Color

It is legitimate to say that tomatoes instantiate the property red. But is it also legitimate to say that tomatoes "cause" the instantiation of the property red? Thank you.

Comments

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 (when parts of it are ripe fruits). I feel less confident about saying this about a tomato that matures on your window sill. It instantiated green yesterday. It instantiates red today. But we would be inclined to say that processes in the tomato, not the tomato itself, (together with external factors such as warmth) caused the change in color. This inclination, however, may be a mere convention: Changes in persons and tomatoes can be caused by processes within them. And there seems to be no deeper reason why we should be prepared to say in the first case, but not in the second, that the change in X was caused by X.

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