ANNOUNCEMENT | July 5, 2011
The Lecture Slides/Notes have been updated; they now contain all of the slides from previous lectures, including student presentations.
Philosophy 467/805: The Philosophy and Science of Colour Vision
Although the topic of colour may seem like a highly specialized and narrow topic, the debate around colour is a microcosm of contemporary debates in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of science. For example, if you have ever read an article on consciousness, and the author wishes to introduce the notion of “qualia”, the first example any philosopher gives of a pure sensation, “a purely subjective mental state”, a phenomenal feel, etc., is colour — “the very blue of the Adriatic” and so on. Similarly, colour is the example of choice for many debates about objectivity versus subjectivity, our epistemic access to mental states of others, the limits of scientific reduction, the nature of intentionality (i.e. colour states are prototypical examples of non-intentional states), and the reality of dispositional properties. Now, add to the current philosophical debates an immense body of scientific research on the colour vision that is both surprising and puzzling—because colour vision is, if nothing else, a truly strange and unexpected sensory capacity. What one gets is a very rich philosophical problem, tied to a body of intriguing scientific research—i. e. a very nice test case for many debates in philosophy as well as a rich body of scientific data against which to test one’s philosophical theories.
This course will NOT be a survey course through a great swath of colour literature, scientific and a philosophical. Rather, on August 6 and 7th, there will be a conference in town entitled "More or Less: Varieties of Human Colour Experience". (For information the website is: More or Less:Varieties of Human Cortical Colour Experience. In advance of this confernece (which studenst will attend in the final week of classes), this course will serve as basic introduction to the metaphysics and epistemology of colour perception, as well as an overview of a new theory of colour, the Spectral Theory. (This is the topic of a book in progress, authored by myself, Martin Hahn, and now (our very own Ph.D. student) Lyle Crawford (although he is still not sure how much of it he believes)).
Thus the seminar will have two basic sections. The first half of the course starts with the question "What is colour?" and introduces the central contemporary philosophical theories of the ontology of colour. However, at the outset, we'll examine just what why colour is, prima facie, so very "odd" Because, at bottom, colour vision is a very, very strange sensory system and it is just these oddities each philosophical theory must overcome, if any theory is prove empirically adequate.. Thus, we begin with how the world is—what makes colour in the world and how we, as humans, perceive colour—and then turn how each theory deals with the "idiosyncracies" of colour vision. With a selection of recent philosophical views in hand, the second half of the course begins. Here, I will present an alternate way of understanding human colour vision, one the redefines the biological function of human colour vision. This will take us through a few strange creatures (stomatopods, cuttlefish, daphnia pulex) and at least one strange visual system, polarization vision. The morals drawn from these evolutionary or comparative examples will then be applied to human colour vision. The course ends with 3 weeks on colour phenomenology, and three test cases for the new "spectral" theory of vision: cerebral achromatopsia, colour synaesthesia, and childhood development of colour vision and language.
PROVISIONARY SYLLABUS
Any changes to the syllabus will be announced in class and updated on the calendar below.
NOTE: Readings are available in electronic form on the READINGS page. Green Dates indicate student presentations; please look for your name opposite the topics.
| Week | Date | Topic | Notes |
| 1 | May 10 | INTRODUCTION. | |
| May 12 | SECTION I.Human Colour Vision: A Strange and Peculiar Sensory System a. Physical Causes of colour. | ||
| 2 | May 17 | b. Physical causes of colours | |
| May 19 | c. Background to Vision | ||
| 3 | May 24 | d. Visual Physiology | |
| May 26 | e. Colour Physiology | ||
| 4 | May 31 | f. Colour physiology | |
| June 2 | g.Colour Spaces. | ||
| 5 | June 7 | Colour Vision in Other Species (Krouzelka; Friesen) | |
| June 9 | Section II. Theories of Colour Ontology. i. Traditional Dispositionalism | ||
| 6 | June 14 | ii.A new Kind of Dispositionalism: Relationalism (Canuel; Nikol) |
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| June 16 | iii. Irrealism (Anderson; Mack) | ||
| 7 | June 21 | iv. Primitivism. | |
| June 23 | is a primitivism possible? A Clash of Concepts. | ||
| 8 | June 28 | v. Realism: Spectral Reflectance Realism (Chen; Wong) |
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| June 30 | Objections ot SSR |
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| 9 | July 5 | SECTION III. THE FUNCTION OF SPECTRAL VISION Three puzzles about "colour-for-colouring" & Recasting the Question | |
| July 7 | Polarization Vision the Mantis Shrimp and Cuttlefish (Farrell; Ross); Spectral Vision in Marine Species: The Uses of Wavlelength Information (Lisac & Hever) |
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| 10 | July 12 | Spectral Vision in Human Vision: Scene Segmentation, Form and Depth Processing |
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| July 14 | Resolving the Three Puzzles |
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| 11 | July 19 | Section IV. Colour Phenomenology: Three Puzzle Cases a. Cerebral Achromatopsia (Viera, Esmaili) | |
| July 21 | Cerebral Achromatopsia cont'd | ||
| 12 | July 26 | b. Colour Synaesthesias (Pernat, Foley) | |
| July 28 | Colour Syn. cont'd. | ||
| 13 | Aug. 2 | c. The Development of Human Colour Vision | |
| Aug. 4 | Development cont'd. |