Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Table of Contents - 2003 - Volume 26, Issue 01  

Short Communication

Perceptual variation, realism, and relativization, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love variations in color vision

Jonathan Cohen a1

a1 Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0119 joncohen@aardvark.ucsd.edu aardvark.ucsd.edu/~joncohen/

Abstract

In many cases of variation in color vision, there is no nonarbitrary way of choosing between variants. Byrne & Hilbert insist that there is an unknown standard for choosing, whereas eliminativists claim that all the variants are erroneous. A better response relativizes colors to perceivers, thereby providing a color realism that avoids the need to choose between variants.