Colour vision and seeing colours

Journal article

Colour vision plays a foundational explanatory role in the philosophy of colour, and serves as perennial quarry in the wider philosophy of perception. I present two contributions to our understanding of this notion. The first is to develop a constitutive approach to characterising colour vision. This approach seeks to comprehend the nature of colour vision qua psychological kind, as contrasted with traditional experiential approaches, which prioritise descriptions of our ordinary visual experience of colour. The second contribution is to argue that colour vision does not constitutively involve the ability to see colours, in a natural and categorically committed sense. I argue that two subjects exactly alike in respect of their constitutive colour vision abilities could differ in respect of whether or not they have categorical perception of colour. The argument is supported by thought experiment and dissociations observed in cognitive neuropsychology. The argument also bears connections to recent neo-Whorfian accounts of colour categorisation.

Authors: Davies, W

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
• Volume: 69
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 657-690
• Publication date: 2017-01-26
• Acceptance date: 2015-12-12
• DOI: 10.1093/bjps/axw026
• ISSN: 1464-3537