Black and white and the inverted spectrum

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 57, Issue 227, 2007, Pages 161-175

  Broagkes, Justin ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949316570     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9213.2007.477.x     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos, VII 198 (=Adversos dogmaticos, I 198). The adverbial theory of perception is noteworthy.
2. On which and much else, see Miles Burnyeat's lecture 'Conflicting Appearances', Proceedings of the British Academy, 65 (1979), pp. 69-111.
3. I follow the main lines of the presentations of Sydney Shoemaker and Ned Block. See Shoemaker, 'The Inverted Spectrum', Journal of Philosophy, 79 (1982), pp. 357-81;
4. Block, 'Inverted Earth', inj. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, 4 (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1990), pp. 53-79,
5. both repr. in N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Güzeldere (eds), The Mature of Consciousness (MIT Press, 1997), pp. 643-62 and 677-93.
6. Page numbers in parentheses in the main text (accompanied by 'a' or 'b' to indicate the column) refer to the reprint. I follow the common usage of Peacocke's term 'red'' (and similarly 'green'', etc.), as intended to apply to the kind of experience produced when a red object is presented to a normal observer under normal circumstances (though Peacocke himself prefers to talk of red' regions of the visual field, rather than of red' experiences): see C. Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford UP, 1983), ch. 1. To simplify the presentation, I shall assume that at stage 1, red things produce red' experiences in normal earthlings, and similarly in normal inverted earthlings. Block does not assume this uniformity - indeed, he is rather inclined to use the inversion hypotheses to cast doubt on it. But the assumption does not affect the core of the argument.
7. The story derives from G. Harman, 'Conceptual Role Semantics', Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 23 (1982), pp. 242-56, at p. 251
8. as developed in Block's 'Inverted Earth'.
9. See Wittgenstein, 'Wittgenstein's Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data"', ed. R. Rhees, Philosophical Review, 77 (1968), pp. 275-320, at p. 284,
10. quoted by Shoemaker, 'The Inverted Spectrum', p. 643a.
11. Block later modifies the inverted earth thought-experiment (following a suggestion of Robert Stalnaker's) to include, after all, awareness of the move: see his 'Mental Paint and Mental Latex', in E. Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical Issues, 7 (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1996), pp. 19-49. The modified version avoids the present objection; for the same reason it also abandons the alleged advantage of the inverted earth story over the original inverted spectrum.
12. See C.L. Hardin, 'Reinverting the Spectrum', in A. Byrne and D. Hilbert (eds), Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color (MIT Press, 1997), pp. 289-301;
13. see also Hardin, Color for Philosophers: Unweaving the Rainbow (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988, 1993), pp. 134-45, and pp. xxxii-xxxiii in the 1993 expanded edition.
14. See also Hardin, Color for Philosophers, p. 140.
15. S.E. Palmer, 'Color, Consciousness, and the Isomorphism Constraint', Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 22 (1999), pp. 923-43, at p. 926.
16. 'Unlike the other colours, green and blue are reported at virtually all lightness levels.... The best greens are seen at the middle lightness levels.... Red, brown, and purple are reported only at the lower lightness levels': P.K. Kaiser and R.M. Boynton, Human Color Vision, 2nd edn (Washington: Optical Society of America, 1996), p. 504.
17. For a development of this suggestion, treating colours as something like 'phenomenal natural kinds', see my article 'Colour, World and Archimedean Metaphysics: Stroud and the Quest for Reality', Erkenntnis, 66 (2007, forthcoming), at end of § 4.