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Color and cognitive penetrability

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Abstract

Several psychological experiments have suggested that concepts can influence perceived color (e.g., Delk and Fillenbaum in Am J Psychol 78(2):290–293, 1965, Hansen et al. in Nat Neurosci 9(11):1367–1368, 2006, Olkkonen et al. in J Vis 8(5):1–16, 2008). Observers tend to assign typical colors to objects even when the objects do not have those colors. Recently, these findings were used to argue that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable (Macpherson 2012). This interpretation of the experiments has far-reaching consequences: it implies that the way we think of objects determines how we see them, thus threatening the role of perception in justifying beliefs. In this paper, I show that the psychological findings can be accounted for without admitting cognitive penetrability. An underestimated but key feature of the experiments is that observers had to judge colors in borderline cases, in conditions of reduced acuity, or on the basis of color-concepts instead of matching. Such judgments are sensitive to the form of bias that Tversky and Kahneman (Science 185:1124–1131, 1974) have termed ‘anchoring’. Adopting a suggestion from Raffman (Philos Rev 103(1):41–74, 1994), I argue that the way subjects in the experiments think of the objects could affect their color judgments without altering their color experiences.

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Notes

  1. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this journal for suggesting this formulation of the relation between the rival hypotheses; and to Thanos Raftopoulos, Maria Olkkonen and Mohan Matthen for stimulating discussion of this article’s topic.

  2. ‘R’ for hue, ‘5’ for value or saturation, and ‘12’ for chroma or intensity.

  3. The mean values were 268 for red-associated shapes and 241 for neutral shapes, out of a 360-step scale. The mean for the backgrounds of the red-associated shapes was not located in Munsell’s system by the subjects of the experiment, but by ‘the eyes of two independent judges’.

  4. See, for example, Wright (1975, p. 338). Note that this thesis (that indiscriminability is not identity) does not affect Macpherson’s or Delk and Fillenbaum’s uses of the concept of sameness of color—that is not the point being made here. On one hand, the thesis does not imply that there can be no identity of colour appearances. For instance, a definition of identity for qualia has been proposed by Goodman (1977, pp. 196, 209) and adopted by Clark (e.g., 1989). While I disagree with that definition, I agree that some cases of indiscriminability are cases of identity, and knowably so (Zeimbekis 2009, pp. 355–356). On the other hand, if one is a sceptic about colour identity, Macpherson’s uses of the expression ‘are the same colour’ can be substituted with ‘are indiscriminable’ without damaging her arguments.

  5. See for example Hardin (1988, pp. 180–181) on just-noticeable differences as a detection of differential stimuli, and Clark (2000, p. 130) for a plausible explanation of why differential stimuli play this role.

  6. For descriptions of the conditions for pairwise matching in constructing color spaces out of phenomenal identity and difference, see Kuehni (2003, p. 201) and Kuehni (2005, p. 82).

  7. An illustration of the distribution of sameness of looks in a color ordering is provided by ‘MacAdam ellipses’: at the centre of the ellipse are colors that match almost all of the time, while at the edges are colors that match about half the time. See Kuehni (2003, p. 216).

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Correspondence to John Zeimbekis.

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Zeimbekis, J. Color and cognitive penetrability. Philos Stud 165, 167–175 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9928-1

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