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A Theory of Secondary Qualities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Eugene Valberg
Eugene Valberg
Affiliation:
University of Nairobi, Kenya
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Extract

One idea that has been around for a long time is that ‘secondary’ qualities—colour, sound, temperature, taste and smell—are not really ‘in objects’ but only ‘in our minds’. If, however, one tries, without assuming any philosophical concepts, to argue for this view, he is likely to find it more difficult than he might have thought.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 55 , Issue 214 , October 1980 , pp. 437 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1980

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References

1 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter xxiii.

2 Three Dialogues Concerning Hylas and Philonous (First Dialogue).

3 Op. cit., First Dialogue.

4 Suggested by my colleague H. Odera Oruka.

5 I thank Professor Kwasi Wiredu, of the University of Ghana, for calling my attention to the usefulness of making this point, as well as for several other helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

6 The reader should note that for the sake of brevity I use locutions like ‘that which looks green’ and ‘that which feels hot’ interchangeably with ‘that which causes us to see green’ (or ‘that which looks green to a normal perceiver’) and ‘that which causes us to feel (a sensation of ) heat’ (or ‘that which feels hot to a normal perceiver’), etc. Wherever one of the former seems unilluminating, the reader may substitute one of the latter.

7 The terms used are those of Keith Donnellan, from his deservedly well-known article ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions’, Philosophical Review 75 (1966), 281–304.Google Scholar

8 Notice, however, that D, understood attributively, would be poorly rendered by ‘Whatever has such and such properties will have such and such other properties’, for that is likely to be understood as a law-like proposition, which D is not; also, D ‘refers’ at least to the extent that it presupposes the existence of something in a way that law-like propositions do not.

9 Compare Jonathan Bennett's saying that ‘there could be a point in calling a thing red even if this were belied by the wave-length of light reflected from it,… If something's colour were in sunlight indistinguishable from that of things agreed to be red, this fact could reasonably be reported in the words “That thing is red”, even if we had to add riders such as “though its light-reflecting properties are atypical for red”,…’ (Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 99Google Scholar). See also Pitcher's discussion in Chapter IV of his book A Theory of Perception (Princeton University Press, 1971), especially pp. 221–231.Google Scholar Neither of them, however, appears to be explicitly aware of the crucial importance of construing definitions of secondary qualities attributively rather than referentially.

10 In Semantics and Natural Languages, Davidson, and Karman, (eds) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971).Google Scholar

11 And here, of course, ‘that which feels hot’ must be taken attributively, since if taken referentially, ‘molecular motion is that which feels hot’ would amount to ‘molecular motion is molecular motion’.

12 Op. cit., 340; emphasis added.

13 Op. cit., 90f. See also Pitcher, , op. cit., 221–231.Google Scholar