Imagining novel colours

Abstract

Some philosophers, most notably David Hume, think that you can imagine colours that you’ve never seen before. Other philosophers, among them David Lewis, L.A. Paul, and Hume again, think that you can’t imagine sensory qualities that lie outwith your past experience. An easy way to reconcile these views is to say that you can imagine colours and other qualities sufficiently similar to those you’ve experienced before: a missing shade of blue, but not totally novel properties. Hence the widespread intuition that someone raised in a monochrome environment could not imagine colours. However, this reconciliation merely raises the questions of why, and how, past experience can facilitate some imaginings and not others. Through consideration of hallucinations, imprisoned colour scientists, flavour design, and the Wagner tuba, this chapter argues against the view that past experience furnishes qualitative material for imaginative blending, and in favour of the Lewisian view that past experience develops the know-how required to imaginatively blend: put somewhat abstractly, it develops the ability to conceive of the experiential space within which novel qualitative appearances might be manifested. The chapter ends by considering extensions of this view from imaginings of novel sensory properties to imaginings of novel sensory and qualitative experiences in the broadest sense. </p