Re:The Problem of Colour
by dragonwriter on Wednesday December 13, 2017 @10:34AM
(#15914837)
Is that a hostile parody of philosophy?
> Focus on a colour in your immediate environment and ask yourself whether that could really be only a figment of your mind, or at best radically different from the way it appears.
That question, which seems to be the bottom line on color before moving to the even more problematic broadening of the issue in the conclusion, is quite lazy; the answer is self-evident yes, and that's true even for traits that the article notes fundamentally do apply to objects (like shape), as anyone who has ever looked through a distorting lens or mirror (or had a visual hallucination) can readily attest.
He “problem”, such as it is, of color is not that a color one perceives might be different from the actual color of the object, but that color is not a property of objects at all, but instead an artifact of compressing information carried by the wavelengths of light impacting the eye to a smaller-dimensonal space, and that even the wavelengths of light that will be received is not purely a trait of the object perceived, but an effect of the combination of several of its traits with features of the environment. But, of courses this isn't a problem for anything out a particular preference for the nature of reality, it's just a well-established fact. At some point our model of reality must be adapted to known facts rather than merely reflecting what we'd prefer to believe.
The ultimate conclusion of the piece goes even further off the rails.
> Moreover, colour is arguably only the thin end of the wedge. One of the reasons why colours are philosophically interesting is that they provide an illustration of general problems that arise in thinking about the “manifest image” of the world, or the world as it appears to us as conscious subjects. It is not just colours that are under threat. Similar problems arise for aesthetic properties like beauty
That beauty is not an inherent property of objects but a subjective response of the observer has been indisputable and widely recognized for much longer than the same is true for color, so that’s a ludicrous thing to point to when claiming color is the thin edge of the wedge.
> for moral properties like right and wrong
Well, yes, this is the philosophically most interesting one, and it's worthy of discussion, but this piece doesn't even begin to be that discussion, or even indirectly illuminate the issue.
> —even for what philosophers have traditionally called “primary qualities” like shape and size.
Well, sure, somethingnsimilar applies there, though the problem there is somewhat different, and connects to the more fundamental problem that the objects to which we apply traits aren't fundamental entities, but arbitrary and subjective divisions of the underlying reality.
> Focus on a colour in your immediate environment and ask yourself whether that could really be only a figment of your mind, or at best radically different from the way it appears.
That question, which seems to be the bottom line on color before moving to the even more problematic broadening of the issue in the conclusion, is quite lazy; the answer is self-evident yes, and that's true even for traits that the article notes fundamentally do apply to objects (like shape), as anyone who has ever looked through a distorting lens or mirror (or had a visual hallucination) can readily attest.
He “problem”, such as it is, of color is not that a color one perceives might be different from the actual color of the object, but that color is not a property of objects at all, but instead an artifact of compressing information carried by the wavelengths of light impacting the eye to a smaller-dimensonal space, and that even the wavelengths of light that will be received is not purely a trait of the object perceived, but an effect of the combination of several of its traits with features of the environment. But, of courses this isn't a problem for anything out a particular preference for the nature of reality, it's just a well-established fact. At some point our model of reality must be adapted to known facts rather than merely reflecting what we'd prefer to believe.
The ultimate conclusion of the piece goes even further off the rails.
> Moreover, colour is arguably only the thin end of the wedge. One of the reasons why colours are philosophically interesting is that they provide an illustration of general problems that arise in thinking about the “manifest image” of the world, or the world as it appears to us as conscious subjects. It is not just colours that are under threat. Similar problems arise for aesthetic properties like beauty
That beauty is not an inherent property of objects but a subjective response of the observer has been indisputable and widely recognized for much longer than the same is true for color, so that’s a ludicrous thing to point to when claiming color is the thin edge of the wedge.
> for moral properties like right and wrong
Well, yes, this is the philosophically most interesting one, and it's worthy of discussion, but this piece doesn't even begin to be that discussion, or even indirectly illuminate the issue.
> —even for what philosophers have traditionally called “primary qualities” like shape and size.
Well, sure, somethingnsimilar applies there, though the problem there is somewhat different, and connects to the more fundamental problem that the objects to which we apply traits aren't fundamental entities, but arbitrary and subjective divisions of the underlying reality.