Topics Color

Question When trying to imagine a completely new colour, similar to those that already exist in brightness - a basic new colour - but one that has never been percieved before - it is antaginizingly impossible. Is this merely a demonstration of the determinism of reality - that there is what there is, and nothing more?

Accepted:
February 14, 2008

Comments

This is one of the issues that perplexed Wittgenstein in his work on colour. The fact that there just seem to be the colours that there are looks like a synthetic a priori proposition, necessary in some sense, but describing matters of fact. Yet colours have often been taken to be good examples of what empiricist philosophers called secondary qualities, features of reality that may be experienced in different ways by different people. How then can we lay down as a rule that there will be no other colours? Wittgenstein argues to a degree that we have this colour system and it is fixed in the way it is right now, and so thinking about new colours does not really make sense within the framework of that colour system. But then he also argues that we could not make sense of the idea of people going to the moon, given our system of physics, and not only can we make sense of this, it has even happened. It rather depends on whether you think that our colour system is an interconnected network of meanings that cannot be broken or changed without radical alteration to what we mean by colour itself, or whether you think it is more like a scientific system. What is fascinating about colour is that it seems to be both, something that Wittgenstein invites us to reflect on.