Friendlier Rivals

This chapter considers Keith Allen’s heroic primitivism and Derek Brown’s layering view. Both views hold that our experience of a color can vary with perspective, without that variation entailing any error or illusion. But Allen rejects one of the core theses of the hybrid view; he takes the existence of widespread agreement about rough objective colors to suggest that disagreements about precise color appearances reflect a lack of precision in our visual systems, rather than the absence of a precise fact of the matter. That is, he seems to hold that there is always a precise and determinate fact of the matter regarding the objective colors of objects. And Brown takes a similar view, holding that the colors of opaque surfaces can be located, precisely, in HSL space or something similar. The chapter argues that this determinacy assumption leads to problems.