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‘Looks Red’ and Dangerous Talk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

J. J. C. Smart
J. J. C. Smart
Affiliation:
Australian National University
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Extract

This paper is partly to get rid of some irritation which I have felt at the quite common tendency of philosophers to elucidate (for example) ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks red’. For a relatively recent example see, for example, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, ‘An Objectivist′s Guide to Subjectivism about Colour’. However rather than try to make a long list of references, I would rather say ‘No names, no pack drill’. I have even been disturbed to find the use of the words ‘looks red’ that I am opposing ascribed to me by Keith Campbell in his useful article ‘David Armstrong and Realism about Colour’. I am not saying that such talk is necessarily wrong. Talk of ‘looks red’ may be a way of harmlessly referring to the behavioural discriminations with respect to colour of a human percipient. Where it is dangerous, at least to those of us who wish to argue for a broadly physicalist account of the mind, is that it may have concealed overtones of reference to epiphenomenal and irreducibly psychic properties of experiences. Moreover even if it does not do so it may be fence sitting on this issue and liable to misinterpretation.

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Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 70 , Issue 274 , October 1995, pp. 545 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1995

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References

1 Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 41 (1987), 127–141.Google Scholar

2 In Bacon, John, Campbell, Keith and Reinhardt, Lloyd (eds) Ontology, Causality and Mind: Essays in Honour of D. M. Armstrong (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 249–268.Google Scholar

3 Hilbert, David R. in his Color and Color Perception: a Study in Anthropocentric Realism (Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1987), 13 footnote, seems to recognize a certain generational change, though perhaps not exactly what I have in mind.Google Scholar

4 See Steven, Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (London: Vintage, 1993), chapter 3.Google Scholar

5 See my paper ‘Colours’, Philosophy, 36, No. 137 (April and July, 1961), 128–142.Google Scholar

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14 See my essay ‘Why Philosophers Disagree’ in Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplement 19 (1993), 69–82.Google Scholar

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19 The expression ‘nomological dangler’ is due to Herbert Feigl. See his ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II, Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven and Grover Maxwell (eds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), 370–;497.

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22 I am grateful to Frank Jackson and Michael Smith for recent comments, and also to those who took part in the discussion when I read an earlier and longer version of this paper at the conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy in 1994. Also to David Lewis for marvellous correspondence expounding his more holistic treatment of our colour concepts. I think that there is still a complementary place for my own approach.