Some of our philosophical problems about concepts are the result of their history. Our perplexities arise not from that deliberate part of our history which we remember, but from that which we forget. A concept becomes possible at a moment. It is made possible by a different arrangement of earlier ideas that have collapsed or exploded.
—Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (2004)1
In this chapter, I describe Descartes’s Quandary, the predicament that Descartes and his contemporaries find themselves in as the result of the Cartesian strand’s criticisms of the Aristotelian strand. I have three goals in describing this quandary. First, I aim to properly characterize the situation that Descartes and his contemporaries find themselves in as the result of their criticisms. I argue that, rather than leaving them well-positioned to take a straightforward position on the nature of color, their criticisms leave them in a philosophical quandary about how to go on thinking about color. The basic problem is that they are left with a pair of hard questions for how to go on thinking about the perception of colors, questions that cannot both be answered in a consistent manner without thereby leading to significant revisions in how they tend to think about what perception can and cannot do. The first goal of this chapter is to properly characterize this situation, so as to make sense of why it leaves them in a philosophical quandary. The second goal is to explain how dispositionalism about color emerges as an apparently attractive view in the context of this quandary. Dispositionalism emerges as an attempt to avoid confronting the difficulties raised by this quandary in a non-revisionary manner. The third goal is to bring out how dispositionalism is ill-equipped to fulfill its promises in this regard.
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)2
In this section, I offer two sorts of evidence for thinking that Descartes finds himself in a philosophical quandary as the result of his criticisms of the Aristotelian strand. First, I give a close reading of one of Descartes’s comments on color, one that usefully illustrates how his criticisms of the Aristotelian strand do not, in themselves, imply a positive view about the nature of color. Second, I compile a series of other comments by Descartes, in which he appears to vacillate between a number of distinct, and incompatible, positions on the nature of color.
It will help to begin by outlining the standard story that is often given about the historical context of Descartes’s comments on color. I will then use this standard story as a foil for my close reading. Here is a representative example of the standard story:3
There is a story about seventeenth-century philosophy which goes roughly as follows. Descartes broke with the scholastic tradition by advancing an austere new mechanistic theory of the physical world; according to this theory, bodies intrinsically possess only geometrical properties. Descartes thus stripped the world of many properties which were formerly classified as unambiguously physical. Some of the properties which were left over from the new scientific picture of the world could be safely discarded; the powers, natures, and faculties beloved of the scholastics are obvious examples. But there were many other properties, such as secondary qualities, which could not be treated in this cavalier fashion; they had to be located somewhere, and Descartes invented a new concept of mind in order to accommodate them. (Jolley 1990, 1)4
According to the standard story, Descartes’s austere mechanistic account of the physical world suffices to banish colors to the “dustbin of the mind.”5 Here is how Alison Simmons summarizes the implications of this story for Descartes’s thought about color:
[Descartes] excised colors, sounds . . . from the corporeal world . . . [and] relocated [them] in the mind in the form of sensations that do little more than give an ornamental . . . flair to our sense perceptual experience. (Simmons 1999, 347)
On the standard story, Descartes relocates colors to the mind, taking them to be nothing more than artifacts of our visual experience, because there is no room for them in the world. There is no room for them in the world because objects in the world intrinsically possess only geometric properties. The standard story usually ends here, but doing so fails to make explicit why there is no room for colors in the world. There is, in other words, a suppressed premise in the standard story, one that is almost never made explicit. The suppressed premise is that colors are not—and cannot be—geometric properties of objects. Presumably, the reason that this suppressed premise is rarely made explicit is that it seems obvious that colors are not geometric properties of objects.
One of the overarching goals of this book is to make us wary of assuming, in a philosophical context, that second-order claims about the nature of color are obvious. It is worth noting, therefore, that the claim that colors are not geometric properties of objects is not something that either Aristotle or Descartes took to be obvious. Far from it: there are times when both Aristotle and Descartes are fine with describing colors in geometric terms. For example, here is Aristotle explaining the differences between colors in terms of different ratios:6
As the intermediate colours arise from the mixture of white and black, so the intermediate savours arise from the Sweet and Bitter; and these savours, too, severally involve either a definite ratio, or else an indefinite relation of degree, between their components, either having certain integral numbers at the basis of their mixture, and, consequently, of their stimulative effect, or else being mixed in proportions not arithmetically expressible. (Sens. I.4, 442a13–442a17, trans. Beare)
And here is Descartes explaining the differences between colors in terms of different ratios:
The differences between colors depends . . . solely on the different ratios of forward to rotational movement. (Descartes, AT II 468 [my translation])
These quotations from Aristotle and Descartes do not exhaust everything that they have to say about the nature of color, or what they each think about the relevance of mathematics for understanding color.7 Far from it. But they should make us wary of the suppressed premise in the standard story, the assumption that it is simply obvious that one cannot describe colors as geometric properties of objects.
With this initial worry about the standard story in place, we can now give a close reading of a particular comment by Descartes, one that usefully illustrates the quandary he finds himself in as a result of his criticisms of the Aristotelian strand. The comment is from Descartes’s Meteorology, from the section in which he introduces his theory of the rainbow:
[S]ince all [colors’] real nature is that they appear, it seems to me a contradiction to say that they are false and that they appear. (Descartes 2001, 338)
If we read this comment with the standard story in the background, then it is easy to assume that it relegates colors to the dustbin of the mind. This, for example, is how Celia Wolf-Devine reads this comment.8 As she puts her reading,
There are . . . hints of a deeper idealism [about color] in this passage. The statement that “all their real nature is to appear” [sic] certainly seems to make of colors something subjective. An “appearance” after all must be an appearance to someone. Colors cannot be identified with the spinning motion of the light particles if “all their real nature is to appear,” since without a perceiver there is no appearance. Descartes also seems to identify colors with their appearance to the perceiver in saying that they cannot appear and be false. If this is so, it would seem that after images (the yellow colors seen by the jaundiced man, etc.) would all be true and, indeed, that all talk of our color perceptions being true or false at all would be ruled out. (Wolf-Devine 1993, 47–48)9
On Wolf-Devine’s reading, Descartes’s comment is intended to take a straightforward position on the nature of color. She takes Descartes’s position to be that colors are merely part of how the world appears to individuals. Accordingly, colors cannot be identified with anything outside of the minds of those individuals; they certainly cannot be identified with purely geometric properties such as the ratio of rotational to forward movement of light particles. Moreover, on Wolf-Devine’s reading, Descartes’s claim that it is “a contradiction to say that [colors] are false and that they appear” commits him to thinking that the very idea of “misperceiving” the colors of things is confused. After all, if colors are merely part of how things appear to individuals, then there is no way for those appearances to be mistaken. In sum, with the standard summary in the background, it is easy to read this comment by Descartes as relocating colors to the dustbin of the mind.
The previous two chapters are intended to draw attention to parts of the historical context of Descartes’s comment that are left out of the standard story. (As Ian Hacking puts it, these are “[not] part of our history which we remember, but . . . which we forget” [Hacking 2004, 37].) With these other parts of the historical context in place, it becomes possible to offer a revised reading of this comment, one that challenges Wolf-Devine’s reading. Here is the comment again, this time including the preceding sentence (which Wolf-Devine quotes but does not discuss in her reading):
And I cannot approve of the distinction made by the philosophers when they say that there are some true colors, and others which are only false or apparent. For because the entire true nature of colors consists only in their appearance, it seems to me to be a contradiction to say that they are false, and that they appear. (Descartes 2001, 338)
If we read this comment in the context of the history of the Descartes’s opposition to the Aristotelian strand, we can see that in the first sentence Descartes is expressing his rejection of the Aristotelian distinction between true and apparent colors. According to the Aristotelian distinction, some colors are mere appearances, because our experiences of these colors are brought about by light, whereas other colors are really there, because our experiences of these colors are brought about by the colors themselves. Descartes rejects this Aristotelian distinction on the grounds that it rests upon a false presupposition: namely, that light plays a role in producing our experiences of apparent colors that it does not play in producing our experiences of true colors. As Descartes notes: light plays the same sort of role in both cases.
This provides us with an entirely different way of reading Descartes’s comment. On my revised reading, Descartes’s point is not to make a positive claim about the nature of color. Rather, his point is that the Aristotelian strand’s account of what they call “apparent” colors applies equally well to what they call “true” colors. The clause “since all their [i.e., colors’] true nature is that they appear” is intended to point out that experiences of (what the Scholastic Aristotelians call) “true” colors are brought about by light, in just the same way that experiences of (what the Scholastic Aristotelians call) “apparent” colors are brought about by light. It is in this sense that all color experiences are “apparent”: they are all brought about by light. Thus, contrary to Wolf-Devine’s insistence that “[c]olors cannot be identified with the spinning motion of the light particles if ‘all their real nature is to appear,’ ” on my revised way of reading Descartes’s comment, his point is precisely to draw attention to the role that purely geometric properties of light particles play in producing all color experiences. Finally, the clause “it seems to me a contradiction to say that they are false and that they appear” can now be read as pointing out that since the manner in which experiences of (what Scholastic Aristotelians call) “true” colors are produced is the same as the manner in which experiences of (what Scholastic Aristotelians call) “apparent” colors are produced, the very idea that “apparent” colors are “not true” (i.e., false) is self-contradictory. In other words, if the very reason for thinking that “apparent” colors are “apparent” applies equally well to “true” colors, then the very distinction between “true” and “apparent” colors is undermined. Rather than making a positive claim, according to which colors are relocated to the dustbin of the mind, this clause is merely making the negative claim that the Scholastic Aristotelian reason for thinking that “apparent” colors are unreal is unfounded. As Walter Charleton puts this revised way of reading Descartes’s comment,
What can remain to interdict our total Explosion of that Distinction of Colours into Real or Inhaerent, and False, or only apparent, so much celebrated by the Schools? For, since it is the Genuine and Inseparable Propriety of Colours, in General, to be Apparent; to suppose that any Colour Apparent can be False, or less Real than other, is an open Contradiction, not to be dissembled by the most specious Sophistry; as Des Cartes hath well observed. (Charleton 1654, 187–188 [emphasis in original)
In short, on my (and Charleton’s) reading of Descartes’s comment, his ultimate point is that it is a mistake to suppose that (what the Scholastic Aristotelians call) “apparent” colors are any less real than (what they call) “true” colors.
There is an important difference between these two readings that extends beyond the specifics of this particular passage. The difference concerns what each reading takes the philosophical significance of this passage to be. On Wolf-Devine’s reading, Descartes’s austerely mechanistic account of the physical world implies a positive philosophical position about color: colors are relocated to the dustbin of the mind. Accordingly, it takes the philosophical significance of this passage to be that it allows us to identify Descartes’s positive philosophical position about the nature of colors. On my revised reading, by contrast, Descartes’s specific criticism of a specific aspect of the Aristotelian strand does not leave him with a positive philosophical position about the nature of color. On the contrary, it leaves him with the realization that one aspect of how we used to think about color collapses in upon itself. On my revised reading, what is philosophically significant about this passage is the difficulty it identifies for how to go on thinking about color. That is, far from leaving Descartes with a positive position, the Cartesian strand’s criticism of the Aristotelian distinction between true and apparent colors leaves him in a philosophical quandary about how, exactly, to go on thinking about color.
For further evidence that Descartes’s criticism of the Aristotelian strand leaves him in a philosophical quandary, it will help to compile some of Descartes’s other comments on color. Consider, for example, the following four comments:
Comment (1): [W]e easily fall into the error of judging that what is called colour in objects is something exactly like the colour of which we have sensory awareness; and we make the mistake of thinking that we clearly perceive what we do not perceive at all. (CSM I 218)
Comment (2): [C]olours, smells, tastes and so on, are, I observed, merely certain sensations which exist in my thought. (CSM II 297)
Comment (3): [W]hatever you may suppose color to be, you will not deny that it is extended. (CSM I 41)
Comment (4): [W]e have every reason to conclude that the properties in external objects to which we apply the terms light, colour, smell, taste, sound, heat and cold—as well as the other tactile qualities and even what are called ‘substantial forms’—are, so far as we can see, simply various dispositions in those objects which make them able to set up various kinds of motions in our nerves <which are required to produce all the various sensations in our soul>. (CSM I 285)
Reading these passages alongside one another makes it difficult to know how we should characterize Descartes’s positive view on the nature of color. At the most basic level, it is difficult to tell from these comments whether Descartes locates colors inside or outside the mind. Comment (2) seems to locate colors inside the mind, but comment (3) seems to locate colors outside the mind (given that, for Descartes, the defining feature of the world outside the mind is extension). At a more complex level, it is difficult to tell from these comments what sort of philosophical theory of color Descartes holds. Consider, for example, the following standard taxonomy of positions in the philosophy of color:10
Error Theory: the view that all of our beliefs about colors are systematically false.
Subjectivism: the view that colors are properties of inner experience.
Physicalism: the view that colors are physical properties of external objects.
Dispositionalism: the view that colors are dispositions to produce a characteristic sort of visual experience.
If we ask ourselves which of these positions Descartes holds, the answer is that he seems to hold all of them—which is obviously problematic. Comment (1) suggests that he holds an error theory of color; comment (2) suggests that he holds a subjectivist theory; comment (3) suggests that he holds a physicalist theory; and comment (4) suggests that he holds a dispositionalist theory. Many who have read Descartes with the intention of identifying which position he occupies in this taxonomy have noted that he appears to vacillate considerably in this regard:
Descartes, Boyle, Locke and other writers of the earlier period could vacillate rather unselfconsciously among the views of, say, colors as dispositions or powers to cause sensations, as the mechanistic structures in objects that accounted for the “powers,” or as the sensations themselves. (Wilson 1992, 234)
Descartes appears to waver between several different theories of color. (Wolf-Devine 1993, 48)
[L]ike many other writers of the seventeenth century Descartes vacillates between taking colors to be dispositions of objects, taking them to be mechanical structures that underlie these dispositions, and taking them to be sensations in the mind. (Cook 1996, 19)
In short, many have noted that Descartes appears to vacillate between different positions on the nature of color.11 The almost universal response to this apparent vacillation, however, has been to attempt to explain it away. Almost every commentary on Descartes’s views on color argues that Descartes “really” holds one or another of these positions, and that any appearance to the contrary is misleading. An academic cottage industry has emerged, dedicated to identifying Descartes’s “official” position on the nature of color. Thus, some hold that Descartes is an error theorist about color,12 others that he is a subjectivist;13 some that he is a physicalist;14 and others that he is a dispositionalist.15
Almost no one is willing to defend the conclusion that it is a mistake to try to identify Descartes’s “official” position on the nature of color.16 To the extent that this conclusion is even considered, it tends to be summarily rejected on the grounds that it would imply that a philosopher of Descartes’s acuity is guilty of having inconsistent views. As Lawrence Nolan puts this point, “One problem with this conclusion is that, if true, it would mean that Descartes also contradicts himself, for many of these alleged vacillations occur in single works. But this seems implausible” (Nolan 2011a, 82).17
In sum: although standard readings of Descartes on color assume that Descartes must be committed to a single, positive view on the nature of color, there is considerable textual evidence for thinking that he instead found himself in a philosophical quandary with regard to how we should think about color and that he vacillates between a number of distinct, and incompatible, positions in response to this problem. Accordingly, what is needed is an explanation for why Descartes vacillates between these different positions.
[P]hilosophical problems are created when the space of possibilities in which we organize our thoughts has mutated.
—Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (2004)18
In this section, I offer a genealogical explanation for Descartes’s vacillation between different positions on the nature of color. I argue that if we understand how Descartes’s criticisms of the Aristotelian strand mutate the space of possibilities for thinking about color, we will be able to understand why he is led to vacillate between these different positions. In other words, understanding the structure of Descartes’s Quandary will allow us to understand his reasons for vacillating.
To see the structure of this quandary, consider the situation of someone who recognizes that the discovery that all color experiences are produced by the transduction of light by the retina undermines the basis for the Aristotelian Scholastic distinction between true and apparent colors. This implies that the sense in which Aristotle and the Scholastic Aristotelians think that the colors of things exist independently of light and perceivers is false. Colors simply do not, in that sense, exist independently of light and perceivers. Perhaps, however, there is some other sense in which they do. Descartes’s own account of the visual process is able to provide another sense in which color perception involves something that exists independently of perceivers: namely, in terms of geometric properties of the rotating particles of light that produce color experiences.19 I think it is for this reason that we find Descartes making comments like comment (3) above, comments that seem to locate colors outside the mind and seem to identify them with the ratios of rotational to forward motion of light particles. Thus, we find Descartes claiming that “the nature of the color [red] consists only in the fact that the particles of the fine substance that transmits the action of the light have a stronger tendency to rotate than to move in a straight line” (Descartes 2001, 337).
This would be the end of this genealogy, and a straightforward way to characterize Descartes’s account of the nature of color, were it not for the fact that choosing to go on talking about color in this manner raises a hard question for how we should think about perception more generally:
Hard Question (1): Can perception represent things to us without thereby making us aware of what those things are?
If we were to answer this question positively, then the question of how to go on thinking about color in the light of Descartes’s criticisms of the Aristotelian strand would be settled. For example, it would imply that our perceptual experiences of red things represent whatever the external physical causes of red experiences turn out to be.
Descartes, however, answers this question negatively, and he here provides a useful illustration of the kind of response that many of us have to the suggestion that redness is identical to a specific ratio of rotational to forward movement in particles of light (or something similar). Significantly, Descartes’s reason for answering this question negatively has nothing whatsoever to do with his criticisms of the Aristotelian strand, nor does it rest upon any sort of claim that is specifically about color or color perception, so one could agree entirely with his criticisms of the Aristotelian strand but disagree with his reason for answering this question negatively. Descartes’s reason for answering this question negatively is (what I will call) his internalism about the content of mental representations.20 For Descartes, the content of a mental representation is determined by facts internal to the thinker of that thought, facts that are available to the thinker just in virtue of having the thought. As Martial Gueroult puts it, “[for Descartes] what constitutes an idea . . . is the character it possesses that an internal investigation reveals, to be manifest to our consciousness as the picture of something external” (Gueroult 1984, 138). This means that if a color experience does not make it possible for a thinker, just in virtue of having that experience, to know that it was caused by a specific ratio of rotational to forward movement in light particles, then that color experience cannot represent that ratio. As Ralph Schumacher puts this aspect of Descartes’s view, “[w]ithin Descartes’s theory of mental representation there is no place for ideas which represent something without thereby giving us epistemic access to its nature” (Schumacher 2004b, 89). By answering question (1) negatively, however, Descartes thereby becomes unable to locate colors outside the mind in the rotation of light particles. He is thereby forced to locate colors somewhere else, somewhere where thinkers are in a position to know about them just in virtue of having visual experiences of them. The only place, however, that fits this description is in visual experience itself. It is for this reason that we find Descartes making comments like comment (2) above, comments that locate colors in the mind and that identify them with visual experiences themselves. Thus, we find Descartes claiming that “sensations of tastes, smells, sounds, heat, cold, light, colors, and so on . . . do not represent anything outside our thought” (CSM I 219).
Once again, this would be the end of this genealogy, and a straightforward way to characterize Descartes’s account of the nature of color, were it not for the fact that settling on this way of talking about color raises a second hard question:
Hard Question (2): Do color experiences represent things outside of thought at all?
It is at this point that we come closest to seeing a genuine vacillation in Descartes. It is not at the level of explicitly contradicting himself, of explicitly saying that color experiences both do and do not represent things outside of thought. It is at the more subtle level of going on to say that how we ordinarily talk about colors involves representing them as being something outside of thought.21 For example, Descartes repeatedly uses phrases like “what is called color in objects” (as in comment (1) above, emphasis added) as a way of pointing out that we ordinarily talk as if colors are properties of objects outside of thought.22 Talking as if colors are properties of objects outside of thought, however, is a way of representing them as outside of thought. Descartes’s reason for answering this second question positively, therefore, is (what I will call) his deference to ordinary speech. It is crucial to notice that this deference involves holding on to one key aspect of the Aristotelian strand: the idea that we think of colors as existing outside of thought. At this point, we find Descartes, as the result of answering this second question positively, making comments like comment (1) above, comments that claim to discover the possibility of a systematic sort of error in color experience. Thus, we find Descartes claiming that,
[W]hen we suppose that we perceive colours in objects . . . we do not really know what it is that we are calling a colour; and we cannot find any intelligible resemblance between the colour which we suppose to be in objects and that which we experience in our sensation . . . And so we easily fall into the error of judging that what is called colour in objects is something exactly like the colour of which we have sensory awareness; and we make the mistake of thinking that we clearly perceive what we do not perceive at all. (CSM I 218)
In sum: we can now give a clear articulation of the structure of the quandary that Descartes finds himself in as the result of his criticisms of the Aristotelian strand. The quandary is structured around two hard questions that cannot be answered consistently without thereby leading to significant revisions in how we tend to think about what perception can and cannot do. The first question is whether it is possible for perception to represent things to us without our knowing what those things are. If one answers this first question negatively (as Descartes does, on the basis of his internalism), it becomes difficult to see how one can hold that color perception represents things outside of thought. The second question is whether color experiences represent things outside of thought. If one answers this second question positively (as Descartes does, on the basis of his deference to ordinary speech), it becomes difficult to see why one is not committed to thinking that color experiences are systematically erroneous. The basic structure of the quandary is that it seems impossible to hold both that colors exist outside of thought and that color experiences are not widely erroneous without giving up either internalism or a deference to ordinary speech.
In the next section, I argue that dispositionalism first emerges as an appealing position on the nature of color because it seems to provide a way out of Descartes’s Quandary.
[M]any of our conceptual misadventures arise precisely because our “linguistic training” has not prepared us adequately for dealing with a vexatious world.
—Mark Wilson, Wandering Significance (2006)23
In this section, I give a genealogical explanation for the emergence of dispositionalism about colors, the view that colors are dispositions to produce characteristic sorts of visual experiences. There are four steps to my explanation. First, I make a preliminary point about the use of the word “disposition” in the seventeenth century. Second, I draw a distinction between two forms of dispositionalism about color: light dispositionalism and experience dispositionalism. Both of these forms of dispositionalism are present in the writings of Descartes and his contemporaries, and are sometimes conflated, so it will be crucial to draw a clear distinction between the two. Third, I explain why light dispositionalism is not an attractive solution to Descartes’s Quandary. Fourth, I explain why experience dispositionalism seems to provide a way out of this quandary.
When discussing dispositionalism in the context of the seventeenth century, it is essential to note that the word “disposition” and its cognates was commonly used in two distinct ways during this period.24 On the one hand, this word was often used to refer to an object’s texture, usually understood in terms of the corpuscular structure of the surface of the object. On the other hand, this word was also used to refer to an object’s powers, usually understood in terms of the object’s ability to bring about certain effects. However, as Peter Anstey notes, these two uses of “disposition” are related in the works of figures such as Descartes, Boyle, and Locke, insofar as these figures hold that “it is in virtue of the ‘disposition’ [texture] of its parts that snow has the ‘disposition’ [ability] to reflect light” (Anstey 2000, 87).25
It is also crucial to draw a distinction between two forms of dispositionalism about color, in terms of two different sorts of effects that an object’s texture has the ability to bring about. First, an object’s texture can have the ability to bring about certain effects on light, in virtue of the ways in which its texture changes the physical character of light by reflecting, refracting, or otherwise modifying it. This is light dispositionalism, the view that color should be identified with a disposition to modify light. The following comment from Boyle suggests such a view:26
[B]ecause there is in the body that is said to be coloured, a certain disposition of the superficial particles, whereby it sends the Light reflected, or refracted, to our eyes thus and thus alter’d, and not otherwise, it may also in some sense be said, that Colour depends upon the visible body. (Boyle 1664 II.3, 10)
This passage is especially useful for our purposes, because it makes clear how light dispositionalism is able to locate colors in objects, rather than in the light modified by those objects (and subsequently transduced by the retina). It is able to do this because it identifies color with an object’s disposition to modify light.
The second sort of effect that an object’s texture has the ability to bring about is on perceivers. Specifically, it is the ability to bring about certain visual experiences. This is experience dispositionalism, the view that color should be identified with a disposition to bring about color experiences in perceivers. The following comment from Locke suggests such a view:27
[T]he ideas of primary qualities of bodies, are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves. They are in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us; and what is sweet, blue, or warm, in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves, which we call so. (Locke 1689/1975, II.viii.15)
This passage is also useful for our purposes, because it makes clear how experience dispositionalism is also able to locate color in objects, rather than in experiences, because it also identifies color with an object’s disposition to bring about color experiences.
Both light and experience dispositionalism are well-equipped to accommodate Descartes’s deference to ordinary speech, insofar as both are able to locate colors in objects (rather than in light or experiences). However, light dispositionalism is ill-equipped to accommodate Descartes’s internalism, insofar as it identifies an object’s color with that object’s disposition to modify light. The reason that this entails abandoning internalism is simply that knowing that objects are disposed to modify light is not something that one comes to know just in virtue of having color experiences. As the Aristotelian strand makes manifest, it is perfectly possible to have color experiences without in any way thinking that these color experiences are brought about by objects’ dispositions to modify light.
Experience dispositionalism, by contrast, does seem well-equipped to accommodate both Descartes’s deference to ordinary speech and his internalism, insofar as it identifies colors with an object’s disposition to bring about color experiences. The crucial thing to note is that this is something that one can know about an object just in virtue of having color experiences. It is for this reason that experience dispositionalism seems to provide a way out of Descartes’s Quandary.
How does [this sort of] philosophical problem . . . arise?—The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We introduce an analogy but we leave the nature of this analogy undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about [it]—we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of thinking about the matter. . . . (The decisive move in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.)—And now the analogy which was to make us understand . . . falls to pieces.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)28
In this section, I offer a genealogical critique of experience dispositionalism. To do this, I focus on a specific aspect of how experience dispositionalism was first introduced by Descartes and his contemporaries. Focusing on this aspect will allow us to see how it does not, in fact, do what it was introduced to do, which is to provide a way of holding on to the Aristotelian and Cartesian strands simultaneously. It does not, in this sense, provide us with a way out of Descartes’s Quandary. Rather than offer us a substantive, illuminating solution to this problem, experience dispositionalism ends up offering us nothing more than a merely verbal solution.
There is an obvious worry that many will have about the form of critique offered in this section, so it is worth addressing that worry up front. The worry is that attending to the context in which dispositionalism first emerged, and using that context to argue that dispositionalism is false, commits the genetic fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the mistake of thinking that errors made in the genesis of an idea must carry over into any subsequent formulation of that idea. There are two reasons why the genealogical critique that follows does not commit the genetic fallacy.
First, this genealogical critique does not aim to show that dispositionalism is false. This genealogy is perfectly compatible with dispositionalism being true; the worry it aims to raise is that the only sense in which dispositionalism seems to be true is a completely trivial sense. I am here agreeing with Alex Byrne and David Hilbert’s conclusion that the main problem with dispositionalism “is not falsity, but insipidity” (Byrne and Hilbert 2011, 359). One way to read this genealogy is as an attempt to complement Byrne and Hilbert’s critique of dispositionalism by offering a historical analysis of how and why an insipid view would nonetheless seem informative and useful to so many philosophers.
Second, rather than aiming to show that dispositionalism is false, this critique aims to show that it does not, in fact, do what it was introduced to do. It aims to explain, in other words, how and why a completely trivial idea could mistakenly seem to be an informative and useful idea. The goal is to undo a conceptual misadventure by identifying the point at which a philosophically uninformative idea first arose, by giving a genealogical account of why it mistakenly seemed informative in the first place. If this genealogy is able to do that, then it will, at least to that extent, have undermined the most historically significant motivation for dispositionalism.
The easiest way to see the problem with dispositionalism is to focus on an analogy that Descartes and many of his contemporaries introduce as a way of motivating how they propose to think about color and color experience in the light of Descartes’s criticisms of the Aristotelian strand. Consider the following quotations from Descartes, Boyle, and Locke:
A sword strikes our body and cuts it; but the ensuing pain is completely different from the local motion of the sword or of the body that is cut— as different as colour or sound or smell or taste. We clearly see, then, that the sensation of pain is excited in us merely by the local motion of some parts of our body in contact with another body; so we may conclude that the nature of our mind is such that it can be subject to all the other sensations merely as a result of other local motions. (CSM I 284)
[I]n case a pin should chance by some inanimate body to be driven against a man’s finger, that which the agent doth is but to put a sharp and slender body into such a kind of motion, and that which the pin doth is to pierce into a body that it meets with, not hard enough to resist its motion—and so, that upon this there should ensue such a thing as pain, is but a consequent that superadds nothing of real to the pin that occasions that pain—so, if a piece of transparent ice be, by the falling of some heavy and hard body upon it, broken into a gross powder that looks whitish, the falling body doth nothing to the ice but break it into very small fragments, lying confusedly upon one another, though, by reason of the fabric of the world and of our eyes there doth in the daytime, upon this comminution, ensue such a kind of copious reflection of the incident light to our eyes as we call whiteness. (Boyle 1991, 35)
How secondary qualities produce their ideas. After the same manner, that the ideas of these original qualities are produced in us, we may conceive that the ideas of secondary qualities are also produced, viz., by the operation of insensible particles on our senses. For, it being manifest that there are bodies and good store of bodies, each whereof are so small, that we cannot by any of our senses discover either their bulk, figure, or motion,—as is evident in the particles of the air and water, and others extremely smaller than those; perhaps as much smaller than the particles of air and water, as the particles of air and water are smaller than peas or hail-stones;—let us suppose at present that the different motions and figures, bulk and number, of such particles, affecting the several organs of our senses, produce in us those different sensations which we have from the colours and smells of bodies; e.g., that a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter, of peculiar figures and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes the ideas of the blue colour, and sweet scent of that flower to be produced in our minds. It being no more impossible to conceive that God should annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, than that he should annex the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance. (Locke 1689/1975, II.viii.13)
Running throughout these quotations is a suggestive analogy. The analogy is between color experience and pain experience.29 The point of the analogy is that pain experience provides a useful model for thinking about the relationship between color experience and color. There are three parts to this model. First, pain experiences do not resemble their external causes. Second, in spite of this lack of resemblance, pain experiences are nonetheless able to make us aware of their external causes. Third, pain experiences are able to make us aware of their external causes without thereby making us aware of whatever paradigmatically primary qualities are present in those external causes.
If we consider this analogy in the context of Descartes’s problem, it can seem to provide us with a putative solution. The putative solution is that we should take how we already think about pain experience and use it as a model for thinking about the relationship between color experience and color. Specifically, the model suggests that color experiences can make us aware of colors as the external causes of those experiences, without the experiences, in themselves, making us aware of whatever paradigmatically primary qualities are present in those external causes. In short, the analogy seems to provide us with a model for thinking about how Descartes’s problem can be solved in a way that does not require giving up either internalism or a deference to ordinary speech.
If the point is to take how we already think about pain experience and use it as a model for thinking about color experience, however, there is a rather significant problem with this analogy. This problem arises as a result of how we tend to think about the relationship between pain experiences and their external causes. Consider, for example, the case of a fire that produces a painful burning sensation in me when I get close to it. The problem is that, as Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole pointed out long ago, “we never say that the fire is in pain” (Arnauld and Nicole 1662/1996, 50). By contrast, we do say that objects are this or that color. The disanalogy that Arnauld and Nicole are highlighting is that although we do not think of pain experiences as making us aware of properties of objects, we do think of color experiences as making us aware of properties of objects.30 Were we to start thinking about color experience on the model of how we already think about pain experience, therefore, we would have to give up on a significant aspect of how we tend to think about color experiences: namely, that they make us aware of properties of objects. This is a preliminary reason for thinking that the proposed analogy between color experience and pain experience will not allow us to hold on to both the Cartesian and Aristotelian strands simultaneously. It does not allow us to do this because it can hold on to internalism only at the cost of forcing us to give up on a deference to ordinary speech.
At this point, it is worth considering a rejoinder on behalf of dispositionalism. The rejoinder is to propose that the analogy between color experience and pain experience is only intended to motivate the very idea of it being possible for sensory experiences to make us aware of their external causes without thereby making us aware of anything about those external causes.
The problem with this rejoinder becomes clear when we reflect upon how, exactly, we would have to think about colors in the light of this disanalogy. We would have to think about colors as bare dispositions, as dispositions that do not have any categorical basis in the underlying properties of objects. On a bare dispositionalist account of what it is for an object to be red, the object is not disposed to look red in virtue of any underlying properties of the object. It looks red solely in virtue of being disposed to look red. There are two related problems with this sort of bare dispositionalism about colors. The first is that it implies that it would be possible for two objects to be identical in every respect, except that one is disposed to look red and the other is not. But, upon reflection, it seems seriously implausible that the only difference between two objects could be that one is disposed to look red and the other is not, without any further difference between them that would explain this difference in dispositions. As Gareth Evans puts it, there is “a deep conceptual prejudice of ours that is offended by dispositional properties without categorical grounds” [Evans 1985, 276]).31 The second, related, problem is that this possibility is incompatible with a basic aspect of the Cartesian strand itself: the idea that there is a one-to-one relationship between the external physical causes of color experiences and color experiences themselves. After all, if bare dispositionalism allows for the possibility of two objects that are identical in every respect, except that one is disposed to look red and the other is not, then one-and-the-same external cause can be disposed to produce different color experiences (in one-and-the-same perceiver, in one-and-the-same set of conditions).
This problem for the rejoinder brings out a deeper, more fundamental problem for the very analogy between color experience and pain experience. The problem is that this analogy does not begin to take into account the discovery that motivates the Cartesian strand in the first place: namely, the discovery that light plays a role in producing color experiences that is overlooked by the Aristotelian strand. The clearest way to see this problem is to notice that the relationship between pain experiences and their external causes is a two-place relation, whereas the relation between color experiences and their external causes is a three-place relation. Consider, once again, the case of a pain sensation produced by a fire. In such a case, there are only two factors involved: (i) the fire and (ii) the burning sensation. Now contrast this with a case of seeing the blue color of a pair of blue jeans. In such a case, there are three factors involved: (i) the blue jeans, (ii) the experience of seeing the blueness of these jeans, and (iii) the light that is illuminating these blue jeans.32 The fundamental problem with the analogy between color experience and pain experience is that it assumes, contrary to the discovery that motivates the Cartesian strand in the first place, that blue jeans are disposed to produce experiences of blue in and of themselves. But this is simply false. Whereas fires are disposed in and of themselves to produce experiences of pain, blue jeans are not similarly disposed in and of themselves to produce experiences of blue.
At this point, it is easy to wonder why the analogy between color experience and pain experience would be thought to motivate dispositionalism at all. What is needed is an explanation for why the analogy between color experience and pain experience could seem so appealing in spite of this fundamental disanalogy between the two cases. The explanation, I think, is that this situation involves a particularly misleading case of (what I will call) philosophical false friends. The phrase “false friends” (faux amis) is normally used in the context of learning a new language to describe cases in which the new language has words or phrases that look or sound similar to words or phrases in one’s home language, but which mean something quite different. For example, in spite of looking the same, the French word “pain” means something quite different from the English word “pain.” Thus, if one is an English speaker learning French, it is all too easy to make the mistake of assuming to that “pain” means the same thing in French that it means in English. Philosophical false friends, by extension, are words or phrases that look or sound similar but mean quite different things in the context of different philosophical theories. As Hacking notes,
Sometimes one can find almost the same sentence, in an earlier epoch, as one that is common in a later way of thinking: a precursor indeed! . . . [However] [d]espite the words being the same, so much had happened that the meaning was different (Hacking 2006, xxi).
In the context of the interaction of the Aristotelian and Cartesian strands, something like this is going on with regard to the following phrase:
Philosophical False Friend: Seeing the colors of things depends on light.
This phrase can seem like something that the Aristotelian and Cartesian strands can agree upon. It is, after all, a phrase that they both would endorse. The problem is that it means something completely different in each case. It is, in this sense, an example of a philosophical false friend.
In the context of the Aristotelian strand, the phrase “seeing the colors of things depends on light” means that in order to see the colors of things, the transparent medium must actually be illuminated/transparent. In this context, light is simply a condition of the transparent medium, the condition of it actually being transparent. Light does not, in this sense, play any role in bringing about color experiences. It simply makes it possible for colors to bring about color experiences.
In the context of the Cartesian strand, by contrast, the phrase “seeing the colors of things depends upon light” means something quite different. It means that color experiences are themselves brought about by the transduction of light by the retina. In this context, light is itself a form of motion, and therefore is itself capable of bringing about color experiences.
Having disambiguated this phrase, if we ask ourselves which of these two meanings better fits the analogy between color experience and pain experience, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the Aristotelian meaning. The superficial appeal of the analogy between color experience and pain experience is based upon thinking that we can use the phrase with its Aristotelian meaning at the same time that we can use it in a Cartesian context, without thereby changing what we mean by our words. It is in this sense that the appeal of dispositionalism is based upon a merely verbal agreement, an agreement on nothing more than a particular string of words, regardless of the meanings of those words.
In sum: in this section, I have offered a genealogical critique of dispositionalism. My critique aims to show how dispositionalism only appears to be able to hold on to the Aristotelian and Cartesian strands simultaneously. To bring out how dispositionalism glosses over the tensions between these two strands, rather than resolving them, I have spelled out the two distinct senses in which each of these strands holds that “seeing the colors of things depends upon light.” My strategy, in other words, has been to bring out how these strands’ merely verbal agreement on this phrase obscures the underlying tension between them.33
1. Hacking (2004, 37).
2. Wittgenstein (1973, §123).
3. Influential versions of this standard story include Burtt (1924/1954), Husserl (1936/1970), and Dijksterhuis (1950/1961).
4. Acceptance of this story is widespread enough that it plays the role of a background assumption in many debates in the philosophy of color. For example, consider the following summary statement from Alex Byrne and David Hilbert’s introduction to their anthology of essays on the philosophy of color:
Galileo and, following him, an impressive parade of philosophers including Descartes and Locke seem to have thought that modern science straightforwardly shows that physical objects are not colored. (Byrne and Hilbert, 1997, xx)
5. See Nolan and Whipple (2006, 33 fn. 1) for a history of the phrase “dustbin of the mind.” Here is how Nicholas Jolley summarizes this way of reading Descartes (which Jolley endorses):
Descartes subscribed to what might be called a dustbin or grab bag conception of the mind. The items that fall under the umbrella of the mental, for Descartes, are whatever is left over from the picture of the world once matter is defined in purely geometrical terms. (Jolley 2000, 57)
6. It is worth noting that the ratios that Aristotle is talking about here are not ratios of different pigments. “The Aristotelian system is not concerned with the behavior of pigments but with the working of colors in nature” (Ackerman 1980, 39). As Alan Shapiro explains:
The common painter’s practice of mixing pigments emerged gradually in the late middle ages and did not become widely accepted until the Renaissance, when painters freely experimented with mixed pigments. . . . [T]he idea that white and black are different from the chromatic colors and could not generate them. . . was perhaps the most radical fruit of Renaissance revisions of the concept of color. (Shapiro 1994, 600–601)
(For a history of the artistic practice of mixing pigments, see Orna [2013].) The ratios that Aristotle is talking about here are most likely the ratios of the mixture of elements that make up the colors. As Richard Sorabji notes:
Aristotle says in the De Sensu that other colours are produced through the mixture of black bodies with white (SS 3, 440a3–b23). The obvious mixture for him to be referring to is the mixture of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, which he describes at such length in the De Generatione et Corruptione. All compound bodies are produced ultimately through the mixture of these elements. (Sorabji 1971, 293)
For an account of Aristotle’s reasons for identifying different colors with different ratios, see Barker (2007).
7. For discussion of Aristotle’s attitude towards the use of mathematics in understanding colors, see Sorabji (1972). For discussion of Descartes’s attitude, see Buroker (1991).
8. For evidence that the standard story is in the background of Wolf-Devine’s reading, note that she quotes (approvingly) Dijksterhuis’s account of the standard story at (Wolf-Devine 1993, 33).
9. It is tangential to the main issue here but worth mentioning that Wolf-Devine is clearly conflating two distinct phenomena in this quotation: (i) after images and (ii) the yellow tint that the world is supposed to take on for people with jaundice. After images are the images floating in one’s visual field “following either brief, intense illumination of the eye or prolonged fixation on an illuminated stimulus” (Wade 1998, 159). For example, if one stares at a bright light for a few second and then looks away, one will see an after image of that light floating in one’s visual field. “[T]he yellow colors seen by the jaundiced man” are the yellow colors that jaundiced people are supposed to see permeating the world. First of all, this is not, in fact, how the world looks to people with jaundice. People with jaundice have yellow skin but do not see the world tinted in yellow. (This confusion is old, at least as old as Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, from the first century B.C.E. [Lucretius 2007].) Second, even in actual cases of people who see the world tinted in yellow (such as when one first puts on a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses), this is not what after-images are like. That said, the conflation between after-images and seeing the world tinted in yellow does not affect the substance of Wolf-Devine’s point.
10. This sort of standard taxonomy can be found in Byrne and Hilbert’s introductory essay to their anthology of readings on the philosophy of color (Byrne and Hilbert 1997).
11. Other readers who have noticed this sort of apparent vacillation in Descartes, Boyle, or Locke include Hamilton (1853/1857, 338), Mackie (1976, 15), Troyer (1976, 211), Smith (1990, 237), Maund (1991, 253–263), Blackburn (1993, 280), Nichols (2003, 471–2), Atherton (2004, 28), Stuart (2003, 64), Jacovides (2007, 243), Nolan (2011b, 6), Pasnau (2011, 512–518), and Durt (2012, 49–50).
12. For readings of Descartes as an error theorist, see Costa (1983), Mackenzie (1989/1990), Wilson (1992), Byrne and Hilbert (1997), Stroud (2000), Hyman (2006), and Maund (2012).
13. For readings of Descartes as a subjectivist, see Wells (1984), Cook (1987), Buroker (1991), Field (1993), Menn (1995), Nelson (1996), Keating (1999), Smith (2005), and Downing (2011).
14. For readings of Descartes as a physicalist, see Cottingham (1990), Beyssade (1992), Wolf-Devine (1993), Alanen (1994), Hoffman (1996), Simmons (1999), De Rosa (2007), Buchwald (2008), Hwang (2011), and Gal-Chen and Morris (2012).
15. For readings of Descartes as a dispositionalist, see Jolley (1990), Gaukroger (1995), Thompson (1995), and Dicker (2013).
16. Notable exceptions are Schmaltz (1995 and 1996), Atherton (2004), and Pasnau (2011), although no one offers the genealogical explanation for this vacillation that I give.
17. Others have rejected this conclusion on similar grounds. Here is Simon Blackburn: “It might seem fairly shocking that a philosopher could vacillate over which of these to endorse” (Blackburn 1993, 280). And here is Christoph Durt: “[I]t seems unlikely that philosophers as intellectually sharp as Descartes and Locke [would] blatantly contradict themselves” (Durt 2012, 50).
18. Hacking (2004, 37).
19. For the purposes of this chapter, the differences between Descartes’s account of the external causes of color experience and a contemporary account do not matter. (For a useful contemporary account, see Nassau [2001].) It is, however, worth noting two significant differences between Descartes’s and contemporary accounts: (i) Descartes assumes that there is a one-to-one relationship between types of external causes and types of color experiences, and (ii) Descartes does not clearly distinguish between the proximal and distal causes of color experiences.
20. Descartes’s most extended articulation and defense of internalism takes place in the First and Third Meditations. For discussions of Descartes’s internalism, see Kemmerling (2004), Schumacher (2004b), and Cassam (2008).
21. For discussion of this aspect of Descartes’s comments on color, see Nolan (2011b).
22. It is in this same sort of context that we find Malebranche reminding us that “[w]e naturally think that color is spread out on the surface of objects” (Malebranche 1674–5/1997, 634) and, more than 330 years later, David Chalmers reminding of the same point: Phenomenologically, it seems to us as if visual experience presents simple intrinsic qualities of objects in the world, spread out over the surface of the object. When I have a phenomenologically red experience of an object, the object seems to be simply, primitively, red. (Chalmers 2010, 398)
23. Wilson (2006, 19).
24. Authors who note the distinction between these two ways of using “disposition” during this period include Wolf-Devine (1993, 48), Anstey (2000, 87), Atherton (2004, 29), Kaufman (2006, 178), and Pasnau (2011, 521).
25. For further discussion of the way in which these two uses “disposition” are related for Descartes and his contemporaries—to the extent that they may not even be sharply distinguished for them—see Rickless (forthcoming).
26. I say “suggests” because Boyle, like Descartes and Locke, appears to vacillate between a number of different positions on the nature of color. I take this apparent vacillation to be evidence that Boyle also finds himself in Descartes’s Quandary. As with Descartes and Locke, this apparent vacillation has led to an academic cottage industry that aims to identify Boyle’s “official” position on the nature of color. For readings of Boyle as a dispositionalist, see Jackson (1929), O’Toole (1974), Ben-Chaim (2004), and Kaufman (2006). For readings of Boyle as a physicalist, see Alexander (1974) and Pasnau (2011). For readings of Boyle as a subjectivist, see Mandelbaum (1974), Keating (1993), and Downing (2011). Curley (1972) and Anstey (2000) both argue that Boyle’s vacillation is real and that it is a mistake to attempt to identify his “official” position on the nature of color. Here is Curley: “Boyle was drawn in different directions on this issue, and. . . he was drawn in different directions for good reasons, even if he was not clear about what those reasons were” (Curley 1972, 447). Here is Anstey: “there is little prospect of offering a fully consistent interpretation of [Boyle’s] doctrine of the sensible qualities without turning a blind eye to important texts” (Anstey 2000, 107).
27. Once again, I say “suggests” because Locke, like Descartes and Boyle, appears to vacillate between a number of different positions on the nature of color. I take this apparent vacillation to be evidence that Locke also finds himself in Descartes’s Quandary. As with Descartes and Boyle, this apparent vacillation has led to an academic cottage industry that aims to identify Lockes’s “official” position on the nature of color. For readings of Locke as a dispositionalist, see Jackson (1929), Yolton (1970), Curley (1972), Wilson (1979), Campbell (1980), Bolton (1983), Lowe (1995), Hyman (2006), and Chappell (2007). For readings of Locke as a physicalist, see Alexander (1974), Troyer (1976), Ayers (1991), McCann (1994), Keating (1998), Jacovides (1999 and 2007), Heil (2005), and Downing (2009). For readings of Locke as a subjectivist, see Berkeley (1710), and Kant (1783/1977). For readings of Locke as an error theorist, see Mackie (1976), Stroud (2000). For a reading of Locke as holding that colors are relations that only exist in the event of being perceived, see Stuart (2003 and 2013).
28. Wittgenstein (1973, §308).
29. It is worth noting that this analogy does not seem to have lost any of its suggestiveness over the years. For a recent invocation of it in this same context, see Langsam (2000).
30. Moreover, we do not think of pain experiences as making us aware of their causes as abiding properties of objects, properties that persist independently of our experience of them.
31. It is at this point that I am inclined to invoke one of John Haugeland’s philosophical maxims, “Don’t get weird beyond necessity” (Haugeland 1998, 120).
32. I am intentionally discussing a case of seeing the color of an ordinary opaque object, and not the case of seeing the color of a light source itself, on the assumption that a large part of the appeal of dispositionalism is due to its apparent ability to account for the (putatively) abiding colors of ordinary opaque objects. It would be disingenuous (and implausibly ad hoc ) to insist that dispositionalism is a really only a theory of the colors of light sources and not the colors of ordinary opaque objects.
33. Here is James Conant’s helpful gloss on the sort of strategy I am adopting here: “The aim. . . is to furnish [one’s target] with a perspicuous representation of the various things he might mean by his words in order to show him that, in wanting to occupy more than one of the available alternatives at once and yet none in particular at a time, he is possessed of an incoherent desire with respect to his words” (Conant 2005, 64).
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