Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Inverted Spectrum, Timothy Schoettle

Biblical, Religious, & Philosophical Studies Educator Scholarship

It is possible for a person and their environment to be physically identical each day and yet the representational content of their beliefs about color are inverted. Each day they utter the same words, ‘Wow! The colors of everything have switched again today.’ In uttering these words, they express a different proposition each day. This supports the view held by Reichenbach and Carnap that when it comes to representations of colored objects, relations of similarity and difference are fundamental. There are no such things as colors like ‘redness’ and ‘greenness’ apart from the particular things we call red and green.