Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LXVIII, No. 2, March 2004

Reality and Colours: Comment on S troud

JOHN MCDOWELL

University of Pittsburgh

Any brief comment on Barry Stroud’s fine book risks bringing some of its virtues into relief precisely by lacking them. The book’s epigraph is a pas- sage from Wittgenstein advising philosophers to take their time. Stroud never papers over difficulties, and he allows himself to be sketchy only when it does not matter for the main line of his argument. Anyone without space constraints should take him as a model. Pleading space constraints, I shall sketch two reservations.

I

Stroud spends little time on the idea of a metaphysical quest for reality in the abstract-just enough to introduce colour as a test case (see 41). He seems to think test cases are the only way to make progress in understanding and assessing the idea. But there is room for scepticism about it on general grounds.

The quest is motivated by its seeming “legitimate to ask how much of what we think and feel is due to the way the world is-the ‘objective’ fac- tor-and how much is due to features of us, the ‘subjective’ factor” (12-13). In this context Stroud cites an image from Quine, in which we measure “the extent of man’s conceptual sovereignty” by subtracting man’s cues from his world view (12). This citation might seem to imply that Quine encourages a metaphysical quest for reality, discarding what “conceptual sovereignty” con- tributes to our world view so as to arrive at how things really are. But that does not fit Quine. Quine’s picture of world views is not meant to detract from a whole-hearted realism about the world as we view it. He combines acknowledging that any world view is partly determined by “conceptual sov- ereignty” with insisting that to accept a world view is to take a stand on how things are anyway, how things are independently of us.

Quine’s image is strikingly Kantian. Now Stroud’s Kant (in a different context) is primarily concerned to explain how there can be a priori knowl- edge that is substantively about reality. The explanation is that the relevant

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reality is partly constituted by our “conceptual sovereignty”, so not genuinely independent of us (see 195-7). Of course such a characterization fits a strand in Kant.’

But we can find a more interesting move at least adumbrated by Kant, in which reflection about the very idea of being in touch with reality reveals that “conceptual sovereignty” is necessarily involved in having the world in view at all, and this without threat to the idea that a world view is a view of how things are independently of us.*

That is just the combination Quine envisages-acknowledging the role of “conceptual sovereignty”, but allowing a quest for reality only in a non- metaphysical form, in which it involves only ordinary methods of finding out how things are. Stroud of course distinguishes that from the metaphysical quest that concerns him.

For Stroud’s Kant, what is in view in a world view, just because the world view is a product of “conceptual sovereignty”, is merely phen~mena l .~ That can easily seem to imply a defectiveness in the world view. The effect is to encourage what motivates the metaphysical quest for reality, the thought that the involvement of “conceptual sovereignty” vitiates the claim of world views to be genuinely objective-even while the quest is discouraged on the ground that a reality genuinely independent of us is outside our reach. For the different, perhaps inchoate, Kant whose thinking would underwrite Quine’s attitude, there is nothing we could mean by “the world as it is independently of us” except the world as it is brought into view, with an essential exercise of “conceptual sovereignty”, in world views. That world is no doubt phenomenal, a world of appearance, but calling it “merely phenomenal” would sound a wrong note. In this way of thinking there is nothing in the idea of objective reality that should seem to invite the metaphysical quest for reality. It is not that we must resign ourselves to being unable to get at a genuinely independent reality, though we can somehow contemplate the project we must renounce. Rather, the idea of an independent reality cannot be anything for us but the idea of what our “conceptual sovereignty” enables us to bring into view. There is no intelligible conception of a project in which

’ “Reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own.” (Critique of Pure Reason Bxiii, quoted by Stroud at 196.) Kant’s successors are inspired by Kant in this direction, but go beyond him in definitively discarding the idea of independent “cues”, which figures in Quine’s image. One might express a Hegelian conception by saying the content of a world view is wholly deter- mined by “conceptual sovereignty”. It may seem strange to cite this Hegelian conception as part of a defence of common-sense realism, but I think it fits Hegel’s aims. This formulation slurs over the fact that the forms of sensibility, as well as the spontaneity of the understanding, figure in Kant’s explanation of how synthetic a priori knowledge is possible. I focus on “conceptual sovereignty” to stay in touch with the image Stroud cites from Quine.

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we would get at a more genuinely objective reality, not even as a project we must see as beyond our powers.

Of course I cannot definitively debunk the metaphysical quest for reality by merely gesturing towards an argument from authority, worse than most in that even the reading of the authority is open to dispute. But it would not fit Stroud’s admirable policy of taking his time if he were quick to decide there is nothing worth looking into here-no prospect of exploiting Kantian con- siderations to undermine the motivation for the metaphysical quest directly, without need for case studies.

I1 Rejecting the metaphysical quest on general grounds would have deprived Stroud of the frame for the discussion of colour that forms the body of his book. That suggests it would be absurd to wish he had shown less respect for the general idea of the quest for reality. In that case he would not have needed to write-at least with the pretext he uses-about colour at all, and obvi- ously writing about colour was what he wanted to do. However, I believe the frame detracts from his discussion of the idea that colour concepts are distinc- tively subjective, that colours are “somehow dependent on perceivers or expe- riencing subjects” (41). He considers this idea only in the context of the pro- ject-an attempt at partially executing the metaphysical quest-of arguing that in respect of colour the world is not as we nai’vely take it to be. The effect is that the most defensible version of the idea makes no appearance on his pages.

A subjectivism about colours can be expressed in claims to the effect that what it is for something to be, say, yellow is for it to be such as to produce certain perceptions in certain perceivers in certain circumstances. According to Stroud, any such conception of colour requires “an indirect connection between the objects of perception and the objects of thought concerning the colours of things” (1 18). The perceptions mentioned on the right-hand side of such a formula cannot be perceptions of the property mentioned on the left. Perhaps they are conceived as mere sensations, without intentionality; if they are conceived as perceptions of colour, what they are conceived as perceptions of must be something other than the colour properties attributable to ordinary things. In either case, the concept of the kind of perceptions that, say, yellow things are said to be such as to produce, in the subjectivist formula, must be intelligible independently of the concept of being yellow as a property of ordinary things.

Stroud has well-placed doubts that this requirement can be met. But even supposing it can, he argues that by that very token the subjectivist claim is revealed as untenable. The constitution of human perceivers or the lighting conditions in which they normally live might have been different, in such a

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way that ripe lemons, say, might have produced in the specified perceivers under the specified circumstances perceptions other than those that are con- ceived as meeting this requirement of independent identifiability for the sub- jectivist account of what it is for something to be yellow. They might have produced, say, the perceptions that would figure in a parallel account of what it is for something to be blue. The right way to capture such a possibility is to say that things that are in fact yellow, for instance ripe lemons, might have looked blue, to normal human beings, in the lighting conditions in which human beings normally live. The subjectivist proposal, as Stroud con- siders it, would have us misdescribe such a possibility by saying ripe lemons might have been blue!

Suppose we express the idea that colours are distinctively subjective by saying that what it is for something to be, say, yellow is for it to be such as to look yellow to normal human beings in the conditions we count as opti- mal for telling what colours things are by looking at them. And suppose we insist that this connection between objects of perception and objects of thought is direct-that “yellow” on the right-hand side of the formula expresses the same property as “yellow” on the left.

This runs counter to Stroud’s thesis that any such conception of colour requires an indirect connection. He argues (140-2) that the “hybrid” I am envisaging is impossible. But his argument turns on the assumption that subjectivism about colour can be motivated only by the quest for reality, the aim of correcting a nahe world view. Not that someone who proposes a con- ception of colour on these lines is urging that ordinary things are not col- oured at all-an “error theory”. But as Stroud treats such accounts, they must aim to reduce the concepts of the colours of ordinary things to concepts expressible in terms of those supposed independently intelligible characteris- tics of perceptions. Thus the quest for reality is supposedly furthered by revealing that the colours things have are not colours we sometimes just see them to have. If “yellow” on the right-hand side of our formula means the same as “yellow” on the left, the formula effects no such reduction. And obviously rewriting the right-hand Occurrence using the formula itself (“such as to look such as to look yellow”) still leaves an unreduced occurrence of “yellow”. (We could start on an infinite regress here; see 142.)

Given Stroud’s assumption, this argument against the hybrid position seems conclusive. But what makes it plausible that the very idea of some- thing’s being yellow (unlike the idea of something’s being, say, cubic) is the idea of something essentially phenomenal-an idea whose content cannot be accurately captured without invoking the distinctive look of yellow things-is independent of the quest for reality. The assumption is wrong. Outside the context of the quest for reality, a subjectivist conception of col-

Perhaps that is a possibility, but it is not the one we are imagining.

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our need not take the form of an attempted reduction. Conceptual dependency between the idea of being yellow and the idea of looking yellow can go in both directions. We can use a formula like the one I am considering to express the thought that the very idea of something’s being yellow is subjec- tive, in that it depends on the idea of how yellow things look, even while we insist that the colour properties attributable to things and the colour proper- ties that figure in specifying ways things can look are the same. This subjec- tivism is consistent with holding that when something looks yellow to one, one can be seeing it to be just the way it looks.

This proposal does not misdescribe the possibilities that figure in Stroud’s argument against a dispositional conception of colours. Unlike the disposi- tional proposals Stroud considers, this proposal allows us to hold on to the fact that ripe lemons are yellow when we envisage possibilities in which they would not have looked the way yellow things in fact look. We hold on to the fact that they are yellow, while we imagine differences in how normal human perceivers are constituted or in the nature and behaviour of light, by holding on to what, according to this subjectivism, constitutes the content of the very idea of their being yellow: namely the way they look to us, with the visual equipment we have, in the conditions we count as optimal for telling the colours of things by looking at them. That is, we take allusions to the actual, in our dispositional formula, “rigidly”.

At one point Stroud considers the strategy of taking allusions to the actual “rigidly”. Of the proposal he considers, he says it “does not reveal any relativ- ity to us in the colours of objects” and does not “support a subjectivist or dispositional view of an object’s colour” (136). But the proposal I am consid- ering is that what if is for something to be yellow is for it to be such as to look yellow to normal human perceivers in what we count as optimal condi- tions for telling the colours of things by looking at them. This is a subjec- tivist and dispositional view of an object’s colour. Stroud cannot see a “rig- idly” interpreted dispositional formula that links being yellow with producing perceptions of yellow as saying something about the very idea of some- thing’s being yellow. He takes it merely to specify which things are yellow. As he remarks, we can just as well specify which things are ovoid by saying they are the things that would produce perceptions of something ovoid in normal human beings in good conditions for telling the shapes of things by perception. But it would be crazy to rewrite this claim as an account of what it is for things to be ovoid, whereas the proposal I am considering says what it is for things to be yellow. It says something about the content of the very idea of something’s being yellow. It does so without aspiring to reduce that idea to something else, and for that reason it is simply missing from Stroud’s inventory of possible positions.

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No doubt the thought that concepts of secondary qualities, including col- ours, differ from concepts of primary qualities in being distinctively subjec- tive originated in the context of the metaphysical quest for reality. But the thought can be extricated from that context. Perhaps we should say Stroud’s discussion reveals how important that is for the thought’s defensibility, because he certainly shows how unsatisfactory the thought is as a way of furthering the quest for reality. But since he does not consider the thought except as a way of furthering the quest for reality, his treatment of its creden- tials is at best incomplete, though he writes as if his considerations apply to any version of subjectivism about colours.

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