Are Colors Secondary Qualities?*

Seventeenthand eighteenth-century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. Any apparent plausibility this has often derives, we argue, from an erroneous picture of perception. The colors are typically held to be one of the clearest examples of secondary qualities, and so we shall focus on these. Since the terminology of “secondary qualities” is liable to produce misunderstanding, some extra clarification won’t go amiss. First, for the purposes of this paper, secondary qualities are just stipulated to be dispositions to produce experiences—that is the way this terminology is (mostly) used by the contemporary philosophers we principally discuss. So, for example, Rae Langton’s (1998) account of Kant’s “primary/ secondary quality distinction” as a distinction between intrinsic and relational properties, and her partial defense of Kant’s apparent claim that we can only know the secondary qualities of objects, is not relevant to present concerns. (A Kantian “secondary quality” on Langton’s interpretation need not involve relations to perceivers.) Also not relevant are secondary qualities in either of Berkeley’s two senses: a quality that exists “nowhere but in the mind” (see Van Cleve 1999: 167); or a quality that is either a color, or a sound, or a taste, or a smell, or . . . (see Armstrong 1968a: 270). Second, although arguably Locke was an “eliminativist” about color, and hence did not hold that colors are secondary qualities (see note 24 below), sometimes contempor-