Color comparisons and interpersonal variation

An important challenge to color objectivists, who hold that statements concerning color are made true or false by objective (non-subject-involving) facts, is the argument from interpersonal variation in where normal observers locate the unique hues. Recently, an attractive objectivist response to the argument has been proposed that draws on the semantics of gradable adjectives and which does not require defending the idea that there is a single correct location for each of the unique hues (Gómez-Torrente, 2016). In Hansen (2015), I argued that the recent objectivist response doesn’t apply to comparative occurrences of color adjectives, so a revised, comparative, version of the argument from interpersonal variation remains a powerful objection to certain types of objectivism. In this paper, I address several unsatisfactory objectivist replies to the comparative version of the argument from interpersonal variation, and offer what I think is a more plausible objectivist reply to the comparative argument from interpersonal variation

Material and lighting dimensions of object colour

AbstractThe dimensionality of the object colour manifold was studied using a multidimensional scaling technique, which allows for the representation of a set of coloured papers as a configuration in a Euclidean space where the distance between papers corresponds to the perceptual dissimilarities between them. When the papers are evenly illuminated they can be arranged as a three-dimensional configuration. This is in line with the generally accepted view that the object colour space is three-dimensional. Yet, we show that under variegated illumination another three dimensions emerge. We call them lighting dimensions of object colour in order to distinguish from the traditional three referred to as material dimensions of object colour