The reality of color: The case for subjective realism

Modern philosophy's embrace of the dictates of natural science gave root to a metaphysical view which has strongly influenced contemporary philosophical thought. We confront a tradition which, in positing ontological antinomies between mental and physical, subjective and objective, appearance and reality, brings with it a conception of reality that falls far short of providing an adequate analysis of properties and events whose instantiation depends on subjective experience or states of conscious awareness.;The problem of the ontology of color is a case in point. Colors have traditionally been conceived as essentially related to the sensory effects of external objects on perceivers, which are realized in experiential states with characteristic qualitative contents. The difficulty for contemporary materialist views is to find a way to fit this qualitative aspect of experience into its catalogue of objective magnitudes. Three sorts of strategies have evolved: (1) A denial of the experiential nature of color: colors are physical properties which cause sensory experiences; their instantiation is independent of perception. (2) Colors are dispositional properties of external objects which depend on perception. (3) Nothing is really colored; although things seem to be colored, color perception delivers only illusions.;Neither the first nor the third position, however, can be maintained in the face of the findings of color science, along with our intuitive grasp of the phenomenology and epistemology of color perception. Dispositional views run aground on the obscurity of the ontology of dispositions. We advance a theory of color which stems from a non-traditional metaphysical view, titled subjective realism, which dismantles long-held ontological oppositions rooted in misguided presuppositions, and asserts that acknowledging the subjectivity of certain properties, such as color, does not entail the denial of their objectivity.;Subjectivity determines the nature of appearances; but considered as interactive events involving psychological and cognitive processes, neurophysiological structures, and physical things, appearances are objectively characterizable as psychophysical phenomena. The demonstration that colors are features of appearance-events provides a concrete case in which subjective existence finds objective instantiation, in which mental and physical dimensions coalesce, and which affirms the reality of color.