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Full Idea
It is quite gratuitous to suppose that physical objects have colours.
Clarification
'Gratuitous' means there is no good reason for it
Gist of Idea
There is no reason to think that objects have colours
Source
Bertrand Russell (Problems of Philosophy [1912], Ch. 3)
Book Ref
Russell,Bertrand: 'The Problems of Philosophy' [OUP 1995], p.18
A Reaction
This has always seemed to me self-evident, from the day I started to study philosophy. I cannot make sense of serious attempts to defend direct (naïve) realism. Colour is a brilliant trick of natural selection for extracting environmental information.
| 1871 | Whether honey is essentially sweet may be doubted, as it is a matter of judgement rather than appearance [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 6526 | Hume says objects are not a construction, but an imaginative leap [Hume, by Robinson,H] |
| 21580 | Science condemns sense-data and accepts matter, but a logical construction must link them [Russell] |
| 6510 | Russell (1912) said phenomena only resemble reality in abstract structure [Russell, by Robinson,H] |
| 5372 | There is no reason to think that objects have colours [Russell] |
| 5682 | Internal realism holds that we perceive physical objects via mental objects [Dancy,J] |
| 5683 | Indirect realism depends on introspection, the time-lag, illusions, and neuroscience [Dancy,J, by PG] |
| 6521 | Representative realists believe that laws of phenomena will apply to the physical world [Robinson,H] |
| 6509 | Representative realists believe some properties of sense-data are shared by the objects themselves [Robinson,H] |