Primitive Colors
ISBN: 9780198785910
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy Metaphysics/ Epistemology Philosophy of Mind;

Joshua Gert presents an original account of color properties, and of our perception of them. He employs a general philosophical strategy - neo-pragmatism - which challenges an assumption made by virtually all other theories of color. That assumption is that for something to be real, it must be reducible to objects and properties of the sort that are studied in the sciences. Gert also makes use of an analogy with shape in the following way: just as the a cubecan continue to look like a cube even as its appearance obviously changes as we view it from different perspectives, so too can an object continue to look the same in color, even as the appearance ofthat color changes as we view it in different illumination conditions. Because of this, we should think of standard color spaces as spaces of color appearances only, and colors themselves as what stands behind or explains these appearances. Primitive Colors also illuminates the nature of our visual experience of the world: the way in which, and extent to which, it represents the world.

Joshua Gert is the Francis S. Haserot Professor of Philosophy at The College of William and Mary. In addition to his work on color, he is also the author of Brute Rationality: Normativity and Human Action (2004) and Normative Bedrock: Response-Dependence, Rationality and Reasons (2012), both of which develop a particular account of rational action and normative practical reasons.

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