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10 - Opponent Processing, Linear Models, and the Veridicality of Color Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2010

By
Zoltán Jakab
Edited by
Andrew Brook  and
Kathleen Akins
Zoltán Jakab
Affiliation:
Békésy Postdoctoral Fellow, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Andrew Brook
Affiliation:
Carleton University, Ottawa
Kathleen Akins
Affiliation:
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
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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.

Type
Chapter
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Cognition and the Brain
The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement
 , pp. 336 - 378
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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