Color and Color Perception
A Study in Anthropocentric Realism
David R. Hilbert
CSLI, 1987
Color has often been supposed to be a subjective property, a property to be analyzed correctly in terms of the phenomenological aspects of human experience. In contrast with subjectivism, an objectivist analysis of color takes color to be a property objects possess in themselves, independently of the character of human perceptual experience. David Hilbert defends a form of objectivism that identifies color with a physical property of surfaces---their spectral reflectance.
This analysis of color is shown to provide a more adequate account of the features of human color vision than its subjectivist rivals. The author's account of color also recognizeds that the human perceptual system provides a limited and idiosyncratic picture of the world. These limitations are shown to be consistent with a realist account of color and to provide the necessary tools for giving an analysis of common sense knowledge of color phenomena.
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