Colours and Causes: A Reply to Jackson and Pargetter

Dialogue-Canadian Philosophical Review

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 281-286

  Watkins, Michael ^a  

^a AUBURN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85011437046     PISSN: 00122173     EISSN: 17590949     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300009513     Document Type: Article

References (4)

1. Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, “An Objectivist's Guide to Subjectivism About Colour,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 41 (1987): 127–41.
2. Dispositions are causally inert, according to Jackson and Pargetter, because there is nothing for dispositions to do. Assuming that there is a categorical ground for any object's disposition to look red, it is the categorical ground that causes the object to look red. To claim that an object looks red both because of its disposition to look red and because of the categorical ground of that disposition would commit us to a strange and systematic over-determination. For a detailed defence of their claim that dispositions are causally inert, see Elizabeth W. Prior, Robert Pargetter, and Frank Jackson, “Three Theses About Dispositions,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 19 (1982): 251–56. Note that I neither defend nor endorse the claim that dispositions are causally inert, but only report Jackson and Pargetter's motivations. The aim of this paper is only to show that Jackson and Pargetter fail to provide an account of colours that is adequate, given their desiderata.
3. Cf. C. L. Hardin, Colors for Philosophers (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988), especially chap. 2.
4. I defend a dispositional account of colours in “Dispositionalism, Ostension, and Austerity,” Philosophical Studies, 73 (1994): 55–86.