Barbara A C Saunders

According to the state of the art in psychology and philosophy, colour sensations are located in a 'quality space'. This space has three dimensions: hue (the chromatic aspect of colour), saturation (the 'intensity' of hue), and brightness. This space is structured further via a small number of primitive hues or landmark colours, usually four (red, yellow, green, blue) or six (if white and black are included). It has also been suggested that there are eleven semantic universals — the six colours previously mentioned plus orange, pink, brown, purple, and grey. Against the standard view, we argue that colour might better be regarded as the outcome of a social-historical developmental trajectory in which there is mutual shaping of philosophical presuppositions, scientific theories, experimental practices, technological tools, rhetorical frameworks, and their intercalated and recursive interactions with the lifeworld. That is: the domain of colour (the threedimensional quality space) is the outcome of interactive processes of scientific, instrumental, industrial, and everyday lifeworlds.

In this essay, I take up Patrick A. Heelan’s proposal that visual perception is “hermeneutic.”1 For Heelan, visual perception is the capacity to “read” (select, abstract) the appropriate structures of the world and form perceptual judgments about which these structures “speak.”2 For example, visual space only has a Euclidean geometrical structure when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly facetted objects that exhibit standard Euclidean shapes. Vernacular visual space in contrast is non-Euclidean, while a digital environment produces perception appropriate to the information age.3 Such structures — vernacular, Euclidean, digital — cannot be translated into one another. Heelan terms these structures “grammars”4 (which later I will take to be similar to, though not quite the same as, Wittgensteinian grammar(s)). Non-Euclidean grammar is used for local, vernacular Lifeworld spaces; Euclidean grammar for the space of classically measured physical entitities, and digital grammar of pixels, nanometers and space-time compressions for information processing.5 Euclidean perception resulted from the invention of technological “prostheses” or “readable technologies” which helped cope with changed circumstances, substituting for what inherited capacities did not supply. Digital perception destabilised and desubstantialised Euclidean perception to cope with the changed circumstances of the information age.6 Thus the red ochre of the landscape, the red of the Munsell colour chart, and the red of a computer screen’s “contrast colour” belong to three different grammars: they are quite simply not the same “red.”7

Colour has been one of the central concerns of philosophers for centuries and colour terms have been of especial interest to empiricist philosophers of mind and language.3 Much of traditional empiricist philosophy relies on ascribing to the mind or brain the function of providing a faithful record of the nature of external physical reality. The mind or brain then transmutes this record by a kind of calculus into the necessary form of language, thereby re-presenting the constituents of reality in the form of names and relations.

In this commentary I point out that Palmer mislocates the source of the inverted spectrum, misrepresents the nature of colour science, and offers no reason for prefering one colour machine over another. I conclude nonetheless that talk about “colour machines” is a step in the right direction.

creature is to say to him, "Look, you have forgotten how hardwon was your conception of belief. Don't you remember what it was like being a child, when you spent so much time wrapped in thought? This idea of'belief was one you invented (we all did!), so you r believing that you are believing X is no more incorrigible than any other proposal in science. To cure yourself of this error, cancel your subscription to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and begin one with Child Development." This is a caricature, but I do not think it is unfair. In short, I would want to take issue not only with how Gopnik regards mental development but with how she views the relation between empirical and philosophical questions in cognitive science. First, there is an uncontroversial sense in which children could be said to be "acquiring a theory" within the mental domain. Mental terms are theoretical terms because grasping them requires a more general grasp of the theoretical network in which they are embedded. Not all terms are theoretical, and recently Campbell (in press) has made the interesting proposal that terms which refer to "primary qualities" are theoretical and those which refer to "secondary qualities" are not. But whatever is the answer to that question, the apparent fact that the acquisition of the theory is gradual does not at all imply that developing approximations to the adult theory are themselves theories. It does not imply that the reason children think about mental concepts in one way when they are 3 and in a different way when they are 4 is that the older children have constructed a better theory for themselves. But we could reasonably say that it is because they are now capable of mental operations of which they were not capable at the earlier age. (The next two points about development will enlarge on this claim.) Second, it is pretty certain that the brains of scientists in the Renaissance performed the same kind of mental operations as those performed by the brains of scientists today. The idea that one scientific theory replaces another because the practitioners just get smarter must be wrong. And is it not equally wrong to believe that younger children can perform all the mental operations of which older children are capable, but that they have been working at the problem of cognition for less time? In short: It is a reasonable conjecture that as the brain develops, newer and more adequate judgements about mental life become possible. Gopnik tries to deal with this kind of point under "information-processing alternatives." I agree that failures on theory-of-mind tasks cannot be explained away in terms of such processing factors as memory failure and reality seduction (to recant somewhat on: Russell et al. 1991); but this is not the same as believing that 3-year-old brains process information in just the same way as 4-year-old brains. Of course we can say that 3-year-olds lack, in the uncontroversial sense, the right theory of mind, but we still have to explain why. I cannot see any other way of trying to explain why than by going "deeper" towards computational models of cognitive change expressed in terms of "information-processing" rather than "theory." Explaining development by theory change is either an uncontroversial description of what happens or it is a false parallel with the case of the scientist.

When Levi-Strauss (1943: 175) describes that 'magic place' in New York where 'disused but singularly effective museographic methods grant the supplementary prestige of the clair-obscur of caves, and of the crumbling heap of lost treasure', he conjures a Poussinesquel design-...

When Levi-Strauss (1943: 175) describes that 'magic place' in New York where 'disused but singularly effective museographic methods grant the supplementary prestige of the clair-obscur of caves, and of the crumbling heap of lost treasure', he conjures a Poussinesquel design-...

Colour is largely assumed to be already in the world, a natural universal that everyone, everywhere understands. Yet cognitive scientists routinely tell us that colour is an illusion, and a private one for each of us; neither social nor material, it is held to be a product of individual brains and eyes rather than an aspect of things. This collection seeks to challenge these assumptions and examine their far-reaching consequences, arguing that colour is about practical involvement in the world, not a finalized set of theories, and getting to know colour is relative to the situation one is in – both ecologically and environmentally. Specialists from the fields of anthropology, psychology, cinematography, art history and linguistics explore the depths of colour in relation to light and movement, memory and landscape, language and narrative, in case studies with an emphasis on Australian First Peoples, but ranging as far afield as Russia and First Nations in British Columbia. What beco...