Colour Perception: Mind and the physical world
Rainer Mausfeld and Dieter Heyer
Abstract
Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way. The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about ‘colour’ and the role ‘colour’ plays in our ... More
Colour has long been a source of fascination to both scientists and philosophers. In one sense, colours are in the mind of the beholder, in another sense they belong to the external world. Colours appear to lie on the boundary where we have divided the world into ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ events. They represent, more than any other attribute of our visual experience, a place where both physical and mental properties are interwoven in an intimate and enigmatic way. The last few decades have brought fascinating changes in the way that we think about ‘colour’ and the role ‘colour’ plays in our perceptual architecture. This book provides an overview of the contemporary developments in our understanding of colours and of the relationship between the ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’. With each chapter followed by critical commentaries, the volume presents a lively and accessible picture of the intellectual traditions which have shaped research into colour perception.
Keywords:
colour,
objective,
subjective,
visual experience,
mental,
physical,
colour perception
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2003 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198505006 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198505006.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Rainer Mausfeld, editor
Professor of Psychology, University of Kiel,
Germany
Dieter Heyer, editor
Professor of Psychology, Martin-Luther-Universitt
Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
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