Cohen’s colour paper again:

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.

For some reason it seems to be nit-picking afternoon here at TAR, so here goes. I really mean the fact that I pick nits to be a sign of affirmation of the paper I have bothered to nit-pick (rather than, say, utterly ignore) but I would understand if other folk did not agree.

Anyway, our first entrant is Jonathan Cohen’s nice manifesto Color Properties and Color Ascriptions.

Now, the antonym of ‘relational’ is obviously `non-relational’, rather than `intrinsic’, and this matters because, as argued in Humberstone, 1996, the relational/non-relational distinction is not equivalent to the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Consequently, the main contrast of concern in this paper will be that between relational and non-relational views of color. However, there does seem to be a connection between the two distinctions that will be relevant. Namely, if an intrinsic property is characterized in a rough-and-ready way as “a property that a thing has (or lacks) regardless of what may be going on outside itself” (Yablo, 1999, 479), then intrinsic properties will also be non-relational. For x cannot bear a relation to something other than x (hence cannot exemplify a relational property) regardless of what may be going on outside itself: at a minimum, x cannot bear a relation R to y (and hence cannot exemplify a relational property) unless y exists.

I don’t think this is quite right. For one thing, the conclusion in Lloyd Humberstone’s paper isn’t that intrinsic doesn’t equal relational, it’s that there is a category difference between the things that are intrinsic or nor (what Lloyd calls properties) and the things that are relational or not (what he calls concepts). So there can’t be an inclusion relation between the two because they are cross-categorical.

Set that worry aside, I still think the claim fails. Consider the property/concept having the same polarity as one’s longest finger. (I mean polarity here in the sense that something can be positively charged, negatively charged, or neither. In practice it’s often indeterminate what the charge of a large object is, so it may be indeterminate which things have this property. Or concept.) This is relational, I think, but it’s also intrinsic, provided charge and length (and, a bit contentiously, being a finger of) are intrinsic.

The bug here is that if a relational property relates something to one of it’s own parts (as it were, I’m speaking pretty loosely here) then it might still be intrinsic. It’s unlikely this matters to the debate about colours, which is why this is a nit-picking point not a serious criticism.

There may be a definition of relational around where relations to one’s own parts are tacitly, or even explicitly, excluded. But I couldn’t see one in a quick scan of Cohen’s paper. As I said, those relations really aren’t relevant to what he has in mind, so nothing here undermines what he says. It just could have been said more pedantically.

The closest we get to a definition of relationality is interestingly ambiguous on just this point

roughly, a non-relational property of x is a property that x has (or lacks) regardless of the relations x bears to things other than x.

Is my finger something other than me? In one sense yes, by Leibniz’s Law it is not identical with me. In one sense no, since it is not, as Lewis puts it, wholly distinct from me. I think the former is the more natural reading, but the latter is really what is needed here.

For some reason it seems to be nit-picking afternoon here at TAR, so here goes. I really mean the fact that I pick nits to be a sign of affirmation of the paper I have bothered to nit-pick (rather than, say, utterly ignore) but I would understand if other folk did not agree.

Anyway, our first entrant is Jonathan Cohen’s nice manifesto Color Properties and Color Ascriptions.

Now, the antonym of ‘relational’ is obviously `non-relational’, rather than `intrinsic’, and this matters because, as argued in Humberstone, 1996, the relational/non-relational distinction is not equivalent to the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction. Consequently, the main contrast of concern in this paper will be that between relational and non-relational views of color. However, there does seem to be a connection between the two distinctions that will be relevant. Namely, if an intrinsic property is characterized in a rough-and-ready way as “a property that a thing has (or lacks) regardless of what may be going on outside itself” (Yablo, 1999, 479), then intrinsic properties will also be non-relational. For x cannot bear a relation to something other than x (hence cannot exemplify a relational property) regardless of what may be going on outside itself: at a minimum, x cannot bear a relation R to y (and hence cannot exemplify a relational property) unless y exists.

I don’t think this is quite right. For one thing, the conclusion in Lloyd Humberstone’s paper isn’t that intrinsic doesn’t equal relational, it’s that there is a category difference between the things that are intrinsic or nor (what Lloyd calls properties) and the things that are relational or not (what he calls concepts). So there can’t be an inclusion relation between the two because they are cross-categorical.

Set that worry aside, I still think the claim fails. Consider the property/concept having the same polarity as one’s longest finger. (I mean polarity here in the sense that something can be positively charged, negatively charged, or neither. In practice it’s often indeterminate what the charge of a large object is, so it may be indeterminate which things have this property. Or concept.) This is relational, I think, but it’s also intrinsic, provided charge and length (and, a bit contentiously, being a finger of) are intrinsic.

The bug here is that if a relational property relates something to one of it’s own parts (as it were, I’m speaking pretty loosely here) then it might still be intrinsic. It’s unlikely this matters to the debate about colours, which is why this is a nit-picking point not a serious criticism.

There may be a definition of relational around where relations to one’s own parts are tacitly, or even explicitly, excluded. But I couldn’t see one in a quick scan of Cohen’s paper. As I said, those relations really aren’t relevant to what he has in mind, so nothing here undermines what he says. It just could have been said more pedantically.

The closest we get to a definition of relationality is interestingly ambiguous on just this point

roughly, a non-relational property of x is a property that x has (or lacks) regardless of the relations x bears to things other than x.

Is my finger something other than me? In one sense yes, by Leibniz’s Law it is not identical with me. In one sense no, since it is not, as Lewis puts it, wholly distinct from me. I think the former is the more natural reading, but the latter is really what is needed here.

I thought I’d made a cute graphic party trick, then I found it messed up the site on 800×600 resolution. And apparently 20% of readers use that resolution. So it’s in the expanded section now.
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We try and keep you ahead of the curve at OPP. Today we have a link to a paper by Gil Harman and Brett Sherman that’s part of a symposium on John Hawthorne’s book on knowledge and lotteries – that hasn’t been published yet. (Though if you want a sneak peek, here’s chapter 1.)