Colorful Findings: Collected Philosophers on Color
by Marianne Janack
“The Ideas of primary Qualities of Bodies, are Resemblances of them, and their Patterns do really exist in the Bodies themselves; but the Ideas, produced in us by these Secondary Qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our Ideas, existing in the Bodies themselves. They are in Bodies, we denominate from them, only a Power to produce those Sensations in us: And what is Sweet, Blue or Warm in Idea, is but the certain Bulk, Figure, and Motion of the insensible parts in the Bodies themselves, which we call so.”
- John Locke
"Suppose… a person… perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue… which it has never been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac’d before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest… he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other… I ask whether ’tis possible for him… to… raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho’ it had never been convey’d to him by his senses?"
- David Hume
“Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’….
What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?”
- Frank Jackson
“A young man, whom I shall call John, works in a necktie shop. He has learned the use of colour words in the usual way, with this exception: I shall suppose that he has never looked at an object in other than standard conditions. As he examines his stock every evening before closing up shop, he says, ‘This is red’, ‘That is green’, ‘This is purple’, etc. and such of his linguistic peers as happen to be present nod their heads approvingly.
Let us suppose now that at this point in the story, electric lighting is invented. His friends and neighbors rapidly adopt this new means of illumination and wrestle with the problems it presents. John, however, is last to succumb. Just after it has been installed in his shop, one of his neighbors, Jim comes in to buy a necktie.‘Here is a handsome green one,’ says John.
‘But it isn’t green,’ says Jim, and takes John outside.
‘Well,’ says John, ‘it was green in there, but now it is blue.’
‘No,’ says Jim, ‘you know that neckties don’t change their colour merely as a result of being taken from place to place.’
‘But perhaps electricity changes their colour and they change back again in the daylight?’”
- Wilfrid Sellars
“22. We do not want to establish a theory of colour (neither a physiological one nor a psychological one), but rather the logic of colour concepts. And this accomplishes what people have often unjustly expected of a theory.
23. ‘White water is inconceivable, etc.’ That means that we cannot describe (e.g. paint) how something white and clear would look, and that means: we don’t know what description, portrayal, these words demand of us.”
56. The difficulties we encounter when we reflect about the nature of colours (those which Goethe wanted to get sorted out in his Theory of Colours) are embedded in the indeterminateness of our concept of sameness of color.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
“It seems to me that the philosophy of color is one of those genial areas of inquiry in which the main competing positions are each in their own way perfectly true. For example, as between those who say that the external world is colored and those who say that the external world is not colored, the judicious choice is to agree with both.
- Mark Johnston
“Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of delirium; Russian cats and oysters, aa withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes ear that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?) and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains and so the constantly increasing absence of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say) consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames, social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese…the pedantic, indecent and censorious…watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as its stood for fidelity.”