Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy Hardcover May 15, 2015

by M. Chirimuuta

Is color real or illusory, mind independent or mind dependent? Does seeing in color give us a true picture of external reality? The metaphysical debate over color has gone on at least since the seventeenth century. In this book, M. Chirimuuta draws on contemporary perceptual science to address these questions. Her account integrates historical philosophical debates, contemporary work in the philosophy of color, and recent findings in neuroscience and vision science to propose a novel theory of the relationship between color and physical reality.Chirimuuta offers an overview of philosophy's approach to the problem of color, finds the origins of much of the familiar conception of color in Aristotelian theories of perception, and describes the assumptions that have shaped contemporary philosophy of color. She then reviews recent work in perceptual science that challenges philosophers' accounts of color experience. Finally, she offers a pragmatic alternative whereby perceptual states are understood primarily as action-guiding interactions between a perceiver and the environment. The fact that perceptual states are shaped in idiosyncratic ways by the needs and interests of the perceiver does not render the states illusory. Colors are perceiver-dependent properties, and yet our awareness of them does not mislead us about the world. Colors force us to reconsider what we mean by accurately presenting external reality, and, as this book demonstrates, thinking about color has important consequences for the philosophy of perception and, more generally, for the philosophy of mind.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology

Unknown Binding

First published May 15, 2015

Reviews

[Andrew Langridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

An authoritative and engaging read, but dwelling on the conflict between the manifest image we have of the world and the scientific image does not get us very far. What a productive philosophy of colour should be concerned with is how an external object appears coloured at all. The fact that colour experience is error-prone and relative to the subject's context (admirably elucidated in this book) does not negate the fact that objects are experienced as coloured (and textured and extensive etc). But how does this happen if colours are formed in the brain, as scientific eliminitivists tell us? Is there some mysterious re-projection of colour back from the brain onto the object? What sort of weird physical process could this be? The physical realist opposition is no less challenged by the error-prone nature of colour perception. Adopting, as recommended, a relationist half-way house between the realist and eliminativist positions fails to respect the phenomenology: colour simply is not a relation, and cases of hallucination must be accommodated. The associated adverbial theory of perception (e.g. 'seeing the sky bluely') fails to capture the ‘openness’ that consciousness has to the world. In short, colours are not ways of perceiving, but ways that objects appear. The author fairly acknowledges the force of this argument, and stresses that we do not perceive colours in isolation from the world as a whole. Nevertheless, I do not feel inclined to stop teaching my child that lemons and bananas are yellow.
A more general point is that naturalistic theories of colour do not have the resources to satisfy us. The empirical 'evidence' that is brought to bear is necessarily marginal to the argument, since if objects did not appear any way at all there would be no empirical science at all.

[SY · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subject of the book is the philosophical problem of color vision, and there the most contested question is probably the realism vs anti-realism debate, i.e., whether colors are real properties that exist 'out there' in the physical world, which the perceiver detect; or they exist only in the mind of the perceiver, which is to say, the physical world itself is colorless and our minds 'color-in.'

The author did an amazing job of balancing dry scientific findings, descriptive diagnostics of historical approaches, and stimulating philosophical discussion. Chirimuuta's 'centrist' thesis revolves around three main ideas: (a) a 'relationalist' account that posits that the problem of color vision rests not with the interior-exterior divide, but rather, it should be considered in relation to a triangulation between the stimuli, the perceiver, and her environment (in the opening chapters, Chirimuuta has some super interesting things to say about how the anti-realist view of color as 'secondary quality' is in fact the long-tail of an allergic reaction towards medieval Christian scholasticism - I wish she had expanded on that); (b) a 'perpetual pragmatism' that posits that our minds do not 'color-in' the world, but rather, we 'color-for' perceptual tasks that serve some specific perceptual function that help us see better, e.g., distinguish between an object and its shadow, or judge the ripeness of a piece of fruit, etc., tasks that might give us evolutionary advantages; and (c) finally, what she calls 'adverbalism' which posits that colors are not 'things' that are either in the mind or out there in the world, but rather properties of 'events': the dynamic processes of visioning that occur between the object, the viewer, and the environment.

I am a total sucker for philosophical positions that sit in-between polar opposits, so I find Chirimuuta's account both satisfying and comforting, though, I do wonder whether by 'drawing the circle bigger' as it were one hasn't already conceded to the color-as-secondary property account, if only by attitude - even if now nobody in particular could be held responsible for the 'secondariness of color,' or for 'inaccuracies' in color vision, because an illusion that serves a perceptual function cannot be called erroneousness according to Chirimuuta. For me, there is just something that isn't fully intuitive in this story. I am inclined to call out a perceptual illusion when I see one, which is to say, as a viewer I am normally committed to some sort of 'standard viewing condition,' so that the green-allover-tint of a night-vision landscape (https://www.lumineq.com/blog/night-vi...) will always strike me as 'non-standard,' even if, in its unmediated and inadequately-lit condition, the landscape will 'leave me in the dark.'

Anyway, I was totally stimulated by this book, it's a lot easier to get through than I had imagined, and I highly recommend it.

[Hind · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting stuff but a bit too much philosophical jargon for me.

[Nat]

I got into an interesting conversation with a waitress at my coffee shop (who studied art history at Cambridge) as a result of reading this book there one afternoon. Color is a topic in philosophy that people find inherently interesting, which is lucky for people who work on color (as opposed to, say, scalar implicature).

Chirimuuta's book is very enjoyable and, though I think I disagree with the positive (adverbialist) position she defends, I found her discussions of the conflict between the "common sense" conception of color and color science and metaphysics compelling, and her resistance to the standard phenomenological arguments against relationism is awesome.

[jeremiah]

I think one of Chirimuuta's most challenging suggestions is that we can find evidence to support any conceptual framework we initially favor. Though color antirealists cite empirical evidence that ostensibly proves their position, Chirimuuta demonstrates that the pragmatic, adverbial, Gibson-inspired approach to color is something to be reckoned with, despite venturing into the strange, mysterious land of process-based philosophy.

[Milton Brasher-Cunningham · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have become interested in color theory, history, and philosophy because I'm chasing a book idea that will use color as a primary metaphor. As I began reading, I thought this book might be a bit over my head, but Chirimuuta conveys very complicated material in a very accessible way. I don't mean I understood everything, but I learned a great deal. And it helped me move toward my own goal.

[Mills College Library]

121.35 C5417 2015