Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: Suppose you and I belong to the same linguistic community and express in our public behaviour just the same colour discriminations and comparisons. Could you and I still have inverted colour experiences? Some philosophers think so. 1 In recent years, those who have doubted this have often appealed to the various "asymmetries " between colours as we perceive them. The argument has been roughly this: The relevant inversion requires that our colour experiences could differ with respect to their intrinsic qualities while having the same structure or form. But a close consideration of colours as we see them shows that this is not possible. For example, orange is perceived as a mix of yellow and red but red is not perceived as a mix of any two colours. A significantly darkened blue still looks blue while a significantly darkened yellow does not look yellow. Again, red is generally perceived as a warm colour while green is perceived as a cool colour. Because of these and many other differences, the intrinsic qualities of our experiences could not differ systematically while having the same structure. 2 However, the existence of such asymmetries is not the only difficulty for the view that you and I could be spectrum inverted while expressing the same colour discriminations and comparisons. Nor, I think, is it the main difficulty. I shall argue that the main difficulty is instead to give a satisfactory account of what you and I would believe and say on such a scenario. This problem is independent of any consideration regarding asymmetries. And as far as I am aware, nobody has to this day made plausible that it can be solved. In section 1, I specify the scenario I will consider. In section 2, I present an argument for its impossibility. In section 3, I consider some recent accounts of spectrum inversion. I try to illustrate, here, that contemporary defenders of the
Author: Pär Sundström
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W92629222