Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- DATA AND THEORY IN NEUROSCIENCE
- NEURAL REPRESENTATION
- VISUOMOTOR TRANSFORMATION
- COLOR VISION
- 9 Chimerical Colors: Some Novel Predictions from Cognitive Neuroscience
- 10 Opponent Processing, Linear Models, and the Veridicality of Color Perception
- CONSCIOUSNESS
- Index
- Plate section
- References
10 - Opponent Processing, Linear Models, and the Veridicality of Color Perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2010
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- DATA AND THEORY IN NEUROSCIENCE
- NEURAL REPRESENTATION
- VISUOMOTOR TRANSFORMATION
- COLOR VISION
- 9 Chimerical Colors: Some Novel Predictions from Cognitive Neuroscience
- 10 Opponent Processing, Linear Models, and the Veridicality of Color Perception
- CONSCIOUSNESS
- Index
- Plate section
- References
Summary
Two Contrasting Intuitions About Color
In roughly the last 15 years, it has become increasingly clear that philosophy and color science have some conflicting views about the nature of color. A philosophical view of color emerged in color science more or less as a collateral effect of the practice in that discipline. In philosophy first arose the need to precisely formulate what many believed was the commonsense view of color. This did happen, and later on the theory became a crucial part of a rather popular theory of mind. Other philosophers, however, were more interested in rigorously framing the view that they saw emerging from color science. Let us take a first look at the two approaches.
It seems to be a fairly widely held view among color scientists that color is at least as much “in the eye of the beholder” as on the surfaces of objects or in the light reaching our retinas. In other words, features of our color experience are crucially determined, and correspondingly explained, by the neuronal processing in our visual systems, as opposed to the environmental properties themselves that are the canonical causes of color experience. There exist, to be sure, color stimuli, or “physical colors,” that reliably and predictably evoke experiences as of color. However, color science has been taken by certain philosophers and color scientists to suggest that these stimuli offer little help in understanding the nature of color experience.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Cognition and the BrainThe Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, pp. 336 - 378Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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