The dispute over color has presented itself as an oscillation between realist views holding that ordinary physical things in the outside world are colored, and antirealist views denying this (often holding “color is inside the mind”). In her rich, historically informed, and empirically sophisticated book, Chirimuuta suggests that somehow both standard realism and standard antirealism are wrong. Instead, she advocates “interactionism” (42): colors are properties of extended world-mind interactions that span the outer-inner divide.
Chirimuuta's case against standard realism and antirealism. Chirimuuta's main argument against realism and irrealism is that they share a common false presupposition, which she calls “the correspondence picture.” She defines the correspondence picture as the view that “a perceptual state is right if it is veridical—if it correctly corresponds to a state of affairs in the environment.” Instead, she proposes the “pragmatist” view that perceptual state is “right” if it is a useful guide to the...
