When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to produce certain kinds of visual experiences. According (...) to both _primitivism_ and _physicalism_, colors are not psychological dispositions; they differ in that primitivism says that no reductive analysis of the colors is possible, whereas physicalism says that they are physical properties. This paper is a defense of physicalism about color. (shrink)

When we open our eyes, the world seems full of colored opaque objects, light sources, and transparent volumes. One historically popular view, _eliminativism_, is that the world is not in this respect as it appears to be: nothing has any color. Color _realism_, the denial of eliminativism, comes in three mutually exclusive varieties, which may be taken to exhaust the space of plausible realist theories. Acccording to _dispositionalism_, colors are _psychological_ dispositions: dispositions to produce certain kinds of visual experiences. According (...) to both _primitivism_ and _physicalism_, colors are not psychological dispositions; they differ in that primitivism says that no reductive analysis of the colors is possible, whereas physicalism says that they are physical properties. This paper is a defense of physicalism about color. (shrink)

In this dissertation I defend a functionalist theory of color, on which colors are the properties that dispose things to look colored. ;I begin in chapter 1 by saying what I think colors are, and why my view should count as a primary quality theory of color---one on which colors are objective and mind-independent properties of objects in the world. In addition, since my view differs substantially from the sorts of primary quality theories most discussed by philosophers, I spend some (...) time setting out features that distinguish my functionalist view from more traditional forms of primary quality theories and arguing for the superiority of my own account. In chapter 2, I consider some of the structural relations between the colors that have led many to argue that no primary quality theory of color can succeed, and attempt to defend the functioanlist theory of color of chapter 1 from these considerations. Next, in chapter 3, I turn to arguments against various theories of color turning on the requirement that colors must be causally efficacious; I conclude that these arguments can make very little headway in ruling out any theory of color at all. In chapter 4, I begin to consider the nature of color experience; here I argue that a prominent and popular family of physicalist theories of color experience that is incompatible with my views should be rejected on the grounds that it falls victim to classic worries about inverted spectra, and that recent attempts to defang such worries fail. Finally, in chapter 5, I offer a positive theory of color experience that identifies color experiences with states of the visual system; after connecting this account with the theory of color of chapter 1, I defend it against several objections. ;By attempting to formulate a functionalist theory of color in some detail, and showing how it can meet several of the most important challenges it faces, I hope what I say will go some distance toward showing that that theory is not obviously wrong, and indeed that it might even be right! (shrink)