Subjectivism and “Unmasking”

Abstract

Barry Stroud' s The Quest for Reality is a fine book that requires and repays several re-readings. Among the book's many virtues is its appropriate skepticism towards the metaphysical ambition to treat some basic physical science as a fundamental ontology, an exhaustive account of what there is and how it hangs together. When Galileo concluded that mathematics was the key to the labyrinth of nature, he was prepared to treat all qualitative aspects of reality as sensational effects produced in us by a world that was essentially quantitative in character. This subjectivization of quality, its into the mind, was perhaps initially driven by a reluctance to examine the abstractive preconditions of developing and deploying a quantitative vocabulary. Certain topics, among them sensed qualities, had to be set aside because they were not amenable to treatment in such terms. As Stroud emphasizes, to simply go on to suppose that such sensed qualities are not to be found in the world because they are not amenable to such treatment is unmotivated metaphysics, not a simple deliverance of any physical science. The question remains whether the metaphysics can be motivated, and the great sources of motivation for the introjection of quality have been the arguments from hallucination and variation. In this book, Stroud does not address those arguments, but rather aims for a result, which if achieved, would seriously inhibit the metaphysical ambition. Stroud focuses on color, in particular on two subjectivizing treatments of the colors, namely the error theory and the dispositional theory. Against the error theory, he aims to show that it is not coherently avowable; the so-called unmasker who ostensibly denies that external objects are colored is not in a position to find the very perceptions of color objects and the very beliefs about the colors of things that he deems non-veridical or false. Against the dispositionalist, Stroud argues that the theory is open to serious counterexample, which it cannot meet except by resorting to a gambit that undermines the very distinction which subjectivists care so much about, the distinction between so-called secondary qualities like the colors and primary qualities like being ovoid.