Noddy Lam
Affiliation: King's College London
Category: Philosophy
Keywords: John McDowell, Dispositionalism, Transparency of Colour Experience, Categoricity of Colours, Selectionism, Partiality of Perception
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:30
Location: Room 154 (154)
View the full session: The Senses
I argue that McDowell’s key insight on the nature of colour and colour experience – that human subjectivity is inevitably involved – can be detached from his stronger claim that colours are dispositions constituted by human subjectivity.
In the first section, I briefly explicate some key aspects of McDowell’s dispositionalism – that to be red is to be such as to look red to normal perceivers under normal circumstances. I first present McDowell’s thought that human vision has contingently evolved to be capable of chromatic vision that’s over and above mere sensitivity to light and dark, and that’s sufficiently uniform for the possibility of agreement in colour judgments, which itself is a condition for the possibility of colour concepts, and how this leads McDowell to suggest that “[this] contingent uniformity… enters into the very constitution of the properties themselves.” (2011, 230; emphasis added).
I explain the importance of McDowell’s distinction between “subjectivity1/objectivity1” and “subjectivity2/objectivity2”. Whereas colours as dispositions are “subjective1” in that we can only adequately understand colour ascriptions in terms of “certain subjective states” – visual experiences of how colours look to us – they are “objective2” as they are there to be experienced – the existence of an object’s disposition to look red is independent of any particular instance of its actually looking red (1985, 113). This distinction purports to secure objectivity in some sense for colours as dispositions, allowing McDowell to claim that “the point is not... that the idea of something’s being [red] is an idea of something subjective… [but] that there is a subjective element in the content of the idea itself” (2011, 228-229).
Based on this, I suggest that McDowell’s key claim can be read as, if colours are constituted by their looks in human subjective experiences, then colours are dispositions to look the relevant ways.
In the second section, I present an objection towards McDowell’s dispositionalism, following Campbell (2005; 2006) and Brewer (2011), concerning the categoricity of colours. If colours are dispositions constituted by our subjective experiential states (i.e. their perceptual appearances), this implies an individuative and explanatory priority from perceptual appearances to worldly properties. The fundamental distinction between different colour properties – redness and greenness – is at the level of appearances – red-type and green-type appearances – conceived independently of their worldly correlates, the mind-independent properties that may or may not be (re)presented by those appearances. The properties of redness and greenness that apply to mind-independent objects are derivatively defined, as precisely those of being disposed to produce red-type and green-type appearances, respectively.
But the phenomenology of our colour experience is such that colours are presented as the categorical properties with which we are acquainted, which ground various dispositions of objects to look various ways to us. By being transparent to the qualitative character of redness in colour experience, we are transparent to the ground of the unity of objects that are red. We derivatively individuate and group certain experiences as red-type. I build on Campbell’s idea that colours are presented in experience as a categorical property of objects on which direct, selective intervention is possible, and why it is essential to our grasp of what it is for it to be true that an object has the colour it has. As such, our understanding of the truth of a colour ascription goes beyond “certain subjective states” the object may produce.
If this objection shows that colours are not dispositions but categorical properties, then by contraposition of McDowell’s key claim, colours are not constituted by their looks.
In the last section, I propose in detail a form of selectionism which accommodates human subjectivity in colour perception, even though it doesn’t constitute colours. Let’s suppose that human beings, with their idiosyncratic perceptual system, have a distinctive “colour perspective” on the world. Some animals and some humans do not occupy a “colour perspective”, because they lack the necessary perceptual system with the ability to track colour properties. But this does not mean that the “colour perspective” that most humans have on the world is the only one that allows perceptual access to colour properties.
Our “colour perspective” is partial: If there are indefinitely many regularities and properties in the environment and the ones that our perceptual system “selects” are those made perceptually available for us, then there are properties that are in principle perceptually available, but which are not determined by a given perception of ours (see Kalderon 2011); instead they might be selected and made perceptually available to another creature with a distinct type of “colour perspective”. Importantly, our “colour perspective” does not constitute the chromatic features perceptually available to us. I contend that the partiality of our “colour perspective” commits us to be neutral on whether we and another creature perceive two distinct chromatic qualities co-instantiated on the same surface, or two distinct qualitative aspects of the same chromatic quality.
I reflect on why it doesn’t seem to us that we occupy a partial “colour perspective”, by comparing it with our partial visuo-spatial perspective on the world. The thought is that we can appreciate the fact that the limits of what we can see on a given perception depends on the limits of our visual field and our orientation rather than the limits of the objects of perception, by reflecting on our visual phenomenology over time (c.f. Soteriou 2013, 130-132; 2025). However, the act of selection by our perceptual system do not show up in a similar manner in our colour phenomenology over time. This negative aspect of our colour phenomenology might invite the thought that the range of colours one has perceptual access to is grounded on some objective fact about colours, namely that the range of colours one has perceptual access to exhausts the range of colour(-like) properties that objects can possess, hence the thought that we don’t occupy a partial perspective on colours.
I end by showing how my proposal accommodates the spirit of McDowell’s claim that colours are “subjective1” but “objective2”, without committing to his dipositionalism.