Episode 95: Zed Adams discusses the genealogy of color
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, Matt Techman here from Elucidations. I just want to say thanks very much for all the iTunes reviews. They've been very helpful and please keep 'em coming. As always, you can find us on Twitter at Elucidations Podcast. And you can check out our blog at Lucian, that's L U C I A N Lucian. ushicago dot edu slash blogs slash elucidations. One other thing I wanted to mention is that since August we've been doing our hosting through a new startup called Pippa, which is pretty cool. It's actually founded by some former philosophers. And I have to say I've been very impressed so far. The service is totally free, it provides detailed analytics, makes it very easy for you to migrate from your previous host to them.
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Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from New York. I'm Matt Tykeman. And with me is Zed Adams, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. And he is here to discuss the genealogy of color. Z Adams? Welcome.
Thanks so much
for having me. So I think a lot of us, you know, not having written a book on color yet, might think that the concept of color is pretty straightforward. But you've discussed some interesting examples that bring out how there's a history to the way we think of color. How do those examples go?
So one way to understand the starting point of my book is in a certain kind of puzzle you could get into in thinking about color. I think this puzzle is usefully illustrated by an example that Edward Avril introduced in the eighties and which is often introduced as a way of bringing out what seems philosophically problematic or puzzling about colors. The example that Avril introduced involves imagining that you have two pots of paint, pot A and pot B. You take these two pots of paint and use them to paint a canvas. You paint the whole canvas with pot A. And then you use the paint from pot B to paint an X in the middle of it. You let the paints dry. You take the painting outside and lo and behold to normal color perceivers in the normal conditions of looking at this painting under a sunny sky, it looks all one color.
But then you take the same painting inside and look at it under an incandescent light, and you're able to see the X painted with the paint from pot B on the backdrop of the paint from pot A. And so the puzzle this seems to raise is, well, how many colors is this painting really? Is it all one and the same color? Or is it two distinct colors? And the reason this seems puzzling is because both of those answers Seem intuitive. On the one hand, it seems intuitive to think that to normal perceivers and normal conditions. If it all looks the same color, then it is the same color. On the other hand, the It seems intuitive to think that well, if you're inside and looking at it under an incandescent light and you're seeing a real physical difference between the two pigments from the two pots of paint
Then Why doesn't that represent a difference in the colors of the pigments themselves? Well The standard kind of use that this example has been put to in contemporary philosophical debates is to try to force us to make a choice about how we really think about color. And this is in the service of trying to offer what I like to call an ahistorical conceptual analysis of our concept of color. So this kind of thought experiment is designed to bring out: okay, what's the way that we We really think about color. There's a kind of timeless, unchanging way that we really think about color. This kind of thought experiment's gonna bring it out. My goal in using this thought experiment is to use it against itself, to actually challenge the very idea of a historical conceptual analysis.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:21
2
What is the Avril paint puzzle and why does it matter for color theory?
9:21–20:09
3
How do the Aristotelian and Cartesian strands define color differently?
20:09–29:11
4
Why does Zed argue that color concepts are historically intertwined rather than timeless?
29:11–32:45
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Elucidations
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