Color Perception: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives
University of California, San Diego, 11-12 October 2002
University of British Columbia, October 2003
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Color Perception: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives
University of California, San Diego, 11-12 October 2002
University of British Columbia, October 2003
|
|
Jonathan Cohen, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Mohan Matthen, Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Questions about color have played a central role in philosophy for virtually the whole history of the subject: such thinkers as Democritus, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Goethe, Carnap, and Wittgenstein (to name a few) have appealed to color in their attempts to advance views about the nature of minds, the world, knowledge, language, meaning, perception, and morality. Color has been such a focus of interest because it is extremely unclear what colors are. The naive perceiver sees color as a property of surfaces, but, as the atomist Democritus saw very early, it is unclear how surfaces can have such a property when atoms do not. The point was well put by Lucretius, a first century B.C. atomist: ``All colors without exception change, but under no circumstances should the primary elements do this.'' The variability of color presents another puzzle of very long standing: why is it that things look different colors to different people in different circumstances? To quote Lucretius again, ``Consider the iridescence imparted by sunlight to the plumage that rings and garlands the neck of the dove: sometime it is glossed with red garnet, sometimes it appears to blend green emeralds with blue lazuli. Since these colors are produced by a certain incidence of light, obviously we must not suppose that they can be produced without it.'' These problems, articulated in the ancient world, formed the basis for the treatment of color by scientists and philosophers around the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century such as Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and Locke.
Of course, color is of interest to fields outside of philosophy as well, including psychology, biology, physics, computer science, and anthropology. But, while the best philosophical treatments of color of the 17th and 18th centuries (Locke's, for example) took current empirical science of color very seriously, philosophical work on color in much of the 19th and 20th centuries proceeded largely in ignorance of the vast body of subsequent developments in color science. For example, the work of 19th century color psychophysicists Hering and Helmholtz was read by some philosophers (e.g., Carnap and Wittgenstein), but this seemed to make little difference to the content of their theories.
All this changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a number of
philosophers breathed new philosophical life into the
subject by bringing recent results in physics, colorimetry,
computational vision, physiology, psychophysics, evolutionary biology,
and other fields of color science to bear on ontological and
epistemological questions about color.
By doing so, these authors made genuine inroads on problems on which
there had been no significant advances for generations.
Since this time, there has been a flowering of empirically informed
philosophical work on color: color has become a prominent topic in
the field, is now discussed in articles in the best philosophical
journals, conferences, and graduate seminars, and has been the subject
of a number of new anthologies and monographs.
Much of this work delivers on the often-made (but too seldom-realized)
promises of interdisciplinary collaboration: new results from color
science really have reframed old debates, suggested new arguments
against old positions, inspired new views, and generally restructured
the philosophical landscape.
At the same time, philosophical attention to empirical color science
has fostered inquiry into the conceptual and methodological
foundations of the relevant sciences.
Despite the increased interest in topics at the intersection of
philosophy and color science, there are a number of empirical
phenomena surrounding color perception whose philosophical
repercussions have been insufficiently acknowledged.
Our conferences will be devoted to these issues.
In each case, our aim will be to set out the empirical phenomena as
clearly and as broadly as possible, and then to consider what these
phenomena imply about the ontology and epistemology of color.
The empirical problems we have in mind are:
We believe that the time is ripe for substantive interchange on these matters between philosophers and color scientists, and that the UCSD and UBC conferences will provide opportunities for sustained and focussed discussion of these topics.
The conference will occur in two installments: one in October of 2002 in San Diego, at which we will set up the empirical issues and the challenges they pose, and then another in October of 2003 in Vancouver, at which we will attempt to delineate viable philosophical accommodations to the problems posed at the first meeting. The conferences will be run as round-tables (rather than having concurrent sessions) at which a relatively small number of the best philosophers and scientists working on color can weigh in on all of our themes. It is our hope that this format, which includes a year's worth of time for reflection in the light of the first meeting, will result in a more unified set of discussions than would otherwise be possible.
The conference organizers gratefully acknowledge the sponsorship of the UCSD Department of Philosophy and the UCSD Department of Psychology, and a grant from the UCSD Center for the Humanities in support of the 2002 conference.
The conference schedule is available (although still a work in progress); it also includes presentation abstracts and information about meals, accommodations, and transportation.
The conference participants have assembled a pre-meeting reading list of papers that will provide useful background and (with any luck) will lubricate interdisciplinary conversation at the time of the conferences.
During the first meeting in October 2002 the conference participants put together a list of questions about color and color perception that they wanted to discuss further. The hope is that thinking about these question in the intervening time will lay the groundwork for discussion at the second meeting in October 2003.
Kathleen Akins, Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University
Justin Broackes, Department of Philosophy, Brown University
Alex Byrne, Department of Linguistics & Philosophy, MIT
Austen Clark, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut
Paul Churchland, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Jonathan Cohen, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Michael D'Zmura, Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine
C. L. Hardin, Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University (emeritus)
David Hilbert, Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Kimberly Jameson, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego
Peter Lennie, Center for Neural Science, New York University
Don MacLeod, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego
Mohan Matthen, Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia
Rainer Mausfeld, Institute of Psychology, Christian-Albrecht-University of Kiel
Brian McLaughlin, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University
J. D. Mollon, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge
Kathy Mullen, Department of Ophthalmology, McGill University
John Werner, Department of Ophthalmology and Section of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis