We Percieve the World as Coloured, But There Are No Colours in the World.

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We percieve the world as coloured: but there are no colours in the world.

That we percieve the world as coloured is considered trivial, so in this essay I will concetrate mainly on the latter claim, “there are no colours in the world”. There are two philosophical positions which are compatible with this claim. The first one is an error thoery known as eliminativism and the second is subjectivism. There are two reasons that people give for claiming that there are no colours in the world. The first is that science has not shown that there are such things in the world - this reason is compatible with both of the above views; the second is that colours are essentially an optical illusion, caused by a systematic error in the visual processing system - this reason is put forward mainly by eliminativists. I will now turn to an analysis of these reasons to see if they are suffiicient to draw the conclusion that “there are no colours in the world”.

Because the first of these reasons supports both theories we will start there, but first I would like to clear up some terminology in order that we not confuse the concepts we are talking about. Firstly, this essay does not deal with the dualist theory of mind; in some sense the subjectivist we are talking about believes that mind is part of the world, and they are realist in the sense that they think there is an external world. And secondly, because of the above, some people might feel that subjectivism contradicts itself, because if it is the case that the mind exists in the world and the subjecitivst believes that colours are in the mind, then he believes that colours exist in the world. but the subjectivist is trying to say something more subtle, the subjectivist is trying to say that i...

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..., it does show that the eliminativist has still to find a plausible theory for this which is testable. if it can offer a solution to these problems then I think that they have a strong case for claiming that colours do not exist in the world, but for the reason given above I find this philsophical position implausible and so not yet convincing.

In conclusion. I think that the subjectivist is too quick in suggesting that colours do not exist in the world: from any amount of negative outcomes, we still cannot claim that there are no colours in the world, the most we can say is that we do not know. The eliminativist theory on the other hand, although it has the advantage that, if it were true, we could certainly conclude that colours do not exist in the world, seems implausible because it does not meet what Logue (2013, p5 and p16 ) calls the ecumenism desidaratum.

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