Javascript must be enabled to continue!

Are the Colours of Things Secondary Qualities?

View through CrossRef

This chapter challenges the notion that the colours we believe to belong to the objects we see are ‘secondary’ qualities of those objects. Such a notion is endorsed by John McDowell, who has explained why he thinks the author is wrong to resist it. McDowell recognizes that the author’s focus on the conditions of successfully unmasking the metaphysical status of the colours of things is a way of trying to make sense of whatever notion of reality is involved in it. However, the author argues that the notion of reality he is concerned with is ‘independent reality’, not simply the general notion of reality. He also contends that an exclusively dispositional conception of an object’s being a certain colour cannot account for the perceptions we have of the colours of things.

Oxford University Press

Oxford Scholarship Online

Title: Are the Colours of Things Secondary Qualities?

Description:

This chapter challenges the notion that the colours we believe to belong to the objects we see are ‘secondary’ qualities of those objects.

Such a notion is endorsed by John McDowell, who has explained why he thinks the author is wrong to resist it.

McDowell recognizes that the author’s focus on the conditions of successfully unmasking the metaphysical status of the colours of things is a way of trying to make sense of whatever notion of reality is involved in it.

However, the author argues that the notion of reality he is concerned with is ‘independent reality’, not simply the general notion of reality.

He also contends that an exclusively dispositional conception of an object’s being a certain colour cannot account for the perceptions we have of the colours of things.

Related Results

What Motivates Getting Things Done

A marvel of evolution is that humans are not solely motivated by their desire to experience positive emotions. They are also motivated, and even driven to achieve, by their attempt...

Syntactic Details

In Chapter 2 the author proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean two things—the property of being grey, and a certain way of looking (which are distinct thi...

When we claim that some things matter, we might mean only that these things matter to people. Suffering matters, for example, in the sense that people care about suffering. No one ...

Colours and Shapes

The property which perceptual experiences of a given phenomenal kind enable the subject to track is not always identical with the property objects appear to have (in a phenomenally...

Carl von Clausewitz and Moral Victories

Clausewitz’s theory of war has been described as quintessentially instrumental, an interpretation that hinges on his oft-cited dictum of war as policy/politics by other means. Howe...

Prehistoric Figurines in Sudan

The chapter presents a descriptive account of Neolithic site inventories containing figurines in the Sudan Nile Valley. Cattle figurines indicate that animal husbandry played an im...

The foregoing chapters trace a profound literary response to a redistribution of the perceptible, a socio-cultural turning away from the tangible experience of existence to forms o...

Encountering Material Culture Through Archaeological Fiction

Investigating the representation of artefacts, objects and ‘things’ in a range of predominantly Western archaeological fiction from the late Victorian period to the modern day, thi...