| Many true thoughts we have about the world are from a kind of cognitive "perspective" we take on it. For instance, my thought that holding the door open is chivalrous is true, if it is true, in part because of my involvement in the cultural traditions in which the concept of chivalry takes shape. We might wonder whether non-perspectival thoughts are possible. In his book, Descartes, Bernard Williams argues that thoughts completely detached from perspective must be possible. In his terminology, such thoughts comprise an "absolute conception" of the world. Here I undertake to evaluate Williams's argument, which following Adrian Moore I call the "Basic Argument.";To do this, I first eliminate the essential occurrence of visual metaphors from the Basic Argument. I show that premises in the argument are equivalent to claims about entailment between representations. It turns out that if Williams argument is to be sound, it must be the case that for any representation it is possible to produce another more objective representation which "entails" it, in a sense of 'entailment' weaker than a priori deducibility.;I then turn to the metaphysics of color to show that this claim is false. I examine two "objectivist" theories of color, reductive physicalism and primitivism, and argue that they fail. Finally, I outline a theory of color based on David Chalmers's notion of reductive explanation. The core claim of the theory is that it is possible to explain colors in mare objective terms, such as those of physical theory. Since in this case "explanation" amounts to entailment, this provides for a way of evaluating the Basic Argument.;I conclude that the project of reductively explaining the colors fails because the "phenomenal" properties of colors are not entailed by any physical description. To establish this result, I examine and defend various spectrum inversion arguments. Because (1) our experiences of the phenomenal properties of colors are representations of them, and (2) these representations are not reductively explainable, it is not the case that it is possible for any representation to produce another which entails it. Thus the Basic Argument fails. |
