Stroud's Quest for Reality

Abstract

Once the metaphysical project's failure to reveal the unreality or subjectivity of color is admitted (if it is), I think there is a temptation to conclude that objects really are colored after all. If the austere conception of an objectively colorless world cannot be reached, and the colors of things cannot be shown to be unreal or subjective, we are inclined to think that they must be real and objective. This temptation is well worth examining and resisting. To yield to it would be to accept what looks like a metaphysical account on the same level as but in direct opposition to the view of reality as completely colorless. It would be a reassuring, positive answer to the same metaphysical question to which the subjectivist and the unmasker hoped to give one or another kind of negative answer: do our perceptions and beliefs involving the colors of things represent anything that is part of the world independently of us? There are good reasons for not inferring from what has gone before that the answer to this question is 'Yes'. (192)