Our world as we ‘see’ it, is full of extended objects, three dimensional things with surfaces, each identifiable in part by their colour. Our view is of a bricolage of these coloured objects and our language re

So I can conclude that the phenomena of colour is due to two things which work simultaneously. First a dispositional aspect of objects, organic or inorganic, whether intentional or accidental, to provoke a perceptual response in the perceiver viewer, and secondly a subjective predilection to ‘force’ a language conformity or language principal onto sense data experience. The human eye, for example, has evolved a sensitivity to a specific spectral range of electromagnetic radiation which is useful in a number of ways. One that immediately springs to mind is survival, and the identification of what Descartés terms as “Beneficial or harmful for the composite of which the mind is a part”. Surely it can be no accident that the eye is sensitive to differing wavelengths of EM radiation as well as luminosity, if evolution had not accorded dispositional characteristics to objects in the first place.

or they are dispositions of physical objects to produce visual states of colour (dispositionalism). This view combines the previous two into a sort of ‘bit of both’ theory and ponders the question whether perhaps objects, though having no colour attribute, do have a mechanism which disposes the observer to attach colour to the perception of it.

Dispositionalism on the other hand rejects that objects are in any way coloured. It holds though, that objects have, as a primary attribute, a physical disposition to produce a perceptual colour response within the viewer. Colour theorist J.J.C. Smart postulates that the attribution of colour to an object is about a behavioural mechanism within the viewer perceiver who attributes colour terms in relation to an object’s dispositional character. More commonly, dispositionalism suggests that these perceptual responses are bounded with visual experiences of colour qualia or accumulated sense data. The perceptive mechanism therefore assigns colour to an object based on visual sense data experience which has been activated by the dispositional characteristic within an object. This idea, as has been said, has parallels with both the subjective and physicalist models of colour. Colour is an attribute which is attached subjectively yet it is activated by certain objective characteristics.

The scientific explanation of colour seems to be the most persuasive when one considers it from a relativist position. Consider the experiences of two creatures A and B for example, A will perceive the world through the function of A’s own particular sensory structures and so similarly will B though it’s sensory structures differ from A’s. Neither A nor B can be considered as having superior sensory structures in relation to the another so nei

Some topics in this essay:
A’s Neither, , Galileo Descartés, JJC Smart, Sidney Shoemaker, David Hilbert, Reference Dictionary, colour perception, colour object, Bill Trumble, sense data, primary attribute, ‘green’ ‘greenness’, physical objects, sensory structures, electromagnetic radiation, sense data experience, differing wavelengths, physical colour, ‘green’ ‘greenness’ colour,