Color, Variation, and the Appeal to Essences: Impasse and Resolution

Many philosophers have been attracted by the view that colors are mindindependent properties of object surfaces. A leading, and increasingly popular, version of this view that has been defended in recent years is the so-called physicalist position that identifies colors with (classes of) spectral reflectance distributions. This view, has, however, come in for a fair bit of criticism for failing to do justice to the facts about perceptual variation. Recently, however, Byrne and Hilbert (2004) have argued that this criticism can be met. They compare cases of perceptual variation involving color to other cases of representational variation involving temperature, point out that such variation fails to undermine physicalism about temperature, and suggest, therefore, that variation is equally ineffective in blocking physicalism about color. In this paper I shall review the anti-physicalist argument from perceptual variation (§1) and the Byrne and Hilbert response to this argument (§2). Then I shall argue that this response is inadequate as it stands, insofar as attackers and defenders of color physicalism will disagree about whether the analogy on which it turns is applicable to the case in dispute (§§3–4). Finally, I shall appeal to facts about our inferential treatment of color and other properties as a way