The Colors of Things

What are colors, and do objects truly possess them? Many scientists and philosophers deny that colors are objective features of the material world. Instead, colors are often regarded as creations of the mind or as essentially dependent on observers’ experiences. This book examines a wide range of conceptual and empirical arguments for such views and finds them ultimately untenable: neither armchair reflection, nor the physics of light, nor the variability of color experience within or across observers undermines the mind-independence of color. The book develops a novel theory called light-interaction primitivism . On this view, colors are observer-independent and irreducible properties constitutively linked to the ways in which objects interact with light. Moreover, the colors of objects are characterized as having multiple ‘faces’ or ‘aspects’ that phenomenally distinct experiences veridically represent. The theory preserves our commonsense understanding of color while accommodating the complexity of color vision revealed by empirical research.