Questions for Discussion
At the 2002 Color
Perception: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives meeting in
San Diego, the participants assembled a list of questions about color
that they would like to discuss in more detail.
This list of questions follows.
Between now and the 2003 meeting in Vancouver, participants are
invited to submit short (~1 page) answers to any of these
questions by email (ascii or
html preferred) to joncohenREMOVETHIS@aardvark.ucsd.edu (omit text in caps, which reduces automated spam).
I will upload whatever answers I receive to this page for general
consumption.
Questions
- What is the relation between the projects philosophers and
psychologists work on when they study color? Do their studies
complement one another or are they on different tracks?
- Is there a "hard problem" of color consciousness? Should
philosophers be interested in it? Should psychologists be interested
in it?
- Why care about the veridicality of color perception?
- What different concepts of color are there?
- What is the relation between color experience and color
neurophysiology? Isomorphism? Correspondence? Identity? What is the
physiological basis of trichromacy? Of color imagery?
- Does individual variation in color perception put a strain on
our understanding of color experience? Of color appearance? Of color
ontology? Does it threaten notions of veridicality?
- Why is there color awareness, over and above that of the ability to
discriminate among the colors?
- What does it mean to say "color vision has the (teological)
function F"? Does such a question have empirical content?
- What is the relationship between achromatopsia and blindsight for
color?
- Is there a color categorization scheme that is independent of
language?
- Why are the color categories disparate in shape and size in
color-appearance space?
- What wrinkles do we add to the theory of color appearance when
we take account of colors like gold, silver, and mother of pearl?
Where do colors end and surface properties begin? Can we take care
of such qualities just by adding to the dimensionality of color
appearance space?
- Do dichromats, tetrachromats, and other non-standard color
perceivers simply imitate the normal use of color terms? Or can they
be said to have the same basis for color categorization that normal
perceivers do?