Talk:Projectivism

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Projectivist theories

According to projectivist theories, in color perception mental colors, characterized as properties of perceptual states rather than sense data, are experienced as properties of mind- independent objects.

There are two versions of projectivism, which provide different explanations for how it is that mental colors are experienced as properties of mind-independent objects. According to one, proposed by Boghossian and Velleman, mental colors are experienced as properties of physical objects.

But since mental colors are properties of visual states, experiencing mental colors as properties of physical objects involves experiencing properties of mental states as properties of physical objects. Since states are fundamentally different sorts of things than objects, it's not clear that it even makes sense to hold that we experience properties of mental states as properties of physical objects.

According to the other version of projectivism, proposed by McGilvray, we are not aware of physical objects or any of their properties in perception. McGilvray doesn't deny that there are physical objects. Rather, he claims that the spatial properties as well as the colors we're aware of in visual perception are mental qualitative properties of visual states themselves. Thus what we're aware of in visual perception are mind-dependent patches with mental colors and mental shapes. (Although this claim suggests a sense datum theory, McGilvray explicitly accepts an adverbialist theory of perceptual states.) McGilvray claims that projective representation of color involves experiencing such mind-dependent color patches as external to our minds.

But if the locations we're aware of in visual experience are never physical locations, the problem now is that it's difficult to characterize these mental locations that McGilvray claims we are aware of. He holds that we can describe mental locations as external to our minds by way of describing them as points in a three-dimensional visual field. However, McGilvray provides no explanation of the relation between perceivers, located in physical space, and the three-dimensional visual field comprised of mental locations, rendering mental locations mysterious.