BOOK SYMPOSIUM. Oxford University Press, xviii pp

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1 BOOK SYMPOSIUM The Quest for Reality. Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour By BARRY STROUD Oxford University Press, xviii pp SUMMARY BARRY STROUD The University of California at Berkeley The Quest for Reality takes up the project of distinguishing, within everything we believe to be so, between what is really so in the world as it is independently of all thinkers and perceivers and what is illusory or only appearance or is dependent in some way on the responses of thinkers and perceivers to that independent world. The distinction traditionally drawn between primary and secondary qualities is one of the most familiar instances of the general enterprise. I take some care in trying to see what the distinction amounts to and how it can be successfully drawn. It requires some way of deciding which aspects of the world as we conceive of it are part of independent reality and which are not. Early chapters explore the adequacy for this purpose of an absolute conception of the world which would show no signs of whose conception it is or of any special peculiarities of its possessors. Beyond the absence of all demonstrative and indexical expressions, no metaphysically fruitful criterion of absoluteness emerges. A purely physical conception of the world, restricted to the austere vocabulary of the physical sciences, does not mention a great many of the things we all appear to believe in. That would show that such things are not real or not part of the independent world only if the physical conception or some other conception which does not include them is exhaustive of the way things are. Application of a metaphysical principle of economy of postulation has been thought to yield that result. It is an explanatory or explanatory sufficiency criterion of reality: what is part of reality is only that which must be so in order to best explain our believing and feeling everything we do about the world. The rest would be either unreal or, like the beliefs and feelings themselves, dependent upon us. 241, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

2 I assess the prospects of showing by this strategy that the colours of objects are not part of the world as it is fully independently of us. It would be demonstrated either that they are not needed to explain our perceiving and believing everything we do about the colours of things, or that what we believe about coloured objects is only that they are disposed to produce certain perceptions of colour in perceivers of certain kinds and so are dependent on perceivers in a way that the shape, size, and motion of objects are not. This strategy depends on acknowledging and so understanding the psychological facts of perception and belief concerning the colours of objects that are to be explained. I accordingly draw attention to the often-unacknowledged complexity of such facts and of the relations among them, arguing that neither perceptions of colour nor beliefs about the colours of things can be understood and attributed separately, but only together. I then explore the consequences of these interconnections of intentional content for any subjectivist metaphysical theory of the colours of things. Dispositional theories to the effect that an object s being coloured is a matter of its being disposed to produce perceptions of certain kinds are shown to fail because a condition of their success is that the perceptions of colour in question must be identified independently of ascribing any colour categorically to objects. Even if that can be done, it will always be possible (if not actual) for objects of a certain colour not to produce perceptions of colour of the specified kind in the specified circumstances, or to produce perceptions of a different colour. Having such-and-such a disposition and having suchand-such a colour could therefore not be equated. Error theories to the effect that no objects in the world are coloured but we only mistakenly believe that they are, are shown to fail on the grounds that even acknowledging the presence in the world of perceptions of and beliefs about the colours of objects requires holding some beliefs of that kind of one s own. By consideration of the conditions of successful attribution of psychological states with intelligible colour contents I argue that no one could consistently find both that people have perceptions and beliefs about the colours of objects and that no objects have any colour. It is not that an error theory is in itself contradictory, but that no one could consistently arrive at such a theory of the world. If that is so, identifying perceptions of colour as the success of dispositional theories requires is also impossible. It follows that our belief that objects are coloured is invulnerable to a certain kind of metaphysical unmasking and is not to be understood along subjectivist dispositionalist lines. It is not something that people could be shown to believe and to be wrong about. But from that it does not follow that the belief is true. We know it is true in any case simply by opening our eyes and seeing what is so. No metaphysical conclusion about the reality of the colours of things is established by the failure consistently to reach a subjectivist view of them. Maybe no satisfactory metaphysical conclusions can be reached. Nothing in my investigation encourages the idea that the goal of the quest for reality can be achieved one way or the other. 242

3 ON THE METAPHYSICAL REALITY OF COLOURS NAOMI EILAN The University of Warwick I The Quest for Reality, contains, amongst much else, a sustained and deeply illuminating investigation of the thesis Barry Stroud labels subjectivism about colours. The grounds he relentlessly amasses for rejecting the thesis are, in my view, compelling. There is a sense, indeed, in which I think they are more compelling than he says he himself finds them. For as I understand his arguments, they contain the materials for delivering a positive answer to the question: are objects really coloured? As Stroud himself presents the outcome of his investigation, they do not. Actually, to put it in this headline-grabbing way is misleading. The real issue turns on the main concern of his book his immensely thought-provoking investigation of the questions: what counts as a metaphysical account of reality? And, in the test case of colours, can the task of addressing the question of whether they are or are not part of reality be successfully undertaken? The suggestion I will be making is that his rejection of subjectivism contains the materials for asking about the metaphysical reality of colour in a way that is distinct from the way he shows cannot work; and that on this distinct way, the answer to the question of whether objects are really coloured is: yes. So, he might either reject the very idea that this alternative way of framing the question about colours does count as an example of a metaphysical quest for their reality; or he might agree that it is one, but disagree with the positive answer I sketch on his behalf, so to speak. In the next three sections I will be concerned with drawing out what I think are the materials in his rejection of subjectivism for formulating a particular way of asking about the metaphysical reality of colours, on which they do turn out to be part of reality. Before that, I want to give a brief introductory summary of the way in which Stroud sets up the very idea of a metaphysical investigation of reality, in Chapters 1 and 2, to lay the grounds for issues that will concern us throughout. In general, on Stroud s account, to engage in the metaphysical quest for reality is to ask about the relation between our beliefs and reality with the aim of arriving at a conclusion about which of these beliefs, if any, represent the world as it really is, as it is independently (in some sense) of us. To engage in this project one must have some account of what it is to represent the world in this way. The account Stroud focuses on is Bernard Williams s, on which to represent the world as it is anyway is to represent it in a way that is purged from the peculiarities of human perspective, to represent it from no point of view. Stroud is particularly interested in the idea that the physical sciences will provide the substantive concepts that meet the absoluteness requirement. As he presents it, the main reason for thinking that they will is 243

4 their explanatory power. In particular, he suggests that the reason for thinking that science will do the work is the idea that it is science that will provide the best explanation of everything that is so, including all human and other animal responses to what is so (p. 71). On this way of linking science with the absolute conception, what would show colours not to be part of reality is not merely that they are not mentioned in science but that science will show that... objects do not have to be thought of as having such qualities [colours] to explain why the world appears to us as it does [i.e. coloured] (p. 71). Much of the Quest for Reality is concerned with whether it is possible to carry out the task of showing that colours are not real because they are not needed for explaining why the world appears to us to be coloured. The particular method Stroud investigates of trying to fulfil this aim is called metaphysical unmasking. To engage in metaphysical unmasking, specifically with respect to colour, is to claim that none of our beliefs in which we ascribe colours to objects are true, on the grounds that we do not have to assume their truth in order to explain why things appear to us to be coloured and why we believe they are coloured. And, if this is right, colours are unreal. His central argument against the success of this kind of unmasking, given in the context of his rejection of subjectivism, is that in order so much as to acknowledge the datum, our beliefs that objects are coloured, we must ourselves believe objects are coloured. If this argument against subjectivism works, the position of the unmasker is untenable, in the same way as is that of someone who asserts that it is not raining and that he believes that it is (p. 204). It is relative to this argument that Stroud says, in Chapter 9, that it would be tempting to conclude from the failure of the unmasking project that colour is, in fact, part of the world as it is independently of us. Stroud gives two reasons for resisting the temptation to conclude that objects really are coloured after all (p. 192). First, asserting that objects are coloured would involve trying to do what the unmasker tries to do and fails, finding a way of acknowledging the datum about our beliefs that objects are coloured while simultaneously suspending our own beliefs in the colour of objects (even if this is in order to go on to assert that they are, after all, needed for explaining why the world appears to us to be coloured) (p. 193). Second, to move from the fact that we have to believe objects are coloured to the metaphysical claim that objects really are coloured, is tantamount to adopting some form of idealism, which moves illegitimately from claims about beliefs we have or must have, to claims about how the world must be (pp ). This is obviously a very rough summary of Stroud s account of the metaphysical problem of colour. And, in this rough form, there are various points at which one might think, for a variety of reasons, that surely there must be ways of asking whether colours are part of the world as it is independently of us that do not have to take the form of metaphysical unmasking. In what follows I want to examine only one of various ways one might try to push for such an alternative, a way that I think is implicit in Stroud s own argument against subjectivism. The question here too, on this alternative route, is whether or not the best explanation of why our colour beliefs are as they are is that objects are coloured. But it does not involve suspending our beliefs in colours 244

5 in order to engage in the question (and is therefore immune, on the face of it, to Stroud s arguments against the unmasker), and it delivers a positive answer to the question without resort to idealism. Or so I will be suggesting. II The datum we are all agreed on is that we ascribe colours to physical objects. We do this both in ascribing to ourselves and others perceptions of coloured objects; and in ascribing to ourselves and others beliefs and other non-perceptual attitudes which include references to the colours of objects. A subjectivist account of colours says that despite such ascriptions, phenomenal colours, as we are aware of them, are actually properties of our experiential responses to the objects we see, rather than of the objects themselves. On one version they are properties of sensations. On another they are the represented properties of visual patches, patches that exist only in perception. In both cases, however, subjectivism delivers a negative answer to the question: are colours properties of physical objects? Stroud examines two types of subjectivism. The dispositional theory version says that beliefs such as the belief that lemons are yellow, say, should be treated in the way we treat beliefs such as beliefs that a play is boring or a noise irritating. We describe the object in terms of our responses to it. What we believe, then, when we believe that an object is yellow, is that it has the power to produce in us experiences as of yellowness, where the yellowness is a property of our experience, not of the object. The error theory version of subjectivism says that in our everyday practice we do in fact believe that colours are properties of objects, in the sense that they are the grounds of the disposition objects have to produce experiences in us. But this belief, on the error theory, is simply false. Colours are properties of experiential spaces or sensations, not of mind-independent objects. There are two main complaints against subjectivism in The Quest for Reality that I want to examine, in this section and the next, in reverse order to that in which they appear in the book. The first that will concern us gets spelled out in Stroud s discussion of the error theory, in Chapter 7, and can be summarised as follows. If subjectivism is right, then it ought to be possible to give an account of what any particular colour concept means, in particular which colour it refers to, without reference to physical objects. Suppose then, with Stroud, our quest is for the meaning of yellow. One way to go would be to try and define yellow in a way that does not presuppose any understanding of any other colour terms, where the properties that one refers to in the definition are properties of perceivers rather than objects perceived. This is certainly something we can do for many terms, such as irritating or amusing. Stroud says, as have many others, that this is not possible for colours terms. Though it may be possible to define some colours by appeal to other colours (for instance, green can be defined as a combination of blue and yellow), we can only get individuations of colours going by using some basic colours terms that cannot themselves be defined in non-colour vocabulary, indeed in any 245

6 vocabulary. The only alternative route open to the subjectivist, if this is right, is to say that we know what our colour terms mean in virtue of a relation of direct acquaintance with the colours, again assumed to be properties of our experiences rather than of the external world. Drawing on Wittgenstein s discussions of private ostensive definitions, Stroud then argues that such private ostensive definitions cannot get off the ground. We need the background setting of objects and their properties to get determinate individuations of colours going in the first place. The first question this raises is: what general conclusions should we draw from the impossibility of descriptive definitions of colour? If it is not possible to give a descriptive definition of the meaning of any colour concepts in terms that do not presuppose the individuation of other colours, then this is true also if we think that colours are properties of objects. That is, if the argument against descriptions is right, we do have to rely on acquaintance and brute pointing, so to speak, to individuate colours. This will be true also in explanations of the way in which colour concepts get their meaning when they are used to express beliefs about the colours of objects. Ultimately giving the meaning of our colour terms requires pointing to instances of them, here thought of as properties of objects. If we think of colours as properties of objects, what the rejection of definition by description amounts to is an assertion of externalism about colours. Now normally, when externalist semantic claims of this kind are made about a concept or set of concepts, they are treated as a first step in defence of a strong realism about the referents of such concepts. For example, when a similar claim is made about particular objects, to the effect that no definite descriptions could serve to nail our reference to one particular object rather than another qualitatively identical one, and we must therefore resort to acquaintance-mediated demonstratives to anchor reference, it is normally thought that the objects we thereby point to are entities in the mindindependent world, the world as it is whatever we take it to be. And this is thought to introduce a strong world-dependence into our thoughts. The same should hold of colours, unless we have reason to think the contrary. Suppose for the moment we do not have such reasons. One obvious way in which such externalism bears, potentially, on Stroud s own assessment of his arguments against the subjectivist is this. If externalism is right, then for any particular colour concept we use, there is a colour in the world it picks out; there is a guaranteed match, in this respect, between mind and world. Stroud s worry is that to make this kind of claim is to adopt some form of idealism, to argue from properties of our mental attitudes to the way the world must be. But if externalism is right, the argument, on the face of it, goes the other way round, from the way the world is to the way our mind must be, for there is nothing we can say about our mind, where colours are concerned, that does not depend essentially on the way the world is. Now Stroud himself does not explicitly draw externalist conclusions from his rejection of the possibility of descriptive definitions of colours. And I guess it would be possible for him to stop the argument right here, and to deny that the correct conclusion, as he sees it, from his rejection of definition by 246

7 description, is externalism, and, for that reason to deny that his rejection of subjectivism yields a robust realism about colours. A more internally plausible line for him to take is to put pressure on the externalist by asking: what is the notion of the world you are using when making your externalist claims, in particular when claiming that the explanation of fit between world and beliefs is the opposite way round from that which it is said to be by the idealist? Saying this to the idealist is an empty gesture unless you can provide some substantive conception of the world, relative to which you can assess whether colours are part of it. But once you embark on the latter route, you end up, in the manner sketched in the first section, in the unmasker s predicament, of having to suspend your beliefs in colours in order to assess their truth relative to the world as it is represented by this substantive conception, while so much as to acknowledge the fact of these beliefs you must yourself endorse them. There are various ways of trying to resist the force of what is in effect a dilemma which allows one the choice of idealism of some kind or unstatable unmasking. The one I want to have before us is the one I think the externalist in particular should opt for, the materials for which, I think, are to be found in Stroud s second complaint against subjectivism, to which we now turn. III To get going here I want to come back to the brief allusion to Stroud s appeal to Wittgenstein s arguments for rejecting internal ostensive definition in giving the meaning of colour terms. What exactly is it that we get when we believe colours are properties of objects that we cannot get when we think of them as properties of experiences, relative to which we can anchor determinate reference to colours only if we believe them to be properties of objects? Stroud s answer, I think, is to be found in his second complaint against subjectivism, which is this. If subjectivism is true then any explanations of the relation between objects and their properties and our experiences of colours lose the kind of intelligibility we think they have, when we ascribe colours to the objects themselves. To take a non-colour example, we normally think that the reason we perceive something as cubical in the presence of a cubical object (given the right conditions) is that there is a cubical object there, and we perceive it (p. 94). Reference to the property in the world explains why the experience is as of one property rather than another. But if the property cannot be referred to the world, there is no reason we can cite for why a perception as of something cubical occurs, rather than, say, a perception of something yellow, or a pain, or the thought of the square root of minus two (p. 93). On the face of it, we think that the same kind of intelligibility is available in the colour case. The claim is, then, that a subjectivist view deprives us of any such sense. The force of the demand for intelligibility can be brought out by considering a subjectivist who admits that our judgements about yellowness are intelligible in the way Stroud describes, but maintains that the required intelligibility is 247

8 to be found not in the relation between claims about perceptions and claims about how the external world is, but, rather, between claims about our introspective judgements and claims about how are experiences are. So, he might claim that when I introspect and internally confront an experiential property of yellowness I have available precisely the kind of intelligibility Stroud is after, except that here the explanatory relation I can avail myself of holds between the properties of my experience and my introspective judgements about their instantiation. A dispositionalist, for example, might say that in having experiences as of yellow I explain my introspective judgements by appeal to the fact that my experiences have these properties, and I am introspectively aware of them, which exactly mirrors the intelligibility Stroud finds in the exteroceptive case. Then, in making claims about objects being coloured, what I mean is that they are such as to cause, in a manner that need not have any particular intelligibility, such experiences. That is what I mean when I say objects are coloured. It is here we come to the point of the privacy arguments that Stroud takes over from Wittgenstein. What is distinctive about ascribing colours to objects rather than to experiences is that by locating objects in space I have the materials for making sense of the idea that the object may have the property even when I am not in a position to observe it. This, in turn, is what gives me grounds for saying that the colour is not determined by what I take it to be when fixating it in attention, which means that the property can be cited in explanation of why I am now having the experience I am having, and making the judgement I am making. Or to put it in the terms in which Gareth Evans and John Campbell put it: locating objects in space secures the determinate mind-independence of objects (and some of their properties) in virtue of my use of the spatial concepts within the framework of what Evans called a primitive or simple theory of perception. In deploying my spatial concepts within the framework of this theory I explain my perceptions to myself as the joint causal outcome of the way the world is and my own position in it. In particular, grasping such a theory and using it in this way provides for a grip on the enabling conditions of perception: one must be in the right place at the right time, there must be nothing in the way, and so forth. And, as Campbell has emphasised, by providing for a grip on these enabling conditions the theory provides me with grasp of the idea that p being true is not sufficient for its seeming to me that p is true. These further conditions must be met. This is what provides me with an explanation of how it can be that there are truths about objects which I am not aware of, which, in turn, makes it possible to cite the fact that p as part of a genuine explanation of why I am aware that p when I am aware of p. 1 The trouble with the concepts used by the private ostensive definer is that they cannot be deployed in this way. The reason that someone who holds that being yellow, say, is a property of experiences rather than of physical objects 1. Cf. John Campbell, The Role of Physical Objects in Spatial Thinking, in Spatial Representation, edited by N. Eilan, R. McCarthy and B. Brewer (Oxford University Press, 1999); and Gareth Evans, Thing Without the Mind, in Collected Papers (Oxford University Press, 1985). 248

9 cannot actually makes sense of the idea that his experiences have properties that are as they are independently of his taking them to be such when he fixates them in attention is that in the case of experiences there is no sense that can be made of such extra enabling conditions that have to be met for a subject to be aware of his experience. There is no story he can tell about not being in the right place and so forth relative to which he can make any sense of the existence of the experience, and its having the properties it has, independently of our taking it to exist and having the properties it has. Or, more accurately, there is no such story that can be told on the subjectivist s assumption that experiences are individuated independently of the external world. Correlatively, on this assumption, there is no bite that can be given to the claim that the instantiation of the property in experience can enter into a genuine causal explanation of why I am now making the introspective judgement I am making. The private ostensive definer will hardly take these arguments, as they stand, lying down. The point here has only been to allude to a kind of argument which, if it works, as I think it does, would show why the surround of physical objects is needed for giving bite to the claim that our colour terms have the meaning they have independently of our taking them to have that meaning. The question that I now want to raise is this. Suppose the externalist appeals to the primitive theory of perception in explaining what she means by the notion of the world as it is independently of us. Can this provide her with a way out of the dilemma posed to her at the end of the previous section? IV The notion of the world as it is anyway is often used, by Stroud and others, interchangeably with the notion of the world as it is independently of us, or independently of observers. This, in turn, can mean various things. One important thing it means is this. When we are rejecting idealism about the world at large or about a particular domain of reference, and claim that they are as they are independently of us, what we have in mind is the idea that the world or the particular domain of reference exist, and have the properties they have, independently of our taking them to exist and having those properties. They are in this sense mind-independent. The first question I want to raise is: what kind of non-perspectivalness in a concept is needed for claiming that the concept represents entities that are mind-independent in this sense? Very generally, as the distinction is usually made, perspectival concepts are concepts whose contribution to the truth conditions of the thoughts in which they occur depends essentially on the obtaining of contextual facts about the subject thinking the thought which object she perceives, the time of thinking, who she is, where she is and so forth. To know which entity is being referred to by the means of such concepts one must know facts about the subject using the concept. Non-perspectival concepts are concepts whose 249

10 contribution to the truth conditions of thoughts in which they occur is said to be wholly independent of any such contextual facts. Now it is possible to draw a rough distinction, among contextual features, between those that are properties of the subject her tastes, processing mechanisms, typical responses, values and so forth; and those that are physical features of the environment she is in the location, time, objects and properties causing her perception and so forth. Suppose we reserve the label subjective for the kind of perspectival concept that refers to the former kind of contextual feature. 2 It is a plausible claim that if a concept is deemed to be subjective in this sense, then it does not represent the world in a way that makes manifest the mind-independence of these referents. If one then goes on to say that the concept is essential for individuating its referents, this is tantamount to saying that the referents are not constituents of the mindindependent world. If our colour concepts were subjective in this sense, this would be a reason for excluding them from a representation of the mind-independent world. But, if Stroud s arguments against subjectivism are right, this is not a reason for excluding them; it certainly could not be Stroud s reason. So, if one accepts Stroud s anti-subjectivist arguments, if colour concepts are to be excluded from the representation of the mind-independent world on perspectivalness grounds, it must be because of their context-dependence in the physical sense. Our next question is, then, this. Are there grounds for excluding such context-dependent concepts from the description of the mind-independent world? To answer it we need a further distinction between mind-independence on the one hand, and a further two meanings given to observer independence when we talk about a description of the world as it is independently of observers. Suppose we call a concept subjectively immersed if it is integral to the subject s grasp of the concept that he conceives of himself as located in the world the concept refers to. One thing that is meant by observerindependent concepts is that they are not subjectively immersed. The concepts used in the primitive theory are immersed in this sense, for it is integral to their deployment within the theory that the subject think of himself as one object among others in the space he is representing. So these concepts are not observer-independent in this sense. And suppose we call a concept objectively immersed if it is such that grasping it requires that the subject actually be in the world in which the referents of the concept are located. This will be true of any concept which is given an externalist semantics. Another thing that is meant by observer-independent concepts is that they are not objectively immersed. On the face of it, it is hard to see why it should be the case that if a concept is subjectively and/or objectively immersed this debars it from being used in a representation of the mind-independent world. Neither having to think of oneself as physically located in the world thought about (as one does when employing the primitive theory of perception), nor actually having to be 2. Cf. Adrian Moore, Points of View (Oxford University Press, 1997). 250

11 physically located in the world in order to grasp the concept (as is the case for concepts given an externalist semantics) introduces any mind-dependence into the world thus conceived. If this is right, there is nothing to stop the externalist from saying that the primitive theory of perception, grasp of which requires use of subjectively immersed concepts, provides her with the notion of the world she uses when she makes her externalist claims to the effect that colour concepts (and others, such as that of a particular) are world-dependent (which is to say that they are also objectively immersed). In exploiting our everyday theory to this philosophical purpose she will, in effect, be claiming that the best explanation of our experiences of colour, and of the beliefs based on them is the kind of explanation provided on any particular occasion by the primitive theory, namely that there is an object of a particular colour there, and one is in a position to observe it. In saying this she is re-using the theory in which our everyday beliefs are embedded (and therefore, unlike the unmasker, not suspending these beliefs) in order to make a metaphysical claim diametrically opposed to that made by the idealist. On the face of it, something along these lines does seem to avoid the dilemma posed to the externalist, and to yield a positive answer to the question: are objects really coloured? There are two reasons I can see that Stroud might be unhappy with this way of asking and addressing the question of the reality of colours. Both turn on the way he appeals to the absolute conception in setting up what in general the metaphysical quest for reality involves. The absolute conception, unlike the primitive theory, as it is usually defined and is understood by Stroud himself, does exclude both subjectively and objectively immersed concepts. It is non-perspectival in this more demanding sense. If the substantive conception of the world one is using to assess the status of the referents of a given set of concepts is the absolute conception, then the route I have suggested the externalist should take drops away. I have been urging, however, that there is one ingredient in the notion of the world as it is anyway, namely the mind-independent world, which does not require cashing in terms of the absolute conception, understood as a wholly non-perspectival conception of the world, and which, on the face of it, can be used to raise substantive metaphysical questions. So, unless some reason is found for insisting that the conception of the mind-independent world must itself be cashed by appeal to the absolute conception, or that it must, in the end, be superseded by the notion of the absolute conception, it is only stipulation that would rule out this route. I myself am doubtful about the success of any such arguments, and do not think I see the materials for them in Stroud s book. The other potential reason I can see in Stroud s own approach for rejecting the proposed form of metaphysical realism about colours is what he describes as a concession, made early on, that colours are not physical properties, because what is physical is delivered by science. I think this concession is made mainly for the dialectical purpose of giving the unmasker everything he wants and then showing that even so, his argument cannot work. Still, it is worth pointing out that if it were right, in fact, that colours are not physical properties, then the context-dependence in our use of colour concepts would 251

12 not be of the physical kind; and the reasons I have suggested for not excluding colour concepts, as explained by the externalist, from representations of the mind-independent world would not hold. However, independently of the colour issue, I think that there are very strong reasons for insisting that the intuitive physics embedded in our primitive theory of perception do deliver a robust notion of a physical world which is in crucial respects immune to revision by scientific physics (it seems to me that much of what Stroud himself says about the notion of the physical world in Chapter 3 is sympathetic to this idea). By intuitive physics I mean the largely a priori principles that link physical properties and magnitudes with geometrical ones, which are constitutive of our concepts of a physical object and space, and, arguably, of the very notion of cause itself, and which are integral to our use of the primitive theory. Certainly, unless there were such strong independent reasons for insisting that embedded in our primitive theory there is a notion of the physical world that is not just the world as delivered by scientific physics, the kind of metaphysical reality for colours that I have been urging would collapse I am greatly indebted to Johannes Roessler, Bill Brewer and Christoph Hoerl for comments on an earlier version. 252

13 BARRY STROUD ON SUBJECTIVISM AND PHYSICALISM ROBERT KIRK The University of Nottingham When I was about four I had a little friend who wouldn t eat jelly unless it was green. At a party there was no green jelly, but her father found a torch with a blue light which he shone on the yellow jelly provided, and she happily ate it all up. What mattered was how the jelly affected her, not its real colour. But what about its real colour? Doesn t that also depend on how it affects us, or how it would affect us? Not according to Barry Stroud. He argues at length and in detail against such subjectivism about colour which he often associates with the extreme metaphysical view that in reality there are no colours at all. The background to his investigations is the grand philosophical project that he calls the quest for reality : a huge metaphysical enterprise (p. ix: parenthesised numbers refer to pages in Stroud s book), which is perhaps even definitive of philosophy (p. 3). Although he thinks there is simply no saying in a few unambiguous words what it amounts to, the following characterisation will serve my purposes: We are pursuing the project of distinguishing, among all the things we believe, between those which represent the world as it is independently of anything that is true about us, and those which in one way or another depend on us or our reactions. (p. 125) His chief conclusion is that the project of unmasking colours as unreal or subjective is doomed: a completely general unmasking of the colours of things cannot consistently be reached (p. 216). To write of a conclusion risks misrepresenting him, however. He has a sense of the special character of philosophical problems and of the difficulty of recognizing that character and describing or explaining it in the right way (p. x). His extended examination of the unmasking project, and its apparent conclusion, should therefore perhaps be regarded as means to the end of bringing readers to share something of his sense of the nature of philosophy in general, and of the quest for reality in particular. The book is subtly and cautiously reasoned. Much of it I can only admire and agree with. But I have serious misgivings about two of its main components: Stroud s attack on subjectivism about colour, and his assumptions about physicalism. I will comment on each in turn. 253

14 Subjectivism about Colour His target sometimes appears much narrower than it actually is. Often he appears to be attacking only the extreme view that nothing is really coloured. However, it becomes clear that he is more ambitious: he argues against subjectivism about colour a much more widely accepted view. One variety endorses biconditionals such as: x is yellow iff normal human perceivers standing in certain relations R to x in certain kinds of perceptual circumstances C would get perceptions of yellow. (p. 121) He considers various ways of reading this biconditional and finds difficulties with them all. Much of his reasoning is based on the assumption that the biconditional is meant to explain the content of our thoughts about the colours of objects (p. 122). According to him, the success of subjectivism turns on whether this content can be explained independently of any appeal to the colours of objects (p. 132). He argues persuasively (mainly in Chs. 6 and 7) that no such independent explanation can be given. I won t dispute that conclusion, but I do query the assumption that subjectivists must explain the contents of our thoughts about colours in the way he suggests. What he counts as subjectivism covers a broad range. It is any view according to which An object s being coloured does not require the existence of any actual perceivers or perceptions of colour, but... does depend on what kinds of perceptions certain kinds of perceiving subjects would get from it (p. 124). Colour is taken to be dependent on us in a way that shape, size, motion, and other primary qualities of things are not (p. 42). I will call this view, whose most famous exponent is of course Locke, moderate subjectivism. I don t see why moderate subjectivists should have to explain the contents of our thoughts about colours. I suggest we need to distinguish two projects: (a) to explain how it is that there are colour-experiences and thoughts about colours in the first place to explain what it takes for there to be such things; (b) to provide reductive biconditionals which give logical equivalents for statements ascribing specific colours to things, where the experiences introduced on the right-hand side are identifiable independently of ascribing colour to any physical objects (p. 129). Those who make claims about the reality or subjectivity of colours must surely undertake project (a); and their explanations have got to be philosophically satisfying: bald accounts of the neurobiological processes involved are not enough. But I don t think Stroud has offered compelling reasons why they must also engage in the reductive project (b). He emphasises the difficulty, noted by Locke, of explaining just how objects produce the relevant effects on us; and quotes the latter s remark that there is no conceivable connexion betwixt the one and the other (Essay, IV.3.xiii). I agree that project (a) is difficult and needs more work. But I see no reason to suppose it is bound to fail. And if it eventually succeeds a big if, admittedly what we already know suggests it will provide room for subjectivism. 254

15 For while we know that whether the jelly is green, for example, depends partly on how its fine structure affects (or would affect) the light reflected from it, we also know that any of a whole range of different patterns of coloured light can produce subjectively indistinguishable experiences. That makes it natural to argue that colours depend not only on the nature of the objects, but on our experiential reactions. Of course Stroud knows all that; but he seems to overlook the possibility that such considerations tend to support subjectivism regardless of whether project (b) can be carried through successfully. Project (a) is compulsory; but if it is successful, (b) seems supererogatory. Stroud may challenge the suggestion that we could, eventually, explain how it is that there are experiences of colour, since he seems generally sceptical about the possibility of explaining the links between experience and the physical world. He examines the feasibility of a physicalist approach to these matters, but has objections to physicalism, to which I will return shortly. First, let us look at two further arguments he brings against subjectivism. Argument from the impossibility of understanding colour-talk without having colour-beliefs According to Stroud, the philosophical investigator engaged in the quest for reality is interested in the relation between our conception of the world and the world that conception purports to be about (p. 211). Suppose, then, that the investigator accepts that people believe things are coloured. In that case the investigator too must have some beliefs about colours. For, Stroud argues, only someone capable of making judgements about the colours of things could understand the contents of beliefs about the colours of things and hence could come to recognize other people as holding them (p. 216); no one could abandon all beliefs about the colours of things and still understand the colour terms essentially involved in ascribing perceptions and beliefs about the colours of things. He concludes that no one could succeed in unmasking all those perceptions and beliefs as giving us only appearance, not reality (p. 168). No unmasking could succeed (p. 216). That argument is something of a centrepiece in Stroud s book; he outlines or alludes to it at several places, and seems to regard it as his main ground for rejecting the unmasking project. But does it work? The following parody suggests it does not: Only someone capable of making judgements about God could understand the contents of beliefs about God and hence could come to recognise other people as holding them ; so no one could abandon all beliefs about God and still understand the theistic terms essentially involved in ascribing perceptions and beliefs about God. The parody obviously fails to show that atheism is impossible. (At least I think that is obvious. It is, however, close to a line of argument pressed some years ago by certain religious philosophers.) It seems to me that Stroud s key argument similarly fails to show that subjectivism about colours is impossible. Of course there are numerous differences between the two cases; but I don t think they are relevant. The point is simple: Stroud s argument, like the parody argument, seems to rest on an unjustified assumption of the form that in order to understand beliefs about x, you must not only have some beliefs relating to x, but actually believe that x exists independently of us. 255

16 Argument from the impossibility of confronting the world independently of having beliefs about it Stroud warns against inferring, just from what he takes to be the unworkability of the unmasking project, that things really are coloured (although he thinks we know they are). He argues that both a negative and a positive answer to the metaphysical question about whether colour exists independently of us would require us to get into an impossible position: We would have to be able to consider all human perceptions and beliefs concerning the colours of things, on the one hand, and the world as it is independently of us, on the other, and manage to ask a still-open question about the relation between them. (p. 192f.) That would certainly be impossible: how could we consider the world independently of our perceptions and beliefs about it? If the unmasking project required people to do that it would be ruled out for that reason alone, and Stroud s other reasoning would be redundant. Just possibly Descartes, on some interpretations, thought we could get into something like that position; but as we have seen, Stroud s target includes far more than Descartes. Why should moderate subjectivists be committed to its being possible to confront the world independently of their beliefs about it? He seems to offer as a reason that even to acknowledge the relevant psychological facts we must also have some beliefs about the colours of objects (p. 193). But the theistic parody exposes the ambiguity of that assertion. To be in a position to criticise theistic beliefs one must understand theistic language and have some beliefs related to theism, certainly; but that doesn t require one to be a theist. Similarly, acknowledging the relevant psychological facts relating to colours requires one to understand the language of colours and to have some beliefs in that area. But I find no compelling reason in Stroud s book to suppose that those beliefs must include the belief that things are objectively coloured. So it seems that subjectivists are not compelled to get into an impossible position. One possible alternative would be a holistic approach, on the lines of: If we strive to take account of all relevant considerations, we end up with our best theory of how the world is. From the basis of that theory we can pose whatever metaphysical questions occur to us, including ones about the objectivity of colours; and any answers we reach can only be based on it. That doesn t require us to compare naked reality with our beliefs about it, or to do anything else impossible. Stroud may reply that this overlooks the point of his phrase a still-open question. If you have a theory of the world, it may already include answers to metaphysical questions such as the one about the objectivity of colours. But if it doesn t, and that question is still open, how do you decide which other questions to consider as settled? What beliefs even vaguely in the region of beliefs about colours do you start from? Now, he must be right to point out that you can t even raise the metaphysical question without sharing at least some of our everyday abilities to use colour concepts. However, I don t think he has undermined the holistic approach. I don t think he has given any good 256

17 reason why metaphysical questions should be set sharply apart from other high-level theoretical ones. I am not implying there is no difference between science and philosophy; just not persuaded the dividing line is as sharp as he assumes. Physicalism Physicalism is an example of the sort of metaphysical position that the quest for reality can lead to: Physicalism,...or materialism is a philosophical doctrine about reality. It says that reality is purely physical. Anything that we think of as nonphysical, or any apparently nonphysical fact that we think holds, is either reducible to a physical thing or fact, or it is a fiction, illusion, or mere manner of speaking. That is true of any apparently mental items if physicalism is true. (p. 14) Stroud is evidently not sympathetic to physicalism. One sign is his emphasis on difficulties over defining physical (pp ). For the exact details of what to count as physical have never been particularly relevant to the debate. The central question has always been how anything at all like current physics could possibly provide a basis for describing and explaining how psychological statements come to be true; nor do the main objections to physicalism ever appeal to the details of physical theory. I suggest we can base a workable version of physicalism on current physics, or an idealised version of it, and leave aside the question of how exactly to define the physical. 1 Another sign of Stroud s lack of sympathy with physicalism is that, when he is attempting to explain its motivation, he suggests, It is felt that the only thing there could be in reality to make our sentences or thoughts true is some purely physical fact or state of affairs, and that it is an assumption that physical reality or the physical world is the only independent world there is (p. 58). That strikes me as off-target. Although I am a physicalist, I don t think I personally have any particular prejudice in favour of the physical. The presence of bits of nonphysical reality might have made things even more interestingly mysterious than they already are. Nor do I know of any cogent a priori objections to dualism. Surely what impresses physicalists above all is the pervasiveness of the physical, and the power of physical explanations. Every day we find further evidence that, in Quine s words, Nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought, without some redistribution of microphysical states For an appealing attempt to define the physical, see J. Poland Physicalism: the philosophical foundations (Clarendon Press, 1994). 2. W.V. Quine, Theories and Things (Harvard University Press,1981), p

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