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Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Marie McGinn
Marie McGinn
Affiliation:
University of York
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Extract

The task of giving some sort of interpretation of Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour is an extraordinarily difficult one. The book is exceptionally fragmentary. Many of the remarks seem to raise questions that are then left completely unanswered, or to invite us to imagine various circumstances that are then left without any further comment. Although nearly all the remarks are related in one way or another to the problem of colour, the range of topics that Wittgenstein touches on is extremely wide, and covers areas that are not normally mentioned in contemporary philosophical discussions of colour. For example, apart from the familiar ‘Why can't there be a transparent white?’ and ‘Why can't there be a reddish-green?’, he asks ‘Can a transparent piece of glass have the same colour as an opaque piece of paper?’, ‘Is white always the lightest colour?’, ‘Do I see blond hair in the black and white photograph of a blond youth?’, ‘Does it make sense to point to a colour in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and ask for the walls of my room to be painted the same colour?’, ‘Do the colour-blind have the same concept of colour-blindness as the normally sighted?’, ‘Can normal vision be described?’, and so on.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 258 , October 1991 , pp. 435 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 Remarks on Colour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).Google Scholar

2 Hacker, Peter, Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p.2.

4 Ibid., p. 40.

5 Ibid., p. 52.

6 Ibid., p.99.

7 Ibid., pp. 185–6.

8 Ibid., p. 185.

9 Ibid., p. 188.

10 Ibid., pp. 182–3.

11 Ibid., p. 183.

12 Ibid., p. 188.

13 Ibid., p. 202.

14 Ibid., p. 203.

15 Ibid., p. 203.

16 Ibid., p. 193.

17 This way of reading Remarks on Colour is influenced in part by my reading Beth Savickey's M.Litt. thesis, Voices in the Later Wittgenstein, which I examined for Cambridge University in Summer Term 1990.

18 Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 66e.Google Scholar

19 Philosophical Investigations, 123.Google Scholar

20 Hacker, , op. cit., p. 50.Google Scholar

21 Remarks on Colour, p. 4e, 15.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., p. 16e, 12.

23 Ibid., p. 29e, 101.

24 Ibid., p. 29e, 106.

25 Culture and Value, p. 56e, quoted in Beth Savickey.Google Scholar

26 Remarks on Colour, p. 17e, 3.Google Scholar

27 Wittgenstein seems to be more equivocal when it comes to propositions like ‘There cannot be a transparent white’, ‘There cannot be a shining brown’, which belong essentially to our everyday language-game, rather than the idealized ‘geometry of colour’. He finds these propositions so perplexing partly because they seem to hover on the boundary between the grammatical and the empirical. Thus: ‘The question is: is constructing a “transparent white body” like constructing a “regular biangle?”’, ibid., p. 35e, 138.

28 Ibid., p. 21e, 35.

29 Ibid., p. 10e, 61.

30 Ibid., p. 24e, 28.

31 Ibid., p. 30e, 108.

32 Ibid., p. 28e, 95.

33 Ibid., p. 25e, 64.

34 Philosophical Investigations, p. 200.Google Scholar

35 For the contrary view, see Hacker, , Insight and Illusion (Oxford University Press, 1972), chap. III, section 3.Google Scholar

36 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.64.Google Scholar