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Color Qualities and Reference to Them

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

N.L. Wilson
N.L. Wilson*
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

Rightly or, wrongly I am going to take it that the doctrine of simple qualities says three things. First, that yellow, for example, is a simple unanalyzable quality. I don’t really believe this to be true, except in what it denies, but I have no immediate quarrel with it. Second, a simple quality, such as yellow, is what it is quite independently of its pattern of exemplification. Third, yellow is somehow ineffable, the sheer dazzling yellowishness of yellow things cannot be conveyed in words. In the third case, I do not mean the commonplace that words are different from things, that the word ‘yellow’ is not itself yellow. I mean the view that there is something about color qualities as immediately apprehended by us that eludes description. Now all these views are somewhat old-fashioned. The third is hardly mentioned nowadays. Yet I am not so sure that we are not still very much in their grip. In any case, philosophical hemlil)eS oscillate almost as frequently as do those of high fashion so it should not surprise anyone if these views were to come back into vogue, especially if phenomenology becomes important in this country. Now it may be more a matter of convenience than of historical accuracy that I am lumping these three doctrines together as “the doctrine of simple qualities”. Perhaps “doctrine of atomistic qualities” would be better. I am reasonably certain that the second and third doctrines mutually entail each other, although it has to be conceded that the situation is fairly complicated. I shall have something to say about the third doctrine–the doctrine of ineffability, but I shall be mostly concerned to refute the second doctrine–the doctrine that the identity of a quality is independent of its extension–and to put something else in its place. I shall be concerned incidentally to examine certain puzzling statements like ‘Red is a color’, ‘Red is between orange and purple’ and ‘Whatever is green is extended’, which seem to be necessary but don’t seem to be analytic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , December 1972 , pp. 145 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1972

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Footnotes

*

Read in a shortened version, as “Qualities and Quality Reference”, at the Oberlin Phllolophy Colloquium, April 11, 1910.

References

1 In “Subwonces without Substrata” (Rev. of Metaphysics, 12 (1959), pp. 522-539), I called such questions Bridgman questions. Since then I have noticed that Berkeley (Principles $$ 18, 20), and Boscovitch (as quoted on p. xliv of H. G. Alexander's edition of the Leibniz-Ciarke correspondence) play the same game. Briefly, a “B” -question is one of the form: “What would the world be like if . . .” where the answer is, “Exactly the same as it is,” even though the question appears to pose a distinct alternative.

2 There is the parallel thesis in “Substances without Substrata,” loc. cit., according to which proper names of individuals are really individual variables. The suggestion was (in effect) that “Once upon a time there was an individual, Julius Caesar, who conquered Caul, crossed the Rubican, and so forth” amounts to the same as “Once upon a time there was an individual x such that x conquered Caul, crossed the Rubicon, and so forth”, provided the ‘x’ is never used outside the scope of the given quantifier.

3 Op. cit., p. 532.

4 ‘Plurality’ is perhaps not quite the right word, but it is easy to see what I mean. If a certain assignment of significance makes forty percent of the sentences of a corpus true and any other assignment makes fewer than forty percent true, then the first assignment is the right one. If the “plurality” is much less than forty percent we might be inclined to dismiss the corpus as incoherent.

5 One thinks of Carnap, Church, Quine, Hintikka.

6 Cf., C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order, pp. 75-77, “You and I mean the same by ‘red’ if we both define it as the first band in the sun’s spectrum, and if we both pronounce the same presented objects to be red. It does not matter if neither the red rug nor the first band of the spectrum give to the two of us identical sensations . . . the very manner in which we learn the names of things will secure such unanimity in the ascription of terms, regardless of any idiosyncracy of purely inner sense feelings.” In conceding the possibility of an “idiosyncracy” Lewis is, I judge, in the grip of some kind of doctrine of ineffability. See also Virgil Aldrich, “Pictorial Meaning and Picture Thinking,” in Feigl and Sellars, 175-181, p. 178. Also Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 272 ff. I am indebted to Rupert Buchanan for these references.

7 If my memory serves me rightly, I first encountered it in one of Brand Blanshard’s seminars.

8 See (inter alia): PRO: Articles by Langford, C. H. “Moore’s Notion of Analysis,” in Schilpp, P. A. ed.. The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, Evanston, 1942Google Scholar; “The Nature of Formal Analysis,” Mind, n.s. 58 (1949), 210-214; “A Proof that Synthetic A Priori Propositions Exist,” Journal of Philosophy,” 46 (1949, 20-24. My examples have been borrowed from Langford. Also, Aldrich, Virgil C. “The Last Word on Being Red and Blue All Over,” Philosophical Studies, 5 (1954), 5-10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar REPLIES: Hay, W. H. and Weinberg, J. R. “Concerning Allegedly Necessary Nonalytic Propositions,” Philosophical Studies, 2 (1951), 17-21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Terrell, D. B. “On a Supposed Synthetic Entailment,” ibid., 57-63Google Scholar; Schwayder, David S. “Mr. Aldrich’s Last Word,” Philosophical Studies, 5 (1954), 62-64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Perhaps I should explain. We might be inclined to attach ten times the weight to ‘Red is between orange and purple’ than to ‘Crass is green’. Then when it comes to maximizing truth we would score the first as having ten truth points (or falsity points) to only one truth or falsity point for the second.

10 It is worth noting that I may judge that Cebes is between-in-size Simmias and Phaedo, but I am never tempted to suppose that I have Cebes, Simias and Phaedo running around in my head.

11 “The Analytic and the Synthetic” in Herbert Feigl and Crover Maxwell, eds.. Scientific Explanation, Space and Time Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 111, 1962, pp. 358-97. See esp. p. 378.

12 “The concept ‘energy’ is an excellent example of a law-cluster concept. It enters into a great many laws. It plays a great many roles, and these laws and inferences constitute its meaning collectively, not individually.” Op. cit., p. 379. I have a feeling that Putnam is shifting back and forth between what I call significance and what I call sense.

13 Physicians always talk about “contusions”, never “bruises”.