The Red and the Real by Cohen Jonathan;

Author:Cohen, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2010-03-01T16:00:00+00:00

6

RELATIONALISM DEFENDED: PHENOMENOLOGY

Colors are visibilia, or they are nothing.

— (Strawson, 1979, 56).

But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences makes us know is very likely to be wrong.

— (Russell, 1912, 7).

Perhaps the most frequently pressed forms of opposition to relational theories of color turn on issues about color phenomenology. I have in mind two different types of phenomenological complaints against color relationalism. The first, and more common, type alleges that relationalism represents colors in a way inconsistent with the way in which phenomenology represents them. Although this complaint has been developed in a number of ways, the basic thought is that there is here a clash between theory and data — between relationalism as a proposed metaphysics of color and the manifest evidence of color phenomenology — that should be resolved by giving up the theory. A second worry grounded in phenomenology alleges that relationalism suffers from a more theoretical shortcoming: here the concern is that relational theories of color are unable to provide an account of what color experience amounts to, or at any rate, that they cannot be combined with important and widely held theoretical claims about the metaphysics of color experience without giving rise to incoherence, regress, or uninformativeness.

Now, most of the objections of both types that occur in the literature are directed against dispositionalist theories; this is unsurprising, since the elaboration and defense of non-dispositionalist forms of relationalism is a relatively recent development. However, it seems clear that many of the arguments we’ll be considering are applicable to forms of relationalism other than dispositionalism. Of course, it is my goal for this part of the book to defend relationalism generally speaking, rather than this or that particular form of relationalism; consequently, while it will sometimes smooth exposition for me to treat the objections in this chapter in the anti-dispositionalist form in which they come, I’ll also comment on the potential extension of my defenses to other forms of relationalism as well.

My aim in this chapter will be to defend relationalism against both types of phenomenological objections. It will be my contention that color relationalism is not in conflict with our phenomenological evidence about color (§§6.1–6.3), and that it presents no special difficulties regarding the metaphysics of color experience (§§6.4–6.5).

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