I should follow up my hasty little comment about colour relationalism below, because I want to be a little bit clearer about what I am and am not endorsing, and what I am and am not dissing.

The following position seems to me to be well nigh untenable. When S says “That is C” (for some colour term C) she expresses (i.e. says in Grice’s preferred sense) the proposition “That looks C to observers O in conditions N”, where context fixes O and N, usually to be friends of S and conditions like she’s normally in. It’s untenable because it doesn’t account for the following facts.

(The baby ‘argument’ in the previous post was meant to show it was implausible, but some implausible things are true. John kissed Jack has an existential quantifier over events at the front of its LF. Who knew?!)

Indirect Reports
For all the examples, I’ll imagine Tunn is a visitor from the planet El, where everyone has such severe tunnel vision that Tunn could not possibly see (part of) my desk while having anything else in her visual field. So my desk, which looks brown to me, looks some other colour to Tunn, just like it would look to me without contrasts. (Let’s call the colour it would look ‘orange’, just for fun. I really don’t know the relevant psychophysics here.) In the following ‘that’ always denotes my desk, which by the way is brown.

Tunn: That is orange.
Me: Tunn said that is orange.

Presumably for me, there’s a tacit ‘for humans in these conditions’ in the proposition I expressed, but that isn’t what Tunn said. She said (on the hypothesis) that it looks orange to her (people) in these conditions. So my report is a misreport. But it sounds like a perfectly good report to me.

Well, maybe the tacit conditions fix on Tun since it’s her speech I’m reporting. That won’t do, if we extend the story. Lying Larry is a human liar. He rarely says true things, unless he can’t help himself.

Tunn: That is orange.
Larry: That is orange.
Me: Tunn and Larry said that is orange.

(alternatively) Me: Tunn said that is orange, and so did Larry.

But there’s no proposition Tunn and Larry both expressed, on the view I’m attacking, so it’s hard to see how any of these reports could be coherent. Yet they are perfectly correct.

Valuations
Same scenario as above

Tunn: That is orange

The following are all bad follow-ups on my part

That’s true.
That’s right.
Tunn said that’s orange, and she’s right.

But if Tunn said that my desk looked orange to her (people) in these conditions, I should say she was correct.

One might try and defend the contextualist position here by saying that we’re just systematically and massively mistaken about these reports, judgements etc. But I don’t know how that position could be defended. It seems to me that these judgements are just as much part of the data about the semantics of colour terms as the simple statements that theorists spend a long time trying to capture.

As I mentioned earlier, I think none of this undermines the arguments in favour of the metaphysical thesis of relationalism. But just in case you’re disposed to draw metaphysical conclusions from linguistic data, here’s some linguistic evidence that cuts the other way.

Let’s assume I’m no longer one of the folk, in that I know that there are such things as contrast conditions, and I know my desk normally looks orange to Els. Then I would hesitate to say either of the following things.

Tunn spoke falsely.
Tunn made a mistake.

Maybe Tunn never said a false thing in her life. It’s certainly compatible with the story that Tunn never had a false belief in her life. If ‘orange’ meant ‘looks orange to me’, we couldn’t explain that. Tunn would have spoken falsely.

The simplest way to capture all this data (I don’t know if this generalises, as the above makes clear I’m no colour expert) seems to be some variant of a relative truth account. Here’s one way of spelling that out – I make no stand on whether it’s the best way, just that it’s a way. (This way obviously owes a lot to John MacFarlane’s relative truth theory, though I’m not sure he’d agree with the last sentence or two.)

Tunn simply expressed the proposition that the desk is brown. (I can say Tunn said the desk is brown, because that’s all she said.) That proposition is true in a context iff most observers in that context see the desk as brown in most conditions. (Or something with more bells + whistles, but you get the idea.) I won’t say ‘Tunn was right’ because in my context she isn’t right. But, when talking about her speech, rather than about what she said, I focus on the context she was in, and so I won’t say she spoke falsely.

Why do I care about this? Well, colour is interesting. But I think some of our reactions to colour speeches by people like Tunn resembles our reactions to speeches involving epistemic modals by people with different knowledge states to ours. And epistemic modals are really interesting.

(All and only the true propositions in here are due to conversations with John Hawthorne and Andy Egan.)