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Jun 2010
ISBN 0262013851
456 pp.
78 illus.
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Color Ontology and Color Science
Jonathan Cohen and Mohan Matthen

Philosophers and scientists have long speculated about the nature of color. Atomists such as Democritus thought color to be "conventional," not real; Galileo and other key figures of the Scientific Revolution thought that it was an erroneous projection of our own sensations onto external objects. More recently, philosophers have enriched the debate about color by aligning the most advanced color science with the most sophisticated methods of analytical philosophy. In this volume, leading scientists and philosophers examine new problems with new analytic tools, considering such topics as the psychophysical measurement of color and its implications, the nature of color experience in both normal color-perceivers and the color blind, and questions that arise from what we now know about the neural processing of color information, color consciousness, and color language. Taken together, these papers point toward a complete restructuring of current orthodoxy concerning color experience and how it relates to objective reality. Kuehni, Jameson, Mausfeld, and Niederee discuss how the traditional framework of a three-dimensional color space and basic color terms is far too simple to capture the complexities of color experience. Clark and MacLeod discuss the difficulties of a materialist account of color experience. Churchland, Cohen, Matthen, and Westphal offer competing accounts of color ontology. Finally, Broackes and Byrne and Hilbert discuss the phenomenology of color blindness.

Table of Contents
 Table of Contents
 Introduction
 Color and Structure: Current Views
1 Color Spaces and Color Order Systems: A Primer
by Rolf G. Kuehni
2 On the Reality (and Diversity) of Objective Colors: How Color-Qualia Space Is a Map of Reflectance-Profile Space
by Paul M. Churchland
3 Color Experience: A Semantic Theory
by Mohan Matthen
4 More than Three Dimensions: What Continuity Considerations Can Tell Us about Perceived Color
by Reinhard Niederee
5 Color within an Internalist Framework: The Role of "Color" in the Structure of the Perceptual System
by Rainer Mausfeld
 Color Spaces and Explanatory Spaces
6 Into the Neural Maze
by Donald I. A. MacLeod
7 Where in the World Color Survey Is the Support for Color Categorization Based on the Hering Primaries?
by Kimberly A. Jameson
8 Color, Qualia, and Attention: A Nonstandard Interpretation
by Austen Clark
9 It's Not Easy Being Green: Hardin and Color Relationalism
by Jonathan Cohen
10 How Can the Logic of Color Concepts Apply to Afterimage Colors?
by Jonathan Westphal
 Color Blindness
11 How Do Things Look to the Color-Blind?
by Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert
12 What Do the Color-Blind See?
by Justin Broackes
 Contributors
 Index
 Index
 
 


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