Abstract

This chapter discusses several theses that are part of the commonsense conception of color as articulated by Mark Johnston, including paradigms, explanation, unity, perceptual availability, and revelation. It focuses on the last doctrine, which contends that the intrinsic nature of canary yellow is fully revealed by a standard visual experience as of a canary yellow thing. Science delivers a variety of relational facts about colors. These physical, psychophysical, neuropsychological, and semantic facts are interesting and important, but are entirely beside the point of knowing what the colors are in and of themselves. What redness is in itself can only be learned in an experience as of a red thing. What is thus learned, what the quality is intrinsically, leaves nothing for a scientific theory to complete, revise, or even enhance.