In this course we'll address color from a variety of philosophical and scientific perspectives. Although the amount of time spent on each topic will be decided largely by student interest, we'll organize our discussions around the following themes:

• Color Science

  Color has been studied by many scientific disciplines. For example, physicists have studied the wide range of physical mechanisms that cause color appearances. Researchers in the field of colorimetry have developed methods for the precise measurement of colors. Computational theories of color vision have been developed in an attempt to specify the algorithms by which the eye extracts information about the colors of objects from the distribution of energy falling on the retina. In addition, there is a rich physiology and psychophysics of human color vision directed at modeling ways in which retinal and cortical physiology, viewing conditions, and environmental factors affect color perception. Finally, evolutionary biologists have attempted to evaluate various computational theories of color vision asking how natural selection would have favored organisms whose visual systems implemented the computational accounts in question, given the particular natural environment in which we evolved.

  These issues are all extremely interesting in their own right, but I'm also interested in finding out whether and how such studies can be used to constrain philosophical theorizing about color.

• Color Ontology

  Philosophers have defended a wide variety of views on the ontology of color. For example, eliminativists claim that (strictly speaking) nothing is colored; sense-data theorists hold that colors are properties of mental items which we ordinarily but (perhaps erroneously) project onto external items in the world; dispositionalists think colors should be understood as dispositions of external objects to produce characteristic experiences in minds like ours; and physicalists hold that colors are mind-independent physical properties of objects.

  Besides taking the time to set out these views in enough detail to see what's at stake between them, we'll want to ask how we might argue for one of them over others, and which (if any) of them is correct.

• Color Experience and the Nature of Mind

  Especially in the last twenty five years, many philosophers of mind and cognitive psychologists have begun to suspect that the most widely accepted functionalist theories (broadly speaking) of our mental states and their relations to the world cannot account for the qualitative aspects of our experience, and therefore are at best incomplete theories of mentality. In discussing these matters, writers have often singled out color experiences as a particularly vivid class of experiences which seem to resist incorporation by functionalism; some of the challenges are the inverted spectrum (might your experience of red things differ from mine, despite the coordination of our linguistic and non-linguistic behavior?), phenomenal zombies (could there be a creature utterly lacking in phenomenal experiences of red things, despite coordinating his behavior with ours?), and knowledge arguments (would a super-smart scientist who knew everything about color and color perception but had never seen anything red learn something new on seeing her first ripe tomato?). Other thinkers, bent on defending functionalism, have argued that the troubles such cases raise for functionalism are only apparent.

  What should we make of these cases, and how damaging are they to existing accounts of our mentality?

Schedule

Week 1: Preliminaries, laying out the territory, modification of the schedule, sign up for presentation assignments.

Week 2: Intro to Color Science
Byrne and Hilbert volume 2, "Introduction"; Hardin, Color For Philosophers, chapter 1

Week 3: Physics, Colorimetry, and Psychophysics
Nassau, "The Causes of Color"; MacAdam, "The Physical Basis of Color Specification"; Hurvich, Color Vision, chapters 5-6

Week 4: Computational Theories of Color Vision
Land, "Recent Advances in Retinex Theory"; Wandell, "Color Constancy and the Natural Image"

Week 5: Comparative Color Vision and Evolution
Shepard, "The Perceptual Organization of Colors: An Adaptation to Regularities of the Terrestrial World?"; Thompson et al., "Ways of Coloring"

Week 6: Dispositions, Dispositional Theories of Color
McLaughlin, "Dispositions" (in Blackwell Companion to Metaphysics); McGinn, The Subjective View, chapter 2; Boghossian and Velleman, "Color as a Secondary Quality"

Week 7: Dispositional Theories Continued
Johnston, "How to Speak of the Colors" (including postscript)

Week 8: Color Eliminativism
Hardin, Color For Philosophers, chapter 2; Maund, Colours: Their Nature and Representation, chapter 2

Week 9: Primary Quality Theories of Color
Hilbert, Color and Color Perception, chapters 4-5; Lewis, "Naming the Colors"; Byrne and Hilbert, "Colors and Reflectances"

Week 10: Functionalist Primary Quality Theories of Color
Jackson and Pargetter, "An Objectivist's Guide to Subjectivism about Color"; Cohen, Color Properties and Color Perception: A Functionalist Account, chapters 1-2

Week 11: Experience, Color Experience, and Identity Theories
Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes"; Kripke, "The Identity Thesis" (= Naming and Necessity, 144-155)
(A useful background reading for those unfamiliar with issues about consciousness in philosophy of mind is Guzeldere, "The Many Faces of Consciousness: A Field Guide".)

Week 12: Intentionalist Accounts of Color Experience
Harman, "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience"; Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness, chapters 4-5

Week 13: Spectrum Inversions
Shoemaker, "The Inverted Spectrum"; Byrne and Hilbert, "Colors and Reflectances"; Hardin, "Reinverting the Spectrum"; Cohen, "Inverted Spectra, Inverted Earth, and Other Philosophical Curiosities"

Week 14: The Knowledge Argument and the Explanatory Gap
Jackson, "What Mary Didn't Know"; Levine, "On Leaving Out What It's Like"; Loar, "Phenomenal States" (second version)

Week 15: Catch Up and Summary