motion and shape.My aim in this paper is to defend this account against a recentgroundswell of arguments that charge it with violating certainimportant precepts of common sense.

Locke’s own distinction between primary and secondary qual-ities, and his treatment of color as secondary, was based upon anamalgam of scientific and intuitive considerations,2 but he was criti-cized, most famously by Berkeley, for not paying sufficient attentionto the claims of common sense. In particular, he was criticized forviolating our common sense intuitions about the parity of shape andcolor, and about what goes on when color is perceived. These arethe prime complaints of many recent critics of dispositionalism aswell. I will argue, however, that dispositionalism about color notonly coheres well with our scientific theories, but also, at least uponreflection, provides an intuitively satisfying account of what colorsare and how they are perceived. In doing so, I’ll endorse yet anotherview that is at least implicit in Locke’s Essay, namely, that commonsense and scientific considerations are, and should be, mutuallyinfluential and inextricably intertwined.

I will first address some recently expressed worries about theincompatibility of dispositionalism with an intuitively satisfyingaccount of color perception, and then discuss some more globaldoubts about the adequacy of any view that takes color to be more

Philosophical Studies100: 151–174, 2000.© 2000Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

152 J. LEVIN

perceiver-relative than shape. To begin the first discussion, I willstart with some well-known converts.

I. THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

In fairly recent work, both Colin McGinn and Mark Johnston have(in my view ably and effectively) defended a dispositional theoryof color on the grounds that it best conforms to our common senseviews about what sorts of properties colors are.3 For both it wasof primary importance that dispositionalism could capture various“constitutive truths” about color, in particular, the relations of simil-arity and dissimilarity, impossibility and necessity that hold amongthem.4 Lockean dispositionalism, they agreed, was attractive alsobecause it permits colors to be properties of external objects, butis consistent with what science takes the causes of our perceptionsto be. Finally, it captures certain important asymmetries that they– and I – take to be evident from our reflections about color andshape: that, unlike in the case of shape, if we had different capa-cities relevant to color perception, but objects were unchanged, thenthose objects would have had different colors, and that, thoughnormal perceivers under standard conditions could be systematicallymistaken about the shapes of objects, they could not be mistakenabout their colors.5

Not that either McGinn or Johnston ever thought that disposi-tionalism conforms toall the deliverances of common sense – inparticular, they agreed that it flouts what Johnston called “revela-tion”, the belief that the intrinsic nature of a color is “wholly” or“fully” revealed by a standard visual experience as of that color.Because, as Johnston put it, standard perception reveals colors tobe “simple non-relational propert[ies] pervading surfaces, volumesand light sources”, dispositionalism forces us to regard perceptualexperience as subject to pervasive “error”.6 McGinn raises much thesame worry.7 Such error, however – or so they both once argued –is a small price to pay for preserving the bulk of our common senseviews about color.8

More recently, however, both Johnston and McGinn have recon-sidered the worry that dispositionalism flouts the important commonsense belief that the nature of color is fully revealed in perception,

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 153

and each has found it serious enough to warrant the rejection ofdispositionalism.9 McGinn’s worry is quite straightforward, namely,that “. . . color properties do notlook much like dispositions toproduce color experiences, so that an error theory of color percep-tion comes to seem inescapable”. He also suggests that “. . . wejust do not see colors as dispositions to cause experiences”.10

Thus, since the nature of dispositions cannot be, or cannot beentirely, revealed in perception, dispositional theories of color donot respect the claims of common sense.11 The only alternative,suggests McGinn, that can honor revelation while preserving theother common sense constraints on color, is to take colors ascategorical, simple, monadic, intrinsic features of objects thatsuper-veneon their dispositions to produce color-perceptions in normalperceivers.12 Of course, this makes color properties distinct fromeither physical or psychological properties, but, McGinn urges, wemust go wherever revelation takes us.

Johnston worries, too, that dispositional theories of color misrep-resent what goes on in color perception, though, as we will see, hefocuses on a problem that is subtly different from, though related to,McGinn’s. His alternative, “hylomorphism”, treats colors, indeed,all sensible qualities, as emergent, qualitative properties that areconstituted by, though not identical with, the underlying physicalproperties of objects (or, in the case of colors, of objects in relationto perceivers of various sorts: unlike McGinn, Johnston does not, inthe end, take colors to be monadic).13

Both these views about color have extravagant ontological con-sequences, and many will no doubt conclude, solely on scientific/metaphysical grounds, that the attribution of even pervasive error toour perceptual experience is much the lesser evil. But I will arguethat dispositionalism remains the theory of choice on common sensegrounds, even when these include the demand of “revelation”.

II. DO COLORS LOOK LIKE DISPOSITIONS?

The first question prompted by McGinn’s doubts about the compat-ibility of dispositionalism with the phenomenology of color exper-ience is “What should we expect dispositions, especiallyresponse-dispositions, to look like?” McGinn’s answer is that we shouldn’t

154 J. LEVIN

expect dispositions to look like anything at all, since dispositionalproperties are not themselves visible properties, but instead areinferred from what we actually do see.14 Is this true, in general –and more important, is this true in the case ofresponse-dispositions,which, of course, are what colors, according to dispositionalists, aresupposed to be?

Though color dispositionalists need not hold this, I’m inclined tothink that, in general, when dispositional properties give an objecta characteristic look, we can actually see (instantiations of) theseproperties, rather than merely seethat the object has them. Take,for example, the fragility of an intact crystal goblet, or the elasticityof a quiescent rubber band. It seems that, in seeing the goblet orthe rubber band, I can come to have a mental state with just asgood an explanatory causal/informational relation to its fragility orelasticity as to its shape and size. It may, of course, take practiceto discriminate these properties with sufficient accuracy, but this isalso true for many manifest properties that we can see or touch orhear, for example, the texture of silk (vs. polyester), the structure ofa musical chord, the gender of baby chicks. And, true enough, wecan see the goblet’s fragility or the rubber band’s elasticity onlybyseeing certain manifest properties of the objects in question – eitherthe characteristic “look” of something’s being fragile or elastic, orthe actual breaking or stretching of these items. But this will showthat there’s something viciously indirect about our perception ofdispositions only if it’s plausible to think (for example) that the factthat I see the spherical shape of a globe by seeing its differentiallyshaded facing surface, or feel the open safety pin in my pocketbyfeeling its point jab my hip shows that these sorts of objects are notdirectly perceived.15

The claim that we can see dispositions directly, moreover, seems,if anything, even more plausible in the case of color. Colors, afterall, areresponse-dispositions, that is, dispositions to produce exper-iences of certain sorts in perceivers. Thus, dispositionalists need notargue that we see colors byseeingsome manifest property, but onlythat we see them byhavingthe experiences that colors are taken tobe dispositions to produce. And it seems quite intuitive to hold thatthis (that is, having the very experiences that one is supposed to have

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 155

when one looks at something colored) is just what it is to perceivethese properties directly.16

But, one might respond, an object does not have the relevantdisposition unless it is manifesting a certain effectunder standardconditions, and this suggests that, unless the perceiverknows orbelieves thatthese conditions obtain, she cannot see that disposition.But this seems to be an unduly harsh condition on seeing, since itwould not be met by perception of many manifest properties either.In a fun house, for example, one may also be fooled about the shapesand sizes of objects, and on any view of color, the presence of non-standard lighting can defeat a person’s claim to see that color: I seex’s redness by having a certain color perception, on any conceptionof color, only if the conditions of perception are standard. In neithercase does this imply that I must know (or believe) that standardconditions obtain to see the objects (or the objects’ possessing prop-erties) in question, so it seems unfair to require such knowledge inthe case of dispositions.

McGinn suggests that thecounterfactual implications of anobject’s having a disposition make it impossible for that dispos-ition to be non-inferentially perceived.17 But it’s not clear whythey should. It’s true that, on the dispositional account, I have notseen something that actually is red unless the object that looks redsustains the relevant counterfactuals. But it is also true that I haven’tactually seen a cube (in seeing something that looks cubical) unlessthe back side of that object has a certain shape. In neither case doesthe fact that my claim can be defeated mean that it’s not true (andtrue non-inferentially) when no defeating circumstances obtain; nordoes it mean that I have to know that there are no such defeatingcircumstances for either claim to be justified.

In short, if having the relevant response counts as perceivinga (response-) disposition, then dispositional theorists are notcommitted to ascribing systematic error about what sorts of proper-ties are perceived. So far, the information perception affords seemsto be compatible both with dispositionalism and the view, preferredby Johnston and McGinn, that colors are non-dispositional, homo-geneous surface properties of the objects perceived.

156 J. LEVIN

III. ARE COLORS PERCEIVED AS DISPOSITIONS?

Most of the above arguments, I think, would be congenial to (andsome have actually been given, or at least suggested, by) MarkJohnston.18 But, even if Johnston agrees that we could perceive thecolor-dispositions of objects, he holds with McGinn that disposi-tionalism cannot give an accurate account of what colors areseento be, since, they both argue, we tend not to see themas responsedispositions.19 Yet this is what revelation demands: that undernormal conditions of perception, we not only see colors, but havetheir natures wholly or fully revealed to us.

Here again we ought to ask just what it would be for colorsto be experienced as response-dispositions. In “How to Speak ofthe Colors”, Johnston argues that some response dispositions canindeed be experienced as such, as long as the subject takes theresponse to be the manifestation of that disposition.20 But whatdifferentiates this from taking a response to be (say) an effect ofa monadic surface property of an object? Johnston notes that, inat least some cases, experience clearly represents objects as havingresponse-dispositional properties, for example, the dispositions toproduce pain or nausea. Moreover, he suggests that some (fleetingand transient) color phenomena, such as the color highlights ofobjects, are perceived as dispositional as well. But the contrastbetween our perception of what he calls the “steady” colors – thatis, colors which seem invariable even throughout changes in posi-tion, lighting, etc. – and of phenomena like color highlights, whichseem clearly to be perceiver-relative, shows that perception does notreveal the “steady” colors to be dispositions,21 since “[a] propertycannot appear as a disposition unless it appears as being a relationof the bearer of the disposition to the manifestation of the dispositionand the circumstances of manifestation”.22

But surely this argument moves too fast.23 The perceiver-dependence of the “steady” colors is treated by almost any disposi-tional theory as quite different from the perceiver-dependence of thecolor highlights. If steady colors are supposed to be dispositions tolook (steadily) colored to normal perceivers under standard condi-tions, then dispositionalism implies that they will remain the same(that is, steady) throughout changes in such variables as position andlighting. It would be unwarranted, then, to expect them to seem rela-

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 157

tional – that is, perceiver-relative –by virtue of producing differenteffects on us when position or lighting varies.

Under what conditionsshoulda dispositionalist expect them toseem relational? Under conditions which, alas, are not availableeven in a lifetime of normal perceptual experience, conditions underwhich, because of retina-to-brain wiring differences or other suchradical differences in our perceptual faculties, steady colors look(equally steady, but) different in hue from the way they look tous now. So, if we had our neural connections rewired, and weretransported to a “world” in which all, or enough, perceivers wereso wired, and proceeded to experience24 the colors of objects andcompare them with our previous experiences, then we would be inperceptual conditions under which the dispositional nature of colorscould be revealed. Let me stress that I’m not (yet) suggesting thatthe dispositional nature of colorswould be revealed under thesecircumstances, only that itcould be so revealed. For disposition-alism to conform to perception under these conditions, I presume,we would have to respond to these switches or variations the waywe in fact respond to variations in color highlights, that is, (1) wewould have to believe that the objects in question have differentcolors from the ones we now judge them to have, and (2) we wouldhave to acknowledge that the difference depends, at least in part, onus.

Whether or not we’d judge that colors are perceiver-relativein the situations I described, acknowledging that situations ofthis sort must be investigated to determine what is “revealed byperception”25 raises an issue for those who think it’s obvious thatperception reveals colors as simple, monadic surface properties ofobjects. If what I’ve argued is correct, then ordinary perception mustbe regarded, instead, asneutral between such a view and disposi-tionalism. Ordinary perception of color mayseemto reveal colorsto be simple monadic properties, just as a quick glance may seemto reveal an object with color highlights to be an object that is“steadily” striped. But in both cases, the “glances” are too quickto be definitive, given the sorts of experiences required for makingthe distinction; in neither case can these judgments be expected toreflect what perception in the proper circumstances would in factreveal.

158 J. LEVIN

IV. THE TRANSPARENCY OF COLOR EXPERIENCE

Even if we acknowledge that ordinary perceptual experience cannotserve as definitive evidence that colors are monadic rather than(steady, response-) dispositional, one might try to appeal to indirectphenomenological evidence for the view. One often mentionedconsideration that seems relevant is that the phenomenology ofcolor perception is much more like that of shape perception thanthe perception of objects as painful or nauseating.26 Take thumb-screws and rotten meat: almost everyone agrees that these itemsare painful or nauseating only because, in normal circumstances,they have the relevant effects on us. And this, one might argue, isonly partly a matter of the variation in pain or nausea thresholdsfor different people, and even for the same individual over time.There’s something else that’s distinctive about the phenomenologyof pain and nausea perception that color perception lacks, namely,that generally we’re aware of the effects of painful instruments ornauseating foodsassensations, but we “see through” color percep-tions to the objects and properties themselves. And if the perceptionof an object’s painfulness or noisomeness are best cases of theperception of response-dispositional properties, then there’s indirectperceptual evidence that colors are not response-dispositions.

Yet while it’s clearly true that there’s a phenomenological differ-ence between these sorts of perceptions, it’s less clear that a thumb-screw’s painfulness or a rotting carcass’s nauseating qualities areindeed typical cases of response-dispositional properties of objects.If anything, it seems that we call an object “painful” or “nauseating”merely by courtesy, and do not think that we’re attributing anyproperty at all – dispositional or not – toit. Some better cases toconsider are the properties of being sexy and being scary: these arenot only generally agreed to be response-dispositional, but they arealso generally agreed to be genuine properties of objects. But here,just as in the case of color, (unless the response in question is veryintense and localized) one “sees through” the perception produced tothe object itself. The perception of scariness or sexiness seems justas “outer-directed” or “diaphanous” as the perception of color.27

Thus, the most that can be convincingly claimed on indirectphenomenological grounds is that ordinary perception reveals thatcolors and shapes have the same status. Unless it’s clear that

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 159

perception unequivocally reveals spatial properties such as shapeto be simple and monadic, this will not show that perception, evenindirectly, reveals colors to be simple, monadic properties. But thesame reasons for affirming the neutrality of experience in the caseof color will be equally relevant in the case of shape, namely,that ordinary perception can’t give us information one way or theother; thus, the most that indirect perceptual evidence reveals isthat colors and shapes are either both monadic or both disposi-tional. So, even on indirect grounds, perceptual experience does notappear to favor non-dispositional accounts of what colors are exper-iencedas. Moreover, this indirect evidence can only be regardedas fragile and defeasible, at least in principle: as noted above,sexiness and scariness may at times appear to enjoy phenomeno-logical parity with shape, but our shifting standards for identifyingthese properties in ordinary perceptual circumstances defeat thesephenomenological claims, and prompt us to take these properties tobe response-dispositions; though ordinary perception may not defeatthe phenomenological parity of shape and color, it’s possible someother kind of evidence, grounded still in our perceptual experience,could.

Unless we find such evidence, however, even this substantiallyweaker claim about what is revealed in perception appears toforce dispositionalism to regard perceptual experience as in error,since most dispositional theories take color to be a perceiver-relative secondaryquality, and thus less objective than intrinsic,non-dispositional,primaryqualities such as shape and size. Dispos-itional theories of color will thus still face a discrepancy betweenthe view that colors, but not shapes, are dispositional, and the claimthat perceptual experience reveals them to have the same status.28

Some dispositionalists may attempt to avoid even this amountof error by arguing thatshapesmust be response-dispositions aswell. But, Berkeley, Kant (and perhaps intermediate Johnston29)to the contrary, this seems to be a wrongheaded move, in that itviolates the conviction that, regardless of what ordinary percep-tion suggests, colors are less objective, more perceiver-relative, thanshapes. Indeed, by examining our grounds for this conviction, wewill uncover another source of perceptual evidence which – as Iwill argue – shows that the apparent phenomenological parity of

160 J. LEVIN

perceived color and shape indeed turns out to be fragile, and thuscan be safely overruled.

V. THE INTUITIVE GROUNDS FOR DISPOSITIONALISM ABOUTCOLOR

Let’s review, more specifically, the reasons why color-dispo-sitionalism – and the distinction between primary and secondaryqualities – ever seemed attractive to its proponents. McGinn andJohnston both considered it of great importance that disposition-alism could capture a crucial difference between our concepts ofshape and color, namely, that if the colors of objects looked system-atically different to (enough of) us, but the objects themselves wereunchanged,30 then those objects would have had different colors,and that, though normal perceivers under standard conditions couldbe systematically mistaken about the primary qualities of objects,they could not be mistaken about their colors. These convictions,presumably, are uncovered by traditional thought experiments:investigations of what (we think) we’d think about the colors vs.the shapes of things under certain counterfactual conditions.

This is true as well, or so it seems, even in the primary text ofcolor dispositionalism, Locke’sEssay. As I’ve already mentioned,though Locke is sometimes taken to have had primarily scientificgrounds for his dispositionalism, it’s arguably clear that theyinvolved a mix of the empirical and a priori. To be sure, Locke’sevidence for the claim that colors themselves don’t “resemble” our“ideas” of colors was primarily scientific, arising from the view thatall the interactions of physical objects, including their effects on thebodies and brains of perceivers, could be explained by reference tojust the shape, size, solidity, and motion of the corpuscles on thesurfaces of objects. But the claim that colors aredispositions, ratherthan those microscopic surface properties of objects that figure inthe explanation of color-perception, had to have arisen–at least forLocke31 – from extra-scientific considerations. And these appear toinclude, once again, the conviction that if we had different percep-tual capacities, but objects had just the same surface properties, thenthose objects would have had different colors, and that if there hadnever been perceivers, objects wouldn’t have had colors at all.32 So

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 161

color-dispositionalism arises at least in part from reflection uponour common sense convictions about shape and color, and thoughtexperiment, once again, is important in determining just what theseconvictions are.

As we know, Locke remained a dispositionalist, while McGinnand Johnston have abandoned the view: not because they’ve revisedtheir estimation of the force of the above-mentioned thought exper-iments – indeed, both their current views attempt to retain thisasymmetry – but because the failure of dispositionalism to accountfor the way colors are revealed in perceptual experience loomslarger, for them, as a deficiency of the view. But it seems that, ifthey accept the asymmetries revealed by these thought-experiments,they in fact have an argument to show that perceptual experiencereveals colors to be dispositions!

For consider what we are doing in these endeavors. Presumably,we’re imagining a possible world in which the inhabitants see greenwhere we see red, etc., and squares where we see circles, but whilewe take them to be mistaken about the shapes of objects, we donot take them to be mistaken about their colors.33 Or perhaps we’reimagining a world in which, because of differing retina-to-brainconnections, the sky looks yellow, etc., tous, and we take it thus tobeyellow. Or perhaps we agree that if the “Eyes [don’t] see Light, orColours . . . all Colours . . . vanish andcease, and are reduced to theirCauses, i.e. Bulk, Figure, and Motion of Parts”,34 or, more briskly,that if there were no perceivers, there would be no colors at all. Whatwe’re doing, of course, is making judgments based on counterfactualperceptual situations, and, if so, then it seems reasonable to take theevidence assembled from (at least these kinds of) thought experi-ments to be extensions of the evidence afforded by perception itself.And if we judge there to be an asymmetry between color and shapes,then it should be reasonable to think that (extended, counterfactual)perceptual experience defeats what appeared to be phenomenolo-gical parity between color and shape, and thus reveals colors, butnot shapes, to be relational properties. If so, then it seems that theburden of showing how colors can be revealed as dispositions canbe met. Let me stress that I do not expect that everyone will sharethese intuitions about how to describe these situations. I am merely

162 J. LEVIN

arguing that those who do should have no further problem with theclaim that colors are revealed as dispositions.

But perhaps it is I who have moved too quickly here. Manyphilosophers have argued that there are problems with disposition-alist theories of color that are independent of their alleged failure tomeet the demands of revelation. If so, then the most my argumentscan accomplish is to show that perceptual experience may reveal the“steady” colors – colors that are not highlighted or shimmering – toberelational. But one can endorse the view that colors arerelationalproperties without taking them to be (response)dispositions.35

Is there reason to affirm that it is the relational, but not response-dispositional, nature of colors that perceptual experience, actual pluscounterfactual, reveals? To answer this, we must squarely face whatmany think is the central problem of dispositionalism, the problemof characterizing just what the colors of objects are supposed to bedispositions to do – without vacuity, circularity, regress, or any othersuch damaging vice.

VI. THE DISPOSITIONAL ACCOUNT OF ‘X IS RED’

The problem here is that it seems that dispositionalism needs tocharacterize an object’s being red in terms of its looking red,or its producing experiences of red in perceivers. But canthesephenomena be understood in a way that is free of all the above-mentioned vices, yet provides a plausible, natural and – mostimportant – error-free account of what goes on when we see red?Many philosophers have thought that the answer is “no”. Forexample, McGinn suggests that if colors are dispositional proper-ties, then x’s looking red must be understood as x’s looking to havea disposition to produce experiences of red in (normal) perceivers.But this, McGinn suggests, requires that “perceiving redness willthen presumably involve perceiving thetermsof this relation . . . [andthus] sensations of red can themselves enter into the content ofexperience – be an aspect of how the world looks. But this issurely absurd: I do not have experiences ofexperienceswhen Isee something red . . . My experience type does not enter its owncontent”.36 So dispositionalism, once again, implies that ordinarycolor perception is subject to pervasive error.

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 163

An even more serious problem with this understanding of ‘xlooks red’, McGinn continues, is that it leads to vicious regress,making it impossible to pin down the qualitative character of theexperience that red is supposed to be a disposition to produce. If anobject is red iff. it’s disposed to look red (under appropriate condi-tions), then an object must be disposed to look red iff. it’s disposedto look to be disposed to look red. . . and so ad infinitum.37

These objections, at least arguably, have merit: absurdity andregress indeed seem to ensue, on the dispositional account, fromtaking the ‘red’ in ‘looks red’ to have the same sense as the ‘red’in ‘x is red’. But, it is often argued, error – or worse – ensuesfrom the suggestion that the ‘red’ in ‘looks red’ should instead beunderstood as denoting some property of perceptual experience thatcan be specified independently of the colors of objects themselves.The alternatives seem to be variations on the following possibilities:(1) ‘red’ – let us, following Christopher Peacocke, call it ‘red′’ toavoid confusion with the ordinary color predicate ‘red’ – denotesan intrinsic property of a phenomenal particular, or portion of thevisual field,38 (2) ‘red’ combines with ‘looks’ to produce a newpredicate, ‘looks-red’, which holds of the experience as a whole.The worry, for many philosophers, is that any view such as this, onceagain, implies that color experience is subject to pervasive error.39

As Boghossian and Velleman put it, “once one posits a visual fieldbearing properties such as red′, one is eventually forced to concludethat objects presented in red′ areas of that field are seen as red′ ratherthan as possessing some other, dispositional quality”. And this, theycontinue, is because “[v]isual experience is ordinarily naively real-istic, in the sense that the qualities presented in it are represented asqualities of the external world”.40

But our previous reflections about what it would take for colorsto be revealed in perceptual experience as dispositions undercutthis claim. Just because an object produces red′ perceptions, evenpreternaturally steady, never-varying red′ perceptions, one is not“forced to conclude” that it is (erroneously) seen as red′. As I’vealready argued, the identification of an object’s color with its dispos-ition to have a certain perceptual effect does not prevent us from“directly” seeing that color; indeed (if we’re disposed to makecertain judgments in counterfactual situations), we can see the color

164 J. LEVIN

as a disposition to produce effects of that sort. Thus the qual-ities “presented in” visual experience – even if such experienceis construed as involving Peacocke’s visual field properties – cannonetheless be response-dispositions, and we can see, given our red′perceptions, an object to be (not red′ but) red.

Our previous reflections about the phenomenology of colorperception ought to deflect another of B&V’s worries as well,namely, that the characterization of dispositions as producing red′experiences “is ideally suited to describing the experience of pain. . . [but] . . . the experience of pain is notoriously different from theexperience of colour . . . The difference is precisely that pain is neverfelt as a quality of its apparent cause, whereas colour usually is. . . Hence [this] model, which fits pain experience so well, cannotsimultaneously fit colour experience”.41 Earlier I argued, to a some-what different end, that the phenomenological asymmetry betweenthe perception of pain and color cannot show that colors are notresponse-dispositions, since the perception of colors is phenomeno-logically similar to the perception of other qualities – being sexyor scary, for example – thatare widely thought to be response-dispositional. But this observation undermines B&V’s argument aswell.42

Those who remain queasy – as I do43 – about acknowledgingphenomenal properties of the visual field like red′ can try insteadto characterize the qualitative content of color-experiences in termsof the distinctive properties of the experiences themselves, ratherthan any of their constituent phenomenal particulars. The so-called“adverbial” theory, which takes “S enjoys a red-visual-experience”to be equivalent to “S is appeared to red-ly” – where “redly” desig-nates away of appearing, a property of the experience and not aphenomenal particular – is an instance of this strategy. These “ways”cannot be characterized in terms of their relations to the colors ofobjects, of course, on pain of reviving the circularity that the dispos-itionalist is trying to avoid, so most adverbial theorists have lookedto the (narrow) functional roles of the experiences (or, for peopleworried about “inverted spectrum” issues, narrow functional rolesplus qualitative “thisness” specified by demonstrative ostension44)to specify their qualitative character.45

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 165

Still, the idea that, in seeing red objects, one is seeing them ashaving dispositions to produce red′ perceptions (or states of sensingred-ly) inus, may be taken to lead to an unhealthy, indeed immoral,self-absorption. As Johnston puts it, if “instead of taking pleasurein watching my greyhound run I should now take pleasure in beingunder the causal influence of something. . . which produces in mecertain pleasing appearances. . . [then] . . . [a] fundamental role of theaesthetic, sensual and erotic emotions – to draw our attention awayfrom ourselves and our inner lives by pleasing us with the presenceof others – has been philosophically undermined. What is left arejust ways of being pleased or displeased with our own reactionsto things, whatever those things might be like. The philosophy ofperception leads us from what Husserl called the natural attitudetowards what we might call the pornographic attitude.”46

But, given that the phenomenology of color experience (presum-ably) would retain its distinctive “transparency” regardless ofshifts in our theories of the metaphysics of color, any consequent“philosophical undermining” of our “natural attitudes” by colordispositionalism would have as little impact on us as hyperbolicCartesian doubt. Unlike true pornography, it would have no behavi-oral, psychological. or physiological effects.47 If a dispositionalist’senjoyment of the colors of things counts nonetheless as porno-graphy, then perhaps the activity of taking pleasure in the categoricalproperties of others, its “naturalness” notwithstanding, should countas engaging in uninvited sensual contact!

VII. THE PROVENANCE OF OUR COMMON SENSE CONVICTIONS

I have argued so far that perceptual experience need not be taken toreveal colors as monadic, rather than relational, properties of thesurfaces of objects, and also that there is no difficulty in givinga non-circular characterization of color responses that permitsthese relational properties to be identified with Lockean response-dispositions. Given that dispositionalism about color honors whatI’ve taken to be our other important convictions about the nature ofcolor, and, in addition, is ontologically conservative, it would seemthat this thesis does better than any other in meeting the claims ofcommon sense.

166 J. LEVIN

But does it? One might object that the account of our “commonsense intuitions” that yields the results I described in the (section IV)thought-experiments involving creatures (perhaps ourselves) whoconsistently experience lemons to be blue – namely, that in thatworld they wouldbe blue – veers suspiciously far from unadulter-ated common sense. Unadulterated common sense, one might argue,treats colors just like shapes and other primary qualities, and thuswould judge lemons to be yellow – just as it judges them to beovoid – no matter what color the normal creatures in its environmentstandardly perceive them to be.48

The questions here are, first, whether the intuitions about theasymmetry between color and shape that I take to emerge fromthe thought-experiments I described are indeed widespread androbust, and, second, whether, if so, they are truly the deliverancesof common sense and not instead the results of a (perhaps unwit-ting) theoretically loaded description of these situations.49 The firstquestion is too hard to answer without systematic empirical investig-ation, but I think something can be said about the second. The chargethat the description of the counterfactual situations is theoreticallyloaded can mean either of two things: first, that it includes assump-tions or leading suggestions about the existence of the very distinc-tion to be proved, and second, that it includes information aboutcolors, shapes, or their perception that may go beyond commonknowledge. Neither the description of the counterfactual situationsin question – nor Locke’s own description of (what he took to be) thefacts about perception inEssayII.viii.11–13 – seems to have the firstproblem, but they most definitely have the second. That is, it seemsreasonable to think that the facts about perception and the struc-ture of objects that go beyond what everybody can be assumed toknow are crucial in eliciting the intuitions that support the Lockeanview.

But to take this as objectionable requires that we deny boththat scientific considerationsdo or that theyought to contributeto the deliverances of “common sense” or to a priori deliberation.Yet it seems that this can’t be right. First of all, there is one waythey could make such contributions to thought-experiments thatnearly everyone, I imagine, would consider quite benign, namely,by providing enough information about the details of the situation

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 167

to permit us to apply the concepts we antecedently have. This roleof theoretical information should be extremely familiar. Are spidersa natural kind? Are worms? Our initial judgments about these caseswill no doubt change once we’re informed that spiders, but notworms, have a common underlying structure. Analogously, if wealready think that one can distinguish objective from perceiver-relative properties in terms of the properties that must be invokedto explain the mechanism of perception, or in terms of their relativecentrality in explaining a variety of phenomena, or in terms oftheir being perceivable by more than one sense,50 then the intro-duction of theoretical information about these topics may merelyserve to allow us toapply the conceptual distinctions we alwayspossessed.

Second, and more radically, it seems reasonable to think thatscientific considerations can have a more substantive role in actuallyshaping the concepts that figure in a priori deliberation. To deny thatthey in fact do so commits us to an unrealistically static picture ofcommon sense and our conceptual heritage, while to deny that theyought to make such contributions commits us to norms of meaningand understanding that do not permit our concepts to change withthe growth of knowledge.

I have noted, at various points in this paper, the mix ofscientific, metaphysical and conceptual considerations that Lockeinvoked, at least implicitly, to support color-dispositionalism andthe primary/secondary quality distinction. It seems that this mix ofconsiderations, rather than resulting from carelessness or confusion,provides an excellent model of how conceptual inquiry, or a priorideliberation, should proceed. Not only, then, did Locke provide acharacterization of color that conforms well to our common senseconcepts, but he also provided an exemplary account of the waysin which we should determine what the contours of these conceptsare.51

NOTES

1 Dispositions to produce perceptions of a certain sort inourselves(or those whoare normal among us), or in whatever perceivers are normal in the circumstancesin question? In a world in which lemons look blue to the normal inhabitants, then,while the lemons in that worldare blue according to the second interpretation,

168 J. LEVIN

they remain yellow on the first. My intent is to defend the second version ofdispositionalism, since I think it better expresses the perceiver relativity Locketook (and I believe) to be true of the colors.2 It appears to rely both on his investigation of the “concept of body” and thethen-current understanding of objects as composed of microscopic solid, extended“corpuscles” and of perception as the effect of these microstructural properties onthe sensory surfaces of perceivers, and eventually (thanks in part to God’s wise“annexation”) on their minds.3 See Johnston (1992): ‘How to Speak of the Colors’,Philosophical Studies68,and McGinn (1983):The Subjective View, Oxford. Johnston’s distinction between“bare” and “constituted” dispositions (pp. 232–237) is particularly helpful inthe defense of dispositionalism against some well-known attempted counter-examples.4 McGinn (1983), Ch. 3; Johnston (1992), pp. 236–241.5 See McGinn (1983), Chs. 1,2. Johnston does not stress this asymmetry in his(1992), but clearly he thinks we’re conceptually committed to it, since he attemptsto reconstruct it in his new non-dispositional theory of the manifest (forthcoming,Ch. 5).6 See Johnston (1992), p. 223.7 “I agree that objects are not represented perceptually the way the correctanalysis of secondary qualities asserts. . . ” (1983, p. 134)8 Let me note here that “revelation”, as stated, provides a fairly strong constraintupon a theory: if revelation requires perception to provide “full” knowledge ofcolors, then perception will be subject to error if it fails to reveal all the (intrinsic)properties of colors, even if it doesn’t prompt any false beliefs about their nature.9 See Johnston (1996a,b and forthcoming); McGinn (1996).10 Pp. 537, 538. He continues, “Nor is it possible to maintain that colors-as-dispositions are the de re objects of vision, without themselves corresponding tothe de dicto content of color perception, since some further properties will needto be introduced in order to capture the de dicto content of perception – and thesewill essentially present the same problem”.11 For a statement of “revelation”, see Mark Johnston, “How to Speak of theColors”, a (limited) defense of dispositionalism, which he too has retracted – onsimilar grounds – in later work.12 (1996, p. 545).13 Forthcoming, (Chs. 1, 5).14 He writes, “Dispositions are not visible properties of things in the way thatcolors are, so the two cannot be identical. . . You may seethatsomething is solubleby watching it dissolve, but you do not see its solubility – that property itself. . . solubility is a property youinfer, rather than one that is directly revealed toyou”. (p. 540)15 Does the experienced doctor thus “directly see” the damaged liver by seeingthe yellowish cast of the patient’s skin? No: here the doctor merely seesthatthe liver is damaged, since she accomplishes this by seeing a visible propertyof something else. See Dretske, for example: “. . . seeing that k is F by seeing, not

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 169

k but some other object h, occurs when there is conceptual, but no correspondingsensory, representation of k”. (1995, p. 41) Thanks to Marshall Cohen for raisingthis point.16 This point has been made on behalf of dispositionalism before. See JohnMcDowell (1985, p. 12): “What would one expect it to be like to experiencesomething’s being such as to look red, if not to experience the thing in question(in the right circumstances) to look red?” and my (1990, p. 656). Mark Johnstonevinces sympathy with this response in his (1992), p. 225, but eventually rejectsdispositionalism on other grounds. We will look more closely at his argumentlater.17 “[d]ispositions depart too far from the actual world to be objects of simplesight”. (p. 541)18 In his (1992), p. 254.19 At least in his (1992), though it’s not so clear now. Also see Harman (1996,p. 9) for a similar view.20 “When a disposition is a disposition to produce a certain subjective responsethen a subjective response of the kind in question may indeed reveal the nature ofthe disposition so long as the subjecttakes his response to be the manifestationof that disposition. So the disposition to look canary yellow can be revealedby sensory experienceif that sensory experience is appropriately construed”.(p. 226)21 “The decisive consideration is that we see most of the colors of external thingsas “steady” features of those things, in the sense of features which do not alteras the light alters and as the observer changes position”. (p. 226) He continues,“Thus there is some truth in the oft-made suggestion that (steady) colors don’tlook like dispositions; to which the natural reply is “Just how would they have tolook if they were to look like dispositions?”; to which the correct response is thatthey would have to look like colored highlights or better, like shifting, unsteadycolors, e.g. the swirling, evanescent colors that one sees on the backs of compactdisks”. (pp. 226–227)22 P. 227.23 It seems that McDowell would also want to challenge this argument, given hisremark, in his (1985), that “Colours and shapes figure in experience. . . simplyas properties that objects are representedashaving, distinctly phenomenal in theone case, and not so in the other”. (p. 115; my emphasis), but I’m not sure how hewould want to argue for this claim.24 And discuss, so we know we’re normal.25 Even “standard” perception, as Johnston puts it, if this is to mean perceptionwithout microscopes or other visual aids.26 See Johnston (1996a), p. 197; Boghossian and Velleman (1989), p. 95.27 Perhaps this is true of most reasonably stable visible properties, and perhapsthis can be explained by appeal to vision’s role in helping perceivers to nego-tiate their environments, but this does not matter here; all I need is thatsomeresponse-dispositional properties seem diaphanous in the sense above.

170 J. LEVIN

The “transparency” or “outer-directedness” of perceptual experiences is notstressed much in the literature on primary and secondary qualities, but it is oftennoted in the literature on externalist theories of qualia. See Harman, Dretske,Lycan, Tye. (I don’t think, by the way – for reasons that will be touched on inthe last section – that this observation supports such externalist theories.)28 Indeed, many statements of the error attributed to our perception by dispos-itional theories seem equally effective if read merely as claims that experiencereveals parity between color and shape.

Consider, for example, McGinn’s recent expression of the worry: “when wesee an object as red, we see itashaving a simple, monadic, local property of theobject’s surface. The color is perceived as intrinsic to the object,in much the waythat shape and size are perceived as intrinsic. . . so if color were inherently rela-tional . . . then perception of color would misrepresent its structure”. (pp.541–542;my emphasis) Consider, too, more classically, the quote from Galileo with whichBoghossian and Velleman (1989) begin their article defending an error theory ofcolor: “Nevertheless as soon as we have imposed names on them [colors, tastes,odors], particular and different from those of the other primary and real accidents,we induce ourselves to believe that they also existjust astruly and really as thelatter”. (p. 81; my emphasis)29 In his talks on color at USC, 1993.30 This is to be thought of as a counterfactual claim about how we could haveperceived the colors of objects, and not as involving wholesale change in thecurrent colors of objects.31 Contemporary theorists may cite science-determined facts that support theirdispositionalism: for example, the fact that, in some cases (color metamers),different surface reflective properties typically look the same to perceivers, andthus, if colors were surface reflective properties they must be disjunctive. Butthese considerations would not be relevant for Locke, who of course had no ideawhat these surface properties might be.

See P. Alexander (1977) for the dissenting view that Locke took secondaryqualities to be the grounds of the relevant dispositions, rather than the dispositionsthemselves.32 This is one way, anyway, of understanding passages like II.viii.17 so that theydo not open Locke to Berkeley’s charge that, for him, secondary qualities existonly in the mind.33 McGinn (1983), p. 10.34 Locke, Essay, II.viii.17.35 For example, blue, in each possible world, could be identified with certainsurface properties of objects that produce blue perceptions in that world. AndJohnston clearly takes colors to be relational, rather than monadic, properties inhis fully developed view, though they are supposed to be manifestly, instead ofdispositionally, relational.36 McGinn (1996), p. 542.37 McGinn (1996), p. 543; McGinn cites Boghossian/Velleman (1989) as one

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 171

source of this objection, and Johnston endorses it as well. It also looms large inBarry Stroud’s recent criticism of subjective theories of color (forthcoming).38 See Peacocke, ‘Colour Concepts and Color Experience’, in Byrne and Hilbert,1997.39 Another, largely Wittgensteinian worry, is that an alternative such as (1), andperhaps even (2), would be incoherent, since it requires that ‘red′’ get its referenceby “private ostensive definition”, which is not sufficiently determinate to fix thereference of any term. I will not respond to this objection in great detail, but willnote that, unlike in Wittgenstein’s own case of attempted private ostension, there issubstantial intersubjective agreement about the relations of similarity and dissim-ilarity among color-experiences, and most indeterminacies can be eliminated bya reference-fixing (though of course not meaning-giving) description of the sort,‘experience of the sort one has when looking at a ripe tomato’ or even, pointingat a ripe tomato, ‘experience of the sort that you get fromthat’.

In addition, even if our referential resources were restricted solely to the useof an introspectively applied demonstrative, it’s not implausible to think that, inthe case of sensations if not all mental phenomena, we’d have a good chanceof getting things right – that is, succeeding in referring to a repeatable property.This is because it’s plausible to think that, since sensations have an importantfunction in the psychophysiology of perceivers, they actually are physical (orpsychofunctional) types, distinctions among which are salient in introspection.40 1989, p. 94.41 Boghossian and Velleman (1989), p. 95.42 Of course, in offering this account of ‘x is red’, the dispositionalist hasn’treally characterized being red in terms of looking red, but only in terms of anexperience’s being red′ (or looking-red). This may avoid circularity and regress,but it leaves the tight relationship between being red and looking red (in theordinary senses of these terms) unexplained. But dispositionalism, though notafter all providing an account of ‘x is red’ in terms of ‘x looks red’, can nonethe-less capture the difference – and the relationship – between an object’s being, andlooking, a particular color.

The first step is to distinguish what may be called a “phenomenal” from an“epistemic” or “doxastic” sense of looking red, such that the first can be defined interms of the phenomenal properties of the experience in question, and the secondin terms of the experience’s propensity to produce (non-inferentially) the beliefthat x is red. Sometimes ‘x looks red (under conditions C)’ is best understoodepistemically, in which case it may be taken to be equivalent to ‘the experience ofx (under conditions C) is disposed to produce, non-inferentially, the belief that xis red’. This will not be circular, of course, since ‘x is red’ is defined not in termsof ‘x looks red’, but of ‘x looks-red’.

As for the phenomenal sense, it seems reasonable to hold that ‘x looks red(under C)’ is equivalent to ‘x looks-red (under C)’. On this understanding, adispositionalist can describe an orange that looks red to me under these lights as aobject which, though disposed to look-orange to normal perceivers under normalconditions, now looks-red to me under the circumstances that now obtain. Are

172 J. LEVIN

there problems with this equivalence? One might think to construct one from anexample discussed by Peacocke, namely, the case of a white sheet of paper seenthrough a pane of red glass; here, the surface of the paper will not just be believedto be white, but will beseen as white. Peacocke himself assimilates this case tothe epistemic reading of “looks”, because, he suggests, there’s no phenomenalunderstanding of the locution that is compatible with his view. He writes, “Insuch a case, it would be wrong to insist that the region of the visual field in whichthe paper is represented is white′ and wrong to insist that it is red′. We have herea new kind of experience, and any extension of these primed properties from thecase where the conditions of viewing are more normal seems partly stipulative.Certainly to insist that in this case the region of the visual field is obviously white′seems to rely tacitly on the representational content of the experience. . . [which,circularly] contains the concept of being white”. (1997), pp. 59 This may posea problem, therefore, for someone who insists, unlike Peacocke, that the paperlooks white in the phenomenal sense as well. In my view, however, Peacockehas given up too soon; it’s sufficient for construing the experience in question aswhite′ (or looking-white) if it is functionally equivalent to her other white′ (orlooking-white) experiences (or – if one eschews functionalism – if the subject’sdisposition to invoke the irreducibly phenomenal concept white′ is triggered bythe experience in question: see Loar (1990)). The strategy of treating color experi-ences as involving colored′ portions of the visual field may tempt one into thinkingthere need to be facts of the matter beyond these to determine which experiencesa perceiver has.43 On reason is that the following alternative seems cleaner and more economical;see previous note for another.44 I myself think that this can be done purely functionally, at least for humanbeings, since, as a matter of fact, our color spectra are not invertable, and – atleast arguably – the peculiarities that make for the color asymmetries are essentialfeatures of the experiences of those colors. (See CL Hardin, (1997) for a recentand particularly convincing argument for this claim.) For possible creatures whodo have invertable spectra, I’m inclined to think (as Georges Rey effectivelyargues, in his 1997) that if Wittgensteinian skepticism is appropriate anywhere,it’s required here! Those who are dubious about functionalism, however, cannonetheless rest assured that an internalist characterization of color along theselines need not lead to dualism – as long as they agree that the demonstrativeconcepts invoked in the ostension I described in the text can denote physicalproperties without being equivalent to any physical description. (See Loar (1990)and Tye (1995) for argument.)45 Some theorists worry that adverbial views fail to capture the representationalstructure of perceptual experience, for example, the fact that we see things asred, rather than just seeing things and seeing red, and that there’s a differencebetween seeing a red square and seeing a square and something (else) that’s red.They thus conclude that an adequate characterization of perceptual experiencemust be explicitly intentional or representational. (See, for example, Michael Tye(1995).) Most intentional or representational theories of perceptual experience

DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES OF COLOR 173

take the experiences to be correlational relations of some sort with propertiesof external objects (see Dretske, 1995, Tye, ibid, for good recent examples), butthis strategy is unavailable to dispositionalists, who would be led once again intocircularity. The only alternative of this sort for dispositionalists is to attempt acharacterization of the “intentional objects” of perceptual experience that is purelyinternal, and the best strategy for this, once again, is to construct them out of simi-larities and differences in the (narrow) inferential, and otherwise functional, rolesof the states in question. (See Rey, 1997; White, 1994) External intentionalistsmay complain that this sort of characterization can’t capture the outer-directedphenomenology of perceptual experience, but it’s unclear how the fact that anexperience is causally correlated with an external property could help. “Internal”intentionalism, it seems, is pretty much a notational variant of the adverbialtheory, and, not unexpectedly, there have been worries raised about the possibilityof inverted spectra parallel to those raised for adverbialism, (See Block, 1996).See previous note for an attempt to address this worry.46 Johnston, 1996b, p. 228; also, forthcoming, Ch. 7. (Gone are the days whenthe moral and aesthetic high ground was occupied by those intent on preventingthe multiplication of “entities”!)

He also notes, “To measure the human cost of this . . . [t]ry explaining to themother of a newborn child that her sensory perception of the child, which drivesher feelings for it, leaves the nature of the child completely unrevealed except forthe fact that the child is something or other which causes appearances and feelingsin her”. (ibid, p. 228) But doesn’teverymother of a newborn, sometime in the firstthree months, mutter to her screaming child, “thank goodness evolution made usso responsive to big eyes and fat cheeks. . . otherwiseyou’d be out the window!”47 Otherwise, dispositional theories of color could be marshalled in the struggleagainst racism!48 See, for example, Stroud (forthcoming), Campbell (1997) and Hacker (1987).49 This last is a question raised by Edwin McCann. Stroud may well be generallysuspicious of thought-experiments involving science-fiction situations, but I thinkthese same intuitions can be elicited (at least from those inclined to have them inthe counterfactual situations I described) by appeal to Berkeley-style observationsabout the relativity of perception (for color, of course, and not for shape).50 These are various ways of attempting to make the PQ/SQ distinction. Thedetails do not matter here.51 Earlier versions of this paper were read at USC and UC Irvine in October,1997. I am grateful to audiences in both places for helpful criticisms andcomments. I also want to thank Kent Bach, Tamara Horowitz, Brian Loar andEdwin McCann for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

REFERENCES

Alexander, P. (1977): ‘Boyle and Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities’, inTipton (ed.),Locke on Human Understanding, Oxford: OUP.

174 J. LEVIN

Block, N. (1996): ‘Mental Paint and Mental Latex’, in Villaneuva (1996).Boghossian and Velleman (1989): ‘Colour as a Secondary Quality’,Mind

xcviii(389).Byrne and Hilbert (eds.) (1997):Readings on Color, Vol. 1, Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press.Campbell, J. (1997): ‘A Simple View of Color’, in Byrne and Hilbert (1997).Chisholm, R. (1957):Perceiving: A Philosophical Study, Ithaca, NY: Cornell.Dretske, F. (1995):Naturalizing the Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Jackson, F. (1977):Perception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Johnston, M. (1992): ‘How to Speak of the Colors,Philosophical Studies68.Johnston, M. (1996a): ‘Is the External World Invisible?’, in Villaneuva (1996)

Perception(Philosophical Issues7), Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press.Johnston, M. (1996b): ‘A Mind-Body Problem at the Surface of Objects’, in

Villaneuva (1996).Johnston, M. (forthcoming):The Manifest.Hacker, P. (1987):Appearance and Reality, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Hardin, C.L. (1997): ‘Reinverting the Spectrum’, in Byrne and Hilbert (eds.),

(1997).Harman, G. (1996): ‘Explaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective Experi-

ence’, in Villanueva (1996).Levin, J. (1990): ‘Review of Hacker,Appearance and Reality’, Philosophical

ReviewXCIX(4).Loar, B. (1990): ‘Phenomenal States’, in Tomberlin (ed.),Philosophical Perspect-

ives 4, Atascadero: Ridgeview.Locke, J. (1689/1975):Essay Concerning Human Understanding(Nidditch, ed.),

Oxford: Oxford University Press.McDowell, J. (1985): ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’, in Honderich (ed.),

Morality and Objectivity, RKP.McGinn, C. (1983):The Subjective View, Oxford: Oxford University Press.McGinn, C. (1996): ‘Another Look at Color’,Journal of PhilosophyXLIII(11).Peacocke, C. (1984): ‘Colour Concepts and Colour Experience, in Byrne and

Hilbert (1997).Rey, G. (1997):Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Stroud, B. (forthcoming):The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Meta-

physics of Colour.Tye, M. (1995):Ten Problems of Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Villaneuva, E. (ed.) (1996):Perception(Philosophical Issues7), Atascadero, CA:

Ridgeview Press.White, S. (1994): ‘Color and Notional Content’,Philosophical Topics22(1&2).

School of PhilosophyUniversity of Southern CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA 90089-0451USA