Holt wrote: "That color out there is the thing in consciousness selected for such inclusion by the nervous system's specific response."
This position, which belongs to a broader category of views sometimes called neutral monism or, following William James, radical empiricism, has not worn well over the subsequent century, partly because of the problem of the nature of abstract ideas such as blackness.
But Arthur Lovejoy showed in his book The Revolt Against Dualism that the perception of black varies so much, depending on context in the visual field, the perceiver's personal history and cultural usage, that it cannot be reduced to commonalities within objects.
In the framework of continental hermeneutics, as a reaction against its constructivist or nihilistic outcomes, Maurizio Ferraris has proposed the so-called new realism (Manifesto del nuovo realismo, 2012), a philosophical orientation shared by both analytic philosophers such as Mario De Caro (Bentornata Realtà, 2012), and continental philosophers, such as Mauricio Beuchot (Manifesto del realismo analogico, 2013), and Markus Gabriel (Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology, 2014).
In South America, Rossano Pecoraro (Cenários da Filosofia contemporânea: fim da pós-modernidade e new realism?, São Paulo, 2015; Cosa resta della Filosofia Contemporanea?, Salerno-Roma, 2013) proposes a political philosophy based on the Italian New Realism.