What is the function of color vision? In this paper, I focus on perceptual phenomena studied in psychophysics and argue that the best explanation for these phenomena is that the color visual system is a perceptual enhancement system. I first introduce two rival conceptions of the function of color vision: that color vision aims to detect or track the fine-grained colors of distal objects and scenes (Seeing Color) and that it aims to help organisms discriminate, detect, track and/or recognize ecologically (...) important objects, properties, and relations more directly (Seeing with Color). I then discuss two kinds of systematic perceptual phenomena investigated by psychophysicists: approximate color constancy and color induction. I argue from the premise that Seeing with Color better accommodates and explains these phenomena to the conclusion that it is the conception that an empirically-guided philosopher of color ought to adopt. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy of aesthetics has explored to what extent ordinary people are committed to aesthetic realism. Extant work has focused on attitudes to normativism – a key commitment of realist positions in aesthetics – the claim that aesthetic judgments/statements have correctness conditions, invariant between subjects, such that there is a fact of the matter in cases of aesthetic disagreement. The emerging picture is that ordinary people strongly and almost universally reject normativism and thus there is no strong realist tendency in (...) ordinary people’s thinking about the aesthetic. This has been taken to dissolve the traditional puzzle in aesthetics of how to best account for the fact that (a) aesthetic judgments seem intersubjectively valid, while (b) aesthetic experience seems subjective. This paper presents studies which further enrich our understanding of ordinary thinking about the aesthetic: ordinary thinking about the aesthetic may not be so vehement in its rejection of normativism; and where previous results suggested that, in many cultures, the dominant trend is to reject correctness conditions for aesthetic judgments, the current results suggest participants think aesthetic judgments have correctness conditions (albeit perhaps very finely relativized to specific circumstances of judgment). (shrink)

Johnston famously argued that the colors are, more or less inclusively speaking, dispositions to cause color experiences by arguing that this view best accommodates his five proposed core beliefs about color. Since then, Campbell, Kalderon, Gert, Benbaji, and others, have all engaged with at least some of Johnston’s proposed core beliefs in one way or another. Which propositions are core beliefs is ultimately an empirical matter. We investigate whether Johnston’s proposed core beliefs are, in fact, believed by assessing the agreement/disagreement (...) of non-philosophers with them. Two experiments are run each with large sample sizes, the second designed to address criticisms of the first. We find that non-philosophers mostly agree with the proposed core beliefs, but that they agree with some more than others. (shrink)

Recent work in folk metaethics finds a correlation between perceived consensus about a moral claim and meta-ethical judgments about whether the claim is universally or only relatively true. We argue that consensus can provide evidence for meta-normative claims, such as whether a claim is universally true. We then report several experiments indicating that people use consensus to make inferences about whether a claim is universally true. This suggests that people's beliefs about relativism and universalism are partly guided by evidence-based reasoning. (...) In a final study, we show that the rejection of universalism does not generate a simple subjectivism but is associated with a more moderate relativism on which highly atypical positions are regarded as mistaken. (shrink)

Debates about the semantics and pragmatics of predicates of personal taste have largely centered on contextualist and relativist proposals. In this paper, I argue in favor of an alternative, absolutist analysis of PPT. Theorists such as Max Kölbel and Peter Lasersohn have argued that we should dismiss absolutism due to its inability to accommodate the possibility of faultless disagreement involving PPT. My aim in the paper is to show how the absolutist can in fact accommodate this possibility by drawing on (...) an account of faultless disagreement that improves upon a recent proposal due to Karl Schafer. In amending Schafer’s proposal, I put forward an empirically informed view of our beliefs regarding matters of personal taste, as well as an account of our assertions concerning such matters. I also argue that absolutists should take disagreement about these matters to be conative, rather than doxastic, in nature. The anticipated result is an independently compelling account of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste that fits naturally with absolutism. (shrink)

In this paper I reply to two sets of criticisms—a first from Joshua Gert, and a second from Keith Allen—of the relationalist view of color developed and defended in my book, The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color Ontology.

It is widely held by philosophers not only that there is a causal condition on perception but also that the causal condition is a conceptual truth about perception. One influential line of argument for this claim is based on intuitive responses to a style of thought experiment popularized by Grice. Given the significance of these thought experiments to the literature, it is important to see whether the folk in fact respond to these cases in the way that philosophers assume they (...) should. We test folk intuitions regarding the causal theory of perception by asking our participants to what extent they agree that they would ‘see’ an object in various Gricean scenarios. We find that the intuitions of the folk do not strongly support the causal condition; they at most strongly support a ‘no blocker’ condition. We argue that this is problematic for the claim that the causal condition is a conceptual truth. (shrink)

Color relationalism holds that the colors are constituted by relations to subjects. The introspective rejoinder against this view claims that it is opposed to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. The rejoinder seems to be correct about how colors appear when looking at how participants respond to an item about the metaphysical nature of color but not when looking at an item about the ascription of colors. The present article expands the properties investigated to sound and taste and inspects the mentioned asymmetry, (...) with a particular focus on the principle of charity. Using a metaphysical item, we find that color and sound are no different from shape, our control for a clearly anti-relational property. Taste, on the other hand, is no different from likability, our control for a clearly relational property. Importantly, we find that the disparity between metaphysical and ascription items is due to participants using a principle of charity to interpret disagreement cases such that both parties can be correct. (shrink)

Are philosophers’ intuitions more reliable than philosophical novices’? Are we entitled to assume the superiority of philosophers’ intuitions just as we assume that experts in other domains have more reliable intuitions than novices? Ryberg raises some doubts and his arguments promise to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy once and for all. In this paper, I raise a number of objections to these arguments. I argue that philosophers receive sufficient feedback about the quality of their intuitions and that (...) philosophers’ experience in philosophy plausibly affects their intuitions. Consequently, the type of argument Ryberg offers fails to undermine the expertise defence of intuition-use in philosophy. (shrink)

Colour relationalism holds that the colours are constituted by relations to subjects. Anti-relationalists have claimed that this view stands in stark contrast to our phenomenally-informed, pre-theoretic intuitions. Is this claim right? Cohen and Nichols’ recent empirical study suggests not, as about half of their participants seemed to be relationalists about colour. Despite Cohen and Nichols’ study, we think that the anti-relationalist’s claim is correct. We explain why there are good reasons to suspect that Cohen and Nichols’ experimental design skewed their (...) results in favour of relationalism. We then run an improved study and find that most of our participants seem to be anti-relationalists. We find some other interesting things too. Our results suggest that the majority of ordinary people find it no less intuitive that colours are objective than that shapes are objective. We also find some evidence that when those with little philosophical training are asked about the colours of objects, their intuitions about colour and shape cases are similar, but when asked about people’s colour ascriptions, their intuitions about colour and shape cases differ. (shrink)

Predicates of personal taste have attracted a great deal of attention from philosophers of language and linguists. In the intricate debates over PPT, arguably the most central consideration has been which analysis of PPT can best account for the possibility of faultless disagreement about matters of personal taste. I argue that two models of such disagreement—the relativist and absolutist models—are empirically inadequate. In their stead, I develop a model of faultless taste disagreement which represents it as involving a novel incompatibility (...) relation between preferences that I call type-noncotenability. This model is available to all parties in the ongoing debates about PPT, but it points up an advantage enjoyed by expressivist accounts of PPT. In closing, I consider four objections against the model that, while failing to fully undermine it, open up promising avenues of inquiry about the nature of disagreement. (shrink)

Is there a problem with believing based on moral testimony? The intuition that there is a problem is a starting point for much research on moral testimony. To arbitrate between various attempts to account for intuitions about moral testimony, we need to know the exact nature of those intuitions. The current study investigates this empirically. The study confirms an asymmetry in the way we think about testimony about moral and descriptive matters and explores the extent to which this asymmetry is (...) explained by different metaphysical beliefs about the relevant domains, or beliefs about the relative background levels of deception or disagreement. (shrink)

The term ‘information’ is used extensively in biology, cognitive science and the philosophy of consciousness in relation to the concepts of ‘meaning’ and ‘causation’. While ‘information’ is a term that serves a useful purpose in specific disciplines, there is much to the concept that is problematic. Part 1 is a critique of the stance that information is an independently existing entity. On this view, and in biological contexts, systems transmit, acquire, assimilate, decode and manipulate it, and in so doing, generate (...) meaning. I provide a detailed proposal in Part 2 that supports the claim that it is the dynamic form of a system that qualifies the informational nature of meaningful interactive engagement, that is, that information is dependent on dynamic form rather than that it exists independently. In Part 3, I reflect on the importance of the distinction between the independent and dependent stances by looking specifically at the implications for how we might better interpret causation and emergence. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to show that within contemporary philosophy of perception, it has become far from clear what proponents of the Content View mean when they claim that experience has accuracy conditions and, therefore, accuracy evaluable content. Two very different interpretations can be discerned here, one which holds that content _has_ accuracy conditions and one which explicitly identifies content with such conditions. On the other hand, the paper wants to argue (...) that neither of these versions succeeds in showing why we should attribute either accuracy conditions or accuracy evaluable content to perceptual experience. To this end, I will present an elaborated argument (which focuses on the moon illusion) to show why we have as yet no reason to think that perceptual experience has accuracy conditions and, therefore, accuracy evaluable content. Instead, it will be argued that perceptual experience is best thought of as accuracy _maker_, not as something which can itself be representationally accurate or inaccurate. (shrink)