Tye's missing shade of blue

Abstract

Pure hues are those that are perceived as not being tinged with any other hue. Pure blue is a blue with no perceived component of green, violet or red. A striking empirical finding is that individuals with normal colour vision disagree about which specific hues are pure. What looks like pure blue to John will look like a greenish blue to Jane. This seems to pose a problem for the common-sense view that colours are properties of physical objects or their surfaces. Tye (2006a) notes that this finding has been used to criticize colour objectivism and representationalist accounts of the phenomenal character of colour experience, and to support projectionist views that hold that ‘colour is something we erroneously project onto the world’ (2006a: 174). Projectionism includes the subjectivist view that colours are internal states or properties of the perceiver. Tye’s broad aim is to offer a scenario that accounts...