Abstract
The paper presents color as a case study for the analysis of phenomena that pertain to several levels of reality and are typically framed by different sciences and disciplines. Color, in fact, is studied by physics, biology, phenomenology, and esthetics, among others. Our thesis is that color is a different entity for each level of reality, and that for this reason color generates different observables in the epistemologies of the different sciences. By analyzing color as a paradigmatic case of an entity naturally spreading over different levels of reality, the paper raises the question as to whether making explicit the usually implicit ontological assumptions embedded within the different observables exploited by the different sciences may eventually clarify some of the difficulties of developing a comprehensive theory of color.
Highlights
What is color? Is it a quality of the phenomenal appearance or a property of the physical object? Or both? How are the phenomenal quality and the physical property related to each other? As well known, widely different answers have been provided
Among them are the following: color realism based on the reflectance of light by surfaces, that is, physics; phenomenal objectivism based on sensory-motor contingencies; color subjectivism based on qualia, i.e., atomic color experiences; color as brain product based on the effects of objects within us, from the point of view of the nervous system; and color dispositionalism based on the effects of objects within us, from the point of view of our experiential states
If someone states that things seen must first be experienced as if they were in the brain, he has not realized that the first part of his statement refers to the visual field as a fact of experience, whilst in the second part, where he uses the expression “the brain,” he is speaking of a physical object in physical space
Summary
What is color? Is it a quality of the phenomenal (subjective) appearance or a property of the physical object? Or both? How are the phenomenal quality and the physical property related to each other? As well known, widely different answers have been provided. Among them are the following: color realism based on the reflectance of light by surfaces, that is, physics; phenomenal objectivism based on sensory-motor contingencies; color subjectivism based on qualia, i.e., atomic color experiences; color as brain product based on the effects of objects within us, from the point of view of the nervous system; and color dispositionalism based on the effects of objects within us, from the point of view of our experiential states (on the different epistemological stances see Byrne and Hilbert, 1997) Theories on these various matters have analyzed aspects concerning the nature of stimuli, the workings of the neurons, sensory response, the eminently qualitative nature of phenomenal vision, or aesthetic yield. Even the identification of colors raises major problems: to wit, the color matching procedure, on which most colorimetry is based (Boynton, 1979; Brainard, 1995; Koenderink and van Doorn, 2003; Koenderink, 2010), exploits a severely www.frontiersin.org
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