Revelation and Transparency in Colour Vision Refuted: A Case of Mind/Brain Identity and Another Bridge over the Explanatory Gap

Russell (1912) and others have argued that the real nature of colour is transparent to us in colour vision. It's nature is fully revealed to us and no further knowledge is theoretically possible. This is the doctrine of "revelation". Two-dimensional Fourier analyses of coloured checke...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Synthese (Dordrecht) 2002-12, Vol.133 (3), p.419-439
Main Author: Webster, W. R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Checkerboards
Color vision
Harmonics
Identity
Identity theory
Materialism
Mind and body. Personal identity
Philosophy
Primary qualities
Psychophysics
Supervenience
Visual perception
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Russell (1912) and others have argued that the real nature of colour is transparent to us in colour vision. It's nature is fully revealed to us and no further knowledge is theoretically possible. This is the doctrine of "revelation". Two-dimensional Fourier analyses of coloured checkerboards have shown that apparently simple, monadic, colours can be based on quite different physical mechanisms. Experiments with the McCollough effect on different types of checkboards have shown that identical colours can have energy at the quite different orientations of Fourier harmonic components but no energy at the edges of the checkboards, thus refuting revelation. It is concluded that this effect is not explained by a supervenience dispositional account of colour as proposed by McGinn (1996). It was argued that the McCollough effect in checkboards was an example of a local mind/body reduction (Kim 1993), by which the different characteristics of identical colours falsifies revelation. This reduction being based on both physical and neurological mechanisms led to a clear explanation of the perceive phenomenal effects and thus laid a small bridge over the explanatory gap.
ISSN:0039-7857
1573-0964
DOI:10.1023/A:1021294209237