Title: Colour Illusion and Visual Expanses
Speaker: Alex Moran (Fribourg, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday February 20, 2025
Time: 1530-1700
Room: H232
Abstract: In colour illusion, when a perceptible object visually appears to have some colour quality it lacks, it is tempting to accept that one is nonetheless aware of an actual instance of the colour quality the object ‘illusorily’ appears to have. (Indeed, this claim was widely taken as being just obviously true, for instance by early analytic philosophers like G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad and H. H. Price.) However, while the intuitive appeal of this idea is still widely acknowledged, the claim itself is commonly rejected in contemporary philosophy of perception, primarily on the basis that accepting it would undermine direct realism and introduce unwanted sense-data (construed as mental or non-physical objects of awareness) into the picture. The present paper challenges this orthodoxy, arguing that even within a robustly naïve realist framework—on which perceptual experience consists wholly in the immediate presentation of mind-independent items to the subject—we can accommodate the insight that in colour illusion, when a perceived object appears have some colour quality it lacks, the subject is nevertheless aware of an actual instance of that very colour quality. In particular, this is achieved by resurrecting an old but important idea from the neglected sense-datum tradition, namely, that among the genuine objects of vision are visual expanses or colour patches, conceived as items that are distinct both numerically and in ontological category from the surfaces of objects and volumes that they pervade. What results is a novel naïve realist account of colour illusion, which both improves on extant naïve realist views, while also fully accommodating an important but neglected insight from the older sense-datum tradition.
About the speaker: Dr Moran completed his BA in philosophy at University College London, followed by a B.Phil at the University of Oxford (University College). He earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge (Queens’ College). He is currently an SNSF Research Fellow at the Université de Fribourg and a Research Associate at Stockholm University. Before locating to Fribourg, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford (2019-21) and an IRC Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2022-23). Dr Moran was also a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University during the Spring of 2024. His research primarily explores issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, with additional interests in early analytic philosophy, early modern philosophy, meta-ethics, and the philosophy of religion.
Host department: Philosophy