KEEPING UP APPEARANCES: COLORS AND THEIR LOOKS

This thesis concerns the utility of color appearances given the tricky relationship between our visual system, the phenomenology of color experiences and the urge for the ontological status of colors. On the one hand, the color constancy phenomena is generally thought to motivate color realism and on the other hand, so-called impossible color phenomena is generally thought to motivate the irrealist accounts. I show that none of these two gives us grounds to adopt either of the ontological positions. Instead, I argue that color appearances do not give us direct information about the alleged externality or internality of colors. Following this line of thought, I propose to stay agnostic about the ontological status of colors derived from their appearances. Moreover, I argue that the primary function of color vision is to discriminate among rather than detect properties. I conclude by showing that color vision understood as non-primal discriminatory capacity does nevertheless, has important roles in visual perception. Among others, its perquisites are effortlessness and usefulnessness.