Hardin, Tye, and Color Physicalism

Larry Hardin has been the most steadfast and influential critic of physicalist theories of color over the last 20 years. In their modern form these theories originated with the work of Smart and Armstrong in the 1960s and 1970s 1 and Hardin appropriately concentrated on their views in his initial critique of physicalism. 2 In his most recent contribution to this project 3 he attacks Michael Tye's recent attempts to defend and extend color physicalism. 4 Like Byrne and Hilbert 5 , Tye identifies color with the reflecting properties of objects (" reflectance physicalism "). Specifically, the determinate and determinable colors are identified with types of reflectances. (Setting some complications aside, the reflectance of an object is the proportion of light that it reflects at each wavelength in the visible spectrum.) These reflectance types are, in the terminology of Hilbert, anthropocentric—in the terminology of Lewis 6 , they are not very " natural " 1 D.