PSYCHE: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ ROBINSON: COLORS, AROUSAL, FUNCTIONALISM

Some philosophers have regarded the connection between hues and certain arousal or affective qualities as so intimate as to make them inseparable, and this “necessary concomitance view” has been invoked to defend functionalism against arguments based on inverted spectra. Support for the necessary concomitance view has sometimes been thought to accrue from experiments in psychology. This paper examines three experiments, two of which apparently offer support for the view. It argues that careful consideration of these experiments undermines this appearance of support. General lessons are drawn concerning (a) the problem that individual differences present for functionalism, and (b) the difficulty of supporting strong conclusions about concomitance by using the methods of experimental psychology. PSYCHE: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ PSYCHE 2004: VOLUME 10 ISSUE 2