Sense-experience, Colours and Tastes

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to make a point about our understanding of judgments of colour and taste. I shall defend two main theses; (A) that a person's own experience is, in a sense to be elucidated, epistemologicallyfundamental, and (B) that this feature is not to be analysed as the provision of premisses in the form of statements about experience for inferential knowledge of colours and tastes. I shall begin by presenting some very simple cases to show this fundamental epistemological role of a person's own experience. Although these simple cases do encapsulate the essence of the matter, something philosophically convincing is only going to come out of an extended commentary on them. In the second section a crucial objection will be considered at length, and more cases presented. In section III I shall consider a further ramification of the points made so far. This section will conclude the defence of the first main thesis; section IV will be devoted to the second main thesis.