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Colour constancy and Fregean representationalism

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Abstract

All representationalists maintain that there is a necessary connection between an experience’s phenomenal character and intentional content; but there is a disagreement amongst representationalists regarding the nature of those intentional contents that are necessarily connected to phenomenal character. Russellian representationalists maintain that the relevant contents are composed of objects and/or properties, while Fregean representationalists maintain that the relevant contents are composed of modes of presentation of objects and properties. According to Fregean representationalists such as David Chalmers and Brad Thompson, the Fregean variety of the view is preferable to the Russellian variety because the former can accommodate purported counterexamples involving spectrum inversion without illusion and colour constancy while the latter cannot. I maintain that colour constancy poses a special problem for the Fregean theory in that the features of the theory that enable it handle spectrum inversion without illusion cannot be extended to handle colour constancy. I consider the two most plausible proposals regarding how the Fregean view might be developed in order to handle colour constancy—one of which has recently been defended by Thompson (Australas J Philos 87:99–117, 2009)—and argue that neither is adequate. I conclude that Fregean representationalism is no more able to accommodate colour constancy than is Russellian representationalism and, as such, ought to be rejected.

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Notes

  1. These two views will be explained in further detail in Sect. 1 below.

  2. See, for example, Block (1990).

  3. A well known example of this sort is Peacocke’s (1983, pp. 16–17) three-dimensional Necker cube.

  4. See Chalmers (2004, p. 167).

  5. Chalmers (2004, p. 168) calls this specific view “physical Russellian representationalism”; Thompson (2008, p. 204) calls it “Standard Russellianism.” In what follows, I will be concerned with this standard Russellian view exclusively, so from now on whenever I say “Russellian representationalism” I mean the standard variety of Russellian representationalism. For some of the difficulties facing non-standard varieties of Russellian representationalism see Chalmers (2004, pp. 168–171) and Thompson (2007).

  6. See Chalmers (2004, p. 176) and Thompson (2009, p. 102).

  7. The same feature enables Fregean representationalism to accommodate inverted earth scenarios: see Thompson (2009, pp. 104–105).

  8. One might be tempted to resist the claim that these two experiences of the sheets of paper have the same colour phenomenology, but there doesn’t seem to be any aspect of colour phenomenology that they don’t share. As Thompson argues, “the phenomenal colour appearance of a place in the visual field is exhaustively characterized by hue, saturation, and brightness (understood as features of visual experience, not as physical qualities of light). This is not only introspectively verifiable—it is the standard view in the literature on colour perception” (2006, p. 84). And he notes further that in colour constancy experiments [for instance, Arend, Reeves, Schirillo and Goldstein (1991)], subjects are able to match two coloured papers for hue, saturation, and brightness even when those same two papers do not look to the subject to have the same surface colour (Thompson 2006, p. 85).

  9. See, for example, Arend et al. (1991).

  10. See Thompson (2006).

  11. Another possibility would be to claim that the mode of presentation picks out the property that typically causes phenomenally yellow experiences in the subject under those lighting conditions represented to obtain by the present experience. Thompson (2009, pp. 111–112) provides convincing reasons for rejecting this proposal as well.

  12. If you hadn’t first been able to look around the room at a variety of different coloured objects, there would be no way for your visual system to distinguish the colour of the wall from the colour of the light [see, for example, Kaiser and Boynton (1996, pp. 510–511)]; however, when the nature of the light is not apparent in a given experience, the visual system can rely on information from immediately prior experiences to achieve colour constancy [see, for example, Smithson and Zaidi (2004)]. It has also been shown that even in cases where only a single surface is visible a good deal of colour constancy can be achieved so long as the subject has been exposed to the relevant illuminant for a sufficient length of time (Uchikawa et al. 1989).

  13. This possible response was suggested to me by Brad Thompson.

  14. This proposal was suggested to me by Brad Thompson. Jagnow (2009, 566 n) also notes that a Fregean might need to adopt such a view in order to address the difficulty at issue.

  15. Thompson (2009, pp. 105–106) points out that his view has precisely this consequence in the case of a subject’s first experience of any given colour. According to Thompson, such experiences possess contents but their contents lack truth values: “They have conditions of satisfaction… But those conditions of satisfaction involve a presupposition that is not satisfied—that there is a typical cause of experiences of that phenomenal type. This makes them infelicitous, but not false” (2009, p. 106).

  16. This ambiguity is noted regularly by researchers: see, for example, Gilchrist (1979, p. 115), Cavanagh and Leclerc (1989, p. 4) and Ostrovsky et al. (2005, p. 1301). And such ambiguous stimuli are sometimes used in experiments: see Jacobson and Werner (2004).

  17. When you view a standard ambiguous figure such as the Necker cube it’s arguable that the visual phenomenology of your experience changes as you switch from one “interpretation” to the other. But in such cases there is a dramatic reorganization of the visual field that is completely absent in the present example.

  18. This point is made forcefully by Thompson (2009, p. 109).

  19. I defend a version of this view in Millar (2011).

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Acknowledgment

I am grateful to Brad Thompson for comments on an earlier version of this material.

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Correspondence to Boyd Millar.

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Millar, B. Colour constancy and Fregean representationalism. Philos Stud 164, 219–231 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9850-y

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