Rival Views

This chapter considers Cohen’s relationalism and Kalderon’s pluralism. An overarching point is to challenge the assumption that we should employ the same strategy for dealing with intrapersonal, interpersonal, and interspecies variation in color experience. Against this assumption, the chapter argues that intrapersonal variation in color appearances can be analogized to intrapersonal variation in shape appearances; different perspectives yield different appearances, with no suggestion that just one of the appearances is the uniquely correct one. But the same is not true for interpersonal variation in color appearance, which is better explained by the vagueness of objective colors. And in the interspecies case, since the varying color appearances are taken from different color spaces altogether, we need not hold that there is even a prima facie conflict in appearances that needs to be resolved by Cohen’s relativizing strategy. Rather, in this case Kalderon’s pluralism provides the best solution.