Against Color Objectivism

Abstract

In this thesis I discuss objectivist, subjectivist, and relativist ontological accounts of phenomenal experience. My focus is on color vision as a case study because perception of color can reveal challenges about these positions easier. Color objectivism is the ontological view that colors are mind-independent and intrinsic properties instantiated in the physical objects. Despite intuitiveness and popularity, color objectivism faces serious objections considering what science can reveal about the nature of color. I argue how one can deny that colors are fully mind independent properties instantiated in the physical objects and simultaneously provide an explanation that accounts for human perception. I argue that objectivism fails because it assumes that the visual system explicitly recovers the stimulus features, e.g. color, as properties of the physical world, while this assumption cannot account for human psychophysical data. I briefly explain that given the inability of the visual system to access the properties of the physical world, an adequate empirical theory of vision can provide a causal relationship between the physical world and the phenomenal world by linking the biologically determined stimuli in the physical world to useful perceptual responses in the subjective world without any need for recovering properties of the physical world. This paradigm suggests a mind dependent phenomenal world, which although causally is related to the physical world but cannot be reduced to the properties of the physical world. However, this conclusion gives rise to a dilemma of whether accepting a fully subjectivist account of color or a relativist account about ontological status of colors which I try to address in the end.