Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Thoughts from retirement

I retired in 2003 because I had a project that I wanted to work on and being a teacher at TT was taking too much time. The project is to work out a projectivist account of color. Color projectivism is the view that objects are not colored, although they look colored. Two ideas make me think that projectivism is the right way to go. First: when we see an object as red - the object looks red - we visually attribute to the object as sensuous non-relational property. Call this property s-red. Similarly there is s-green, s-blue, and so forth. Second: if the world we see about us is anything like physics says that it is then the objects we see about us are not s-colored. So I conclude that it must be that our visual system projects s-colors onto objects.


Since 2003 I have written five essays (I am a very slow writer), three of which are about projectivism. "Toward a Projectivist Account of Color" appeared in JP in May of 2005. "The phenomenological character of color perception" was published on line by Philosophical Studies,in September of 2010, and will eventually come out in their journal. I have just finished a third article that is now under review.

I thought I would use this blog to consider some issues that have arisen with these works. Perhaps a blog on perceptual consciousness and another on perceptual representation.

Ed Averill