Product Description
This book, now published in paperback, investigates the venerable claim that colours, tastes and sounds are mind-dependent or relative rather than objective characteristics of the world. The origins and development of this conception of appearance and reality are sketched. An analysis of sensation and perception leads to an examination of four theses: that such perceptual qualities, as we perceive them, are sensations; that as they are in objects, they are dispositions to cause us to have such sensations; that the concepts of such qualities are explained by reference to how things appear to a normal observer under normal conditions; that secondary qualities, though not subjective, are relative. In the course of the investigation the concepts of the senses are anatomized and the concepts of sundry perceptual qualities subjected to scrutiny. The book concludes with an analytical account of the notions of the apparent and the real, and of the distinctions between appearances and perceptual experiences.
