Philosophy of color

Some primitivists further accept that, though colors are primitive properties, no real or nomologically possible objects have them.

Color vision became an important part of contemporary analytic philosophy due to the claim by scientists like Leo Hurvich that the physical and neurological aspects of color vision had become completely understood by empirical psychologists in the 1980s.

An important work on the subject was C. L. Hardin's 'Color for Philosophers,' which explained stunning empirical findings by empirical psychologists to the conclusion that colors cannot possibly be part of the physical world, but are instead purely mental features.

David Hilbert and Alexander Byrne have devoted their careers to philosophical issues regarding color vision.

[citation needed] Jonathan Cohen (of UCSD) and Michael Tye (of UT Austin) have also written many essays on color vision.

In The Red and the Real, Cohen argues for the position, with respect to color ontology that generalizes from his semantics to his metaphysics.

Cohen's work marks the end of a vigorous debate on the topic of color that started with Hardin.

Paul Churchland (of UCSD) has also commented extensively on the implication of color vision science on his version of reductive materialism.

Paul Churchland's view is similar to Byrne and Hilbert's view, but differs in that it emphasized the subjective nature of color vision and identifies subjective colors with coding vectors in neural networks.

The inverted spectrum is a thought experiment dating back to John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The thought experiment was originally proposed by Frank Jackson as follows: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor.

She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on.

She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue".

... What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor?