Colors are of philosophical interest for two kinds of reason. One is that colors comprise such a large and important portion of our social, personal and epistemological lives and so a philosophical account of our concepts of color is highly desirable. The second reason is that trying to fit colors into accounts of metaphysics, epistemology and science leads to philosophical problems that are intriguing and hard to resolve. Not surprisingly, these two kinds of reasons are related. The fact that colors (...) are so significant in their own right, makes more pressing the philosophical problems of fitting them into more general metaphysical and epistemological frameworks. (shrink)

There is a well-known tradition of thinkers who have argued that philosophical reflection on the lived character of everyday experience can reveal significant and sometimes surprising insights into the nature of things. Philosophers as diverse as William James, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein have all suggested that first-person experience can play an important, if not definitive, role in structuring our philosophical accounts of the world. One deep source of opposition to this tradition is the worry that first-person experience simply cannot (...) do this kind of work, that mere armchair reflection on the lived character of everyday experience is an unreliable guide to the real natures of things. In this paper, I defend this tradition from this worry, but not by showing that everyday experience is infallible. There are, of course, many features of everyday experience that are deeply misleading: the earth does not feel like it is moving, after all. Rather than attempting the impossible—to defend the infallibility of everyday experience, or common sense more generally—I am going to adopt a different route. I will focus on a particular type of everyday experience and argue that “armchair” reflection upon it reveals serious constraints on what would count as an adequate account of the nature of the objects of that experience. The example on which I will focus is color. What, exactly, does first-person experience of colors reveal to us about their natures? (shrink)