Postgraduate "Work In Progress" Seminar

Abstract:

Objects can look different in different conditions of illumination while retaining their colour: for instance, a directly illumined part of a uniformly white wall and a shadowed part of that wall look different in spite of being, and looking to be, the same colour. These familiar cases of changing appearances have been used to motivate substantive philosophical theories of appearances. On these views, in order to explain how things look, we need to posit some special subject - or context-dependent properties, such as colours, shapes and sizes (e.g. Shoemaker 2000, 2006, Noë 2004, Schellenberg 2008, Hill-Bennett 2008, Genone 2014).

In this paper, Giulia argues that changes in colour appearance under different illuminants can be explained in terms of ordinary, objective properties we visually perceive and do not motivate a metaphysical commitment to properties of a different kind. She first appeals to evidence from theories of colour constancy, colour matching experiments and phenomenological considerations to show that visual appearances exhibit a structural complexity that can only be explained by acknowledging that properties other than colours contribute to the way things visually appear. Giulia will then argue that the best explanation for this complexity is that we can visually perceive the illumination of surfaces and that illumination distinctively contributes to determining visual appearance. She concludes that cases of changing appearances involving colours under different illuminants do not support the appearance properties view. Finally she discusses an alternative proposal, on which illumination is a dimension of colour appearance (Hilbert 2005, Jagnow 2010), and argues that we have no reason to accept its counter-intuitive consequences. Changing appearances do not require us to abandon the näive view on which the way the objects we perceive appear is explained by their perceivable, objective properties.