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Discussion: The Physical Unnaturalness of Churchland's Ellipses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Wayne Wright
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Abstract

This article addresses Paul Churchland's attempt to identify colors with surface reflectance spectra. Of particular concern is Churchland's novel method of approximating surface reflectance spectra. While those approximations are generated by objective means and yield a striking match with human phenomenological color space, they are not physically meaningful. The reason for this is that the method used to produce the approximations induces equivalence classes on surface reflectances that are not invariant under physically appropriate changes of measurement convention. This result undermines Churchland's proposed response to the objection from metamers commonly raised against color physicalism, as his surface reflectance approximations are supposed to provide an objective, physical unifying basis for metamers.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 76 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 391 - 403
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Parts of this article have been presented in various forums and I have learned much from the feedback provided by those audiences. A particular debt of thanks is owed to Edward Averill, C. L. Hardin, Kimberly Jameson, Laurence Maloney, Louis Narens, A. Kimball Romney, Whit Schonbein, Michael Webster, and John I. Yellott.

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