Colours Their Nature and Representation

The world as we experience it is full of colour. This book defends the radical thesis that no physical object has any of the colours we experience it as having. The author provides a unified account of colour that shows why we experience the illusion and why the illusion is not to be dispelled but welcomed. He develops a pluralist framework of colour-concepts in which other, more sophisticated concepts of colour are introduced to supplement the simple concept that is presupposed in our ordinary colour experience. The discussion draws on philosophical and scientific literature, both historical and modern, but it is not technical, and will appeal to a broad range of philosophers, cognitive scientists and historians of science.

Part I. The Representation of Colour: Introduction to Part I; 1. Colour-as-we-experience-it; 2. Colours as virtual properties; 3. What colours are essentially; 4. The natural concept of colour; Part II. The Colours Objects Have: The Pluralist Framework: Introduction to Part II; 5. The pluralist framework; 6. Objectivist accounts of colour; 7. Revisionary accounts: objectivist and dispositionalist; Part III. Colours and Consciousness: Introduction to Part III; 8. Colour qualia; 9. The psychological reality of colour; Bibliography; Index.

The world as we experience it is full of colour. This book defends the radical thesis that no physical object has any of the colours we experience it as having. The author provides a unified account of colour that shows why we experience the illusion and why the illusion is not to be dispelled but welcomed.