The scientific materialist worldview robs reality of its colour, temperature, smell, leaving us with a picture of reality that is radically at odds with our common sense understanding of the world. Helen Yetter-Chappell proposes an alternative: Reality is made of experiences, woven together into an experiential tapestry, that persists even when we aren’t looking.
Snow is white. Fire is hot. What could be more obvious? Yet a surprising number of philosophers do not think these things are true in the way that we ordinarily presume.
What is it for something to be hot? You know this. You’ve felt heat before. It’s warm, then it’s unpleasant, then it burns. It feels … hot. But when scientists look around, they don’t find the hot feel. What they find is molecules bouncing around rapidly. So scientists (re)define heat as molecular kinetic energy.
What is it for something to be white? You know this, too. It looks… white. But when scientists look around, they don’t find this whitish “look”. They find objects with different molecular structures, reflecting and absorbing different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. So white is (re)defined as having a molecular structure that reflects all electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers.
It would be absurd to deny that hot things have high molecular kinetic energy or that white objects reflect light in a certain wavelength. It is the business of science to reveal the structural features of the world around us. And it is amazing at doing so. But many philosophers go a step further. They take these structural features to be all that the world contains of heat and color. The whiteness that I thought was part of reality is but an illusion generated by my brain.
___
The standard scientific image of the world depicts a radically alien place, leached of all warmth and color that infuses our experiences. The world is made into a blank dot-to-dot with no substance.
___
These are extreme simplifications of a rich philosophical literature on the nature of color. The key point is that the standard scientific image of the world depicts a radically alien place, leached of all warmth and color that infuses our experiences. The world is made into a blank dot-to-dot with no substance.
Join the conversation