Consider the first objection – that color discourse makes no explicit mention of the parameters to which the relationalist claims colors are relativized. I stand by the relationalist claim that colors are relativized to visual systems and viewing circumstances, but I also claim that the presuppositions of ordinary thought and talk about color tacitly provide us with values for these parameters. In particular, I suggest, we fill in these parameters by tacitly generalizing from our own case or the cases of organisms like us. Thus, we say that x is green (simpliciter) when we mean that x looks green to visual systems like our own and in viewing conditions like those we typically encounter. That ordinary discourse does not make these values explicit shows not that they are not present, but only that they are tacit.
Er, when I was two and I said “Dat green” I did not mean “Dat green ta vizzal sisems liek myne n sishuashuns liek dis un.” I meant “Dat green” and dat’s all I meant. I don’t think I’ve changed much over the years.
There’s really very little syntactic or semantic evidence for the existence of the argument places Cohen needs. (Or at least little such evidence that is apparent to me. Feel free to question my evidence detection capacities.) This doesn’t in the slightest refute relationalism, which is a thesis about the metaphysics of colour properties, not the semantics of colour words. (But isn’t it a platitude that colour words denote colour properties? Yes, it’s a platitude, but if I’m right that relationalism has to be an error theory about colour talk, it could still be a false platitude.)
What these syntactic/semantic considerations would show, at most, is that the folk are bad metaphysicians – they treat colours as absolute when really they are relational. But really it doesn’t even show that, unless perhaps you can show something that’s already been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Just what to say about cases where the lexicon embodies beliefs about the world that are deeply mistaken is very hard. Perhaps sometimes the right thing to do is to posit extra structure to the propositions being uttered than is immediately apparent. I very strongly doubt that this is one of those times.
I should note that (like the last post) this really is a nit to pick. I’m sympathetic to a relationalist account of the truth conditions of colour talk. (I’m going to be deliberately quiet on what exactly this means, but I don’t rule out something like John MacFarlane’s relative truth theory having application here. I meant what I said in the last paragraph about this area being very hard. I also don’t rule out theories on which sentences containing colour terms have as their semantic content incomplete propositions and the relational stuff is, if anywhere, in the speaker meaning of utterances of these sentences. The move space here is still impressively large even if we don’t allow relational stuff into the logical form of colour attributions.) I’m just not sympathetic to an account of the meaning of colour talk involving reference to viewing conditions or the like.