On the Genealogy of Color by Adams Zed

Author:Adams, Zed [Zed Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317401896
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

In this comment, Descartes is pointing out that according to his account of the visual process, the sameness or difference of inner psychological effects allows us to know that they are being produced by the same or different external causes. In neither case, however, does this allow us to know what these external causes are.

When Descartes says that “We know size, shape and so forth in quite a different way from the way in which we know colours, pains and the like” (CSM I 217 [emphasis in original]) he is introducing a distinction between sensory-transduction-independent knowledge and sensory-transduction-dependent knowledge, akin to the difference between knowing phone numbers and knowing ring tones. For example, on Descartes’s account of the visual process, our sensory knowledge of color essentially involves inner physiological effects of external physical causes, where there is an arbitrary relationship between these inner effects and their external causes, in virtue of the contingent way in which the retina just happens to transduce the motion of light.36 It is in this sense that our knowledge of color is sensory-transduction-dependent. By contrast, on the assumption that it is possible to know about the external physical causes of color experiences in a way that does not itself consist in knowing only the arbitrary assignment of inner physiological effects to these external causes, then there is a sensory-transduction-independent way of knowing about these causes. (Descartes himself thinks our knowledge of shape is an example of this other sort of knowledge. One need not agree with his choice of example in order to agree that there is this distinction between sensory-transduction-independent and sensory-transduction-dependent sorts of knowledge.) The objects of these two different sorts of knowledge are primary and secondary qualities. On this way of understanding the distinction, primary qualities are sensory-transduction-independent objects of knowledge and secondary qualities are sensory-transduction-dependent objects of knowledge.37

With the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in place, we can now bring out how it makes possible a distinctive sort of error. The error would be to think that our knowledge of secondary qualities is knowledge of primary qualities, or that sensory-transduction-dependent knowledge is the same as sensory-transduction-independent knowledge. Here is how Descartes introduces the possibility of this distinctive sort of error:

[W]e easily fall into the error of judging that what is called colour in objects is something exactly like the colour of which we have sensory awareness; and we make the mistake of thinking that we clearly perceive what we do not perceive at all. (CSM I 218)

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