A shade of grice

Speranza

Jones was remarking how interesting colours can be. Here some excerpts from the Stanford encyclopaedia, as we look for Griceian connections.

B. Maund writes:

"Colours are of philosophical interest for two kinds of reason."

"One is that colors comprise such a large and important portion of our social, personal and epistemological lives and so a philosophical account of our concepts of color is highly desirable."

"The second reason is that trying to fit colors into accounts of metaphysics, epistemology and science leads to philosophical problems that are intriguing and hard to resolve."

"Not surprisingly, these two kinds of reasons are related. The fact that colors are so significant in their own right, makes more pressing the philosophical problems of fitting them into more general metaphysical and epistemological frameworks."

He also writes:

"If we concentrate on the use of color predicates such as ‘red’, ‘blue’, ‘olive’ etc., in natural language, it is possible to specify what we might call the ‘folk concept’ of color, one expressed by such terms. There is some advantage, however, in using the term ‘natural concept’ to emphasize that the folk concept is built upon the use of a biological endowment, one that is exhibited in the use of colors as natural signs, for the identification and re-identification of physical objects. Whatever it is called, it is clear that, if we wish to give an account of the epistemological, personal and social roles served by colors, then we need to give an account of the natural or folk concept of color, the concept which is embedded in the activities and practices that form the basis of such roles."

"To specify the natural or folk concept of color, therefore, requires studying the variety of activities and practices, linguistic and non-linguistic, in which colors play a role."

"To specify this concept is a central task for any theory of colors to perform. Color is not just a topic for scientific experts. The ordinary folk are experts too. They have expertise in recognizing colors, in sorting and classifying them, in using colors and in responding to them. Color experts are not just those who study color in a scientific way, nor those who paint in colors, nor those who are industrial chemists. There are, in other words, different ranges and levels of expertise. Those of us who are competent with colors know a lot: we know what color blue is, how it differs from red and from yellow and green; we know how dark blue differs from light blue; we use terms such as rich, pale, faded, intense, brilliant, bright, pure, mixed, and so on to convey and exploit what we know."

---

"Recognizing the expertise of the ‘folk’ should also make us alert to the dangers of using the term "the folk concept" of color. The term ‘natural concept’ is much safer to use. For one thing, ‘folk concept’ gets easily conflated with ‘folk theory’, i.e., some doctrine that we in our naive moments would articulate if asked, and if we had the time to reflect on. There are two things wrong with this slide. In the first place, the natural concept is a concept (or set of related concepts) not a theory (though its possession may presuppose certain beliefs). In the second place, by calling it a theory, it is easy is to over-intellectualize the concept. The concept is one embedded in a vast set of conceptual practices, engaged in by color experts, those who are competent in the perception, recognition and use of colors. The knowledge is implicit as well as explicit, and it involves know-how besides."

"In providing an account of the natural/folk concept of color, there are two sorts of description that we can provide: (i) a description of the way color is conceptualized, i.e., the kind of property color is conceptualized as being; (ii) a description of the kind of concept the natural/folk concept is, i.e., a description of how the concept is acquired, how it is exercised, the purposes it serves, and so on. In this respect it is possible to describe the folk concept of color as follows."

1. "Colour concepts are perceptual concepts."

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2. "Colour terms such as ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘blue’, etc are taught by the use of paradigm examples."
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3. "There is a distinctive color vocabulary the terms of which are taught by paradigm examples."

4. "It is through the exercise of color concepts (through the way colored objects appear), that colors fulfil their (practical) epistemological role: to serve as the signs for identification and re-identification of physical objects."

5. "It is through the exercise of color concepts (through the way colored objects appear), that colors fulfil their social roles: to serve as conventional signs."

6. "It is through the exercise of color concepts (through the way colored objects appear), that colors fulfil their aesthetic and emotional roles."

"It is through the study of the activities and practices which involve the acquisition and exercise of such concepts, that we can state certain principles about the kind of properties colors are conceptualized as being. These principles are implicit or explicit in the activities and practices. One such principle is that colors are perceptually salient, i.e are the sorts of properties that color vision is sensitive to and which are presented or represented in perceptual experience. Other important principles are those having to do with fact that colors as a group form structured arrays, with characteristic internal structures."




Bibliography

•Agoston, G. (1987), Color Theory and Application in Art and Design, Berlin: Springer.

•Armstrong, D. M. (1969), ‘Color-Realism and the Argument from Microscopes’, Brown and Rollins (1969), Contemporary Philosophy in Australia, London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 119-31.
--- Meaning and intention. Philosophical review. On Grice.

•Berlin, B., and Kay, P. (1969), Basic Color Terms, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

•Boynton, R.M. (1978), ‘Color in Contour and Object Perception’, in Carterette and Friedman, (eds.) (1978), Handbook of Perception, vol. 8, New York: Academic Press, pp. 173-98.

•Boynton R.M. and Olson C.X. (1990), ‘Salience of chromatic basic color terms confirmed by three measures’, Vision Research, 30, 1311-17.

•Broackes, Justin (1992), ‘The Autonomy of Color’, in Charles, David, and Lennon, Kathleen (eds.) (1992), Reduction, Explanation and Realism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 421-66.

•Byrne, Alex and Hilbert, David R., (1997), Readings on Color, Vol. I: The Philosophy of Color, Camb.Mass. : M.I.T Press.

•Byrne, Alex and Hilbert, David R., (1997), Readings on Color, Vol. II: The Science of Color, Camb.Mass. : M.I.T Press.

•Byrne, A. and Hilbert D. (2003), ‘Color Realism and Color Science', Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 26: 3-21.

•Campbell, J. (1994), ‘A Simple View of Color’, in Haldane, John, and Wright, Crispin (eds.) (1994), Reality, Representation and Projection, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 257-69.

•Campbell, Keith (1969), ‘Colors’, in Brown and Rollins (1969), Contemporary Philosophy in Australia, London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 132-57.

•Cohen, Jonathan (2001), ‘Subjectivism, Physicalism, or None of the Above . . .’, Consciousness and Cognition, 10, pp. 94-104.
--- Grice on the logical particles of natural language.
--- Can the conversationalist hypothesis be defended?

•Evans, Gareth, (1980), ‘Things Without the Mind’, in Z. v Straaten, Philosophical Subjects, 10, pp. 76-116.
----- on Grice's dossier. In Varieties of Reference.

-- Grice, H. P. 1961. The causal theory of perception.
---- 1966. Some remarks about the senses.
---- 1989. Studies in the way of words.
---- 1991. The conception of value.


•Hacker, P. M. S. (1987), Appearance and Reality, Oxford: Blackwell Publisher.
----- (Hacker succeeded Grice as tutorial fellow at St. John's).

•Hard, Anders, and Sivik, Lars (1981), ‘NCS-Natural Color System: A Swedish Standard for Color Notation’, Color Research and Application, 6, pp. 129-38.

•Hardin, C. L. (1988/1993), Color for Philosophers, Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett.

•Hardin C.L. & Maffi L. (1997), Color categories in thought and language, Cambridge: C.U.P.

•Hardin, C.L. (2003), ‘A Reflectance Doth Not a Color Make', The Journal of
Philosophy, 100: 191-202.

•Hardin, C.L. (2004), ‘A Green Thought in a Green Shade', Harvard Review of
Philosophy, XII, 29-39.

•Hering, E. (1964), Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, trans. L. Hurvich and D. Jameson, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

•Hilbert, D. R. (1987), Color and Color Perception, Stanford, Calif.: C.S.L.I.

•Jackson Frank, (1996), ‘The Primary Quality View of Color’, Philosophical Perspectives, 10, pp. 199-219.
---- On Grice on 'if'.

•Jackson F. & Pargetter R., (1987), ‘An objectivist's guide to subjectivism about color’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 160, pp. 129-41.

•Kaiser P.K. and Boynton R.M. (1996), Human Color Vision, (2nd edition) Washington: Optical Society of America.

•Kuehni, R. (1997) Color New York: J. Wiley and Sons.

•Land, E. H. (1983), ‘Recent Advances in Retinex Theory . . .’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 80, pp.5163-9.

•Landesman, C. (1989), Color and Consciousness, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

•Lewis, David, (1997), ‘Naming the Colors’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 75, pp. 325-42.
--- on Grice, in "Convention".

•Matthen, M. (1988), ‘Biological Function and Perceptual Content', The Journal of Philosophy, 95: 5-27.

•Matthen, M., (2000) ‘The Disunity of Color’, Philosophical Review, 108(1), pp. 47-84.
•Matthen, M. (2005), Seeing, Doing and Knowing, Oxford: OUP.

•Maund, J. B. (Barry) (1991), ‘The Nature of Color’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 8, pp. 253-63.

•Maund, Barry (1995), Colors: Their Nature and Representation, Cambridge: Camb.University Press.

•Maund, Barry (2006), ‘The Illusion Theory of Colour: An Anti-Realist Theory', Dialectica, 60: 245-68.

•Mausfeld, R. and Heyer, D. (2003), (Eds.), Color Percepton: From Light to Object, New York: Oxford University Press.

•McLaughlin, B. (2003), ‘The Place of Color in Nature’, in R.Mausfield and D.Heyer (2003)

•Nassau, K. (1983), The Physics and Chemistry of Color, New York: Wiley.

•Price H. H. (1932). Perception, London: Methuen.
-----

•Ross, P. (2001), ‘The location problem for color subjectivism’, Consciousness and Cognition, 10, pp. 42-58.

•Stroud,B. (2000), The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Color, New York: Oxford University Press.

•Thompson, Evan (1995), Color Vision, London: Routledge.

•Tye, M. (2000), Consciousness, Color, and Content, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT/Bradford.

•Van Brakel, J. (1993), ‘The Plasticity of Categories: The Case of Color’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science,XL 44, pp. 103-35.

•Westphal, Jonathan (1987), Color: A Philosophical Introduction, 1st ed., Oxford: Blackwell Publisher.
Other Internet Resources

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concepts | Descartes, René | Locke, John | qualia | realism | reduction