It would not be right to raise a child in a very controlled environment where she is cut off from all that wonderful, colorful nature you get to experience every day. But we can think about such a child. So let's do this. Suppose this child is raised in such a very controlled environment where she can ever see only six basic colors: blue, white, black, red, yellow and violet. I think we would be able to explain to this child -- in fact, to any child -- that the color violet lies between red and blue, is really a mixture of red and blue. And I think we could then go farther and say that red and blue can also be mixed in different proportions, so that the mixture contains less blue and more red. In this way, I think we can get the child to imagine the color purple. So the answer to your question is yes, it is possible. But it is possible only in those cases where the child knows colors that are close enough. You probably know from your experience in drawing that you can mix yellow, red and black to...

If you are talking about basic colors, then you are right: there are only finitely many of them, and to get beyond them one would then have to bring in "colors" beyond the visible spectrum, and this is indeed weird in the absence of beings that can actually perceive those "colors". But here's an argument on the other side. Suppose we are willing to count as colors all the different shades on the visible spectrum -- between 360 and 750 nanometers, let's say. Suppose these are densely packed so that between any two wave lengths there's always another one. Then we'd have infinitely many different colors all of which we can actually perceive. (There's a serious questions about whether this account is consistent with the latest physics, but set this aside for a moment.) Now you might object that two colors can be different only if (a) we are able to perceive both and (b) we are able to discern the difference between them . Our abilities of discernment are surely limited, and so there are not...

One might say that a person causes the property kind to be instantiated when she decides to perform a kind act: She causes there to be a kind act. But we cannot really say anything like this about static objects. The stone does not cause heaviness to be instantiated, the relationship between stone and heaviness is too close for this. Something heavy comes into existence together with the stone. The stone does not cause its own existence, so it does not cause the instantiation of the property heavy. Now a tomato is unlike a stone in that it changes (its color turns from green to red) and also unlike a person in that it does not make decisions about how to be. The latter discrepancy seems to me less significant when we are speaking about causality. Considering a tomato plant we can, I believe, say both that it causally produces fruits that eventually mature to the point where they are red (thus causes the property red to be instantiated) and also that it instantiates this property ...