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Color and Competence

My project is a dissertation in philosophy of perception, focusing largely on color, and consisting of six interconnected chapters. First, I motivate and defend a particular approach to philosophy of color, one that engages with the relevant empirical sciences (visual ecology, neuroscience, psychophysics) from the very beginning, and leads with the question of the function of color vision. Second, I argue that the available data from the relevant sciences supports the conception that the overarching function of color vision is to help organisms see better in general, rather that to see color per se. Third, I show that the existing philosophical theories of color and color perception either entail widespread color visual system failure, make such failure exceedingly rare, and/or struggle to accommodate and explain at least some ordinary color perceptual phenomena. Fourth, I motivate and sketch a new philosophical theory of color perception that avoids the pitfalls mentioned above. I suggest that we understand color vision as being "competence-embedded" in the sense that its overarching function is to enhance and enable the manifestation of relevant (species-specific) competences, and that color experiences are correct when they result from competence-enhancing processing. Fifth, I offer a new interpretation of the early modern distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities. I suggest that we understand primary qualities as the kind of properties that we can competently perceive, and secondary qualities as properties that are involved in the exercise of perceptual competences. Sixth, I compare and contrast the color system and the pain system. I suggest that the processing performed by both systems is competence-embedded, but whereas the color system aims at enabling and enhancing the manifestation of perceptual competences, the pain system aims at enabling and enhancing the manifestation of behavioral competences.

During the grant period, I successfully completed and defended my dissertation in empirically-guided philosophy of perception. The dissertation is entitled "Color, Competence, and Correctness" and it consists of five separate but interconnected chapters (one has been published independently as a chapter in a book, another has been published as a journal article, and a third one is currently under review). The mainstream view in contemporary analytic philosophy is that perception is primarily in the business of representing the mind-independent world as it is. In my dissertation, I explore an alternative conception: that the goal of perception is to guide successful action and that perceptions do not need to track mind-independent properties to play this action-guiding role. I focus on two types of perception: color perception and pain perception. I start with the former and advocate a pragmatist, empirically-guided approach which begins by inquiring into the function of color vision. After arguing that none of the extant philosophical views of color are satisfactory, I answer the function question by focusing on systematic color perceptual phenomena investigated by psychophysicists. I argue that the human color visual system is an enhancement system: that is, its job is to help us better discriminate, track, and recognize meaningful objects, properties, and relations. I then build on this idea using the notion of ‘competence-embeddedness.’ I propose that color vision is embedded in a network of competences: the aim of color vision is to help organisms manifest these competences, and color experiences are correct when they result from competence-enhancing processing. The framework is explanatorily robust. For example, it allows me to conceptualize many textbook color illusions as special cases of successful color perception where the demands of the relevant competences clash. Finally, I use the notion of ‘competence-embeddedness’ to develop a new account of pain. I argue that the pain system is not a bodily disturbance detector, but a sophisticated, context-responsive security system whose primary goal is to help organisms manifest important behavioral and cognitive competences. 

In addition to completing the work summarized above, I worked on two side projects. The first has to to do with reinterpreting the early modern distinction between distinction primary and secondary qualities drawing on insights from vision science. The second is a a brief survey of philosophy of color meant for a non-specialist audience.

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