Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind
Areas of Competence
Early Modern Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy of Language
Works in Progress
Drafts available upon request. Please allow up to one week for me to complete any pending revisions and proofread.
Shedding Light on Surface Appearance
A mainstream view about color constancy is that it consists in the visual system's tracking of illumination-invariant surface features. This view has been challenged for its alleged failure to account for differences in color appearance even where color constancy is achieved. In this article, I provide direct counterexamples to variantism about color constancy. I then propose a new invariantist model of color constancy, based upon a Fregean theory of perceptual content in which the visual system attributes a multitude of illumination-independent and luminance-relative features to surfaces.
No Color Mentation Without Visual Representation
Relational color constancy is a perceiver's ability to match surfaces by color in the absence of visual cues for the nature of ambient illumination. It is sometimes suggested that relational color constancy obviates the explanatory value of visual representation of color. I argue that the resulting non-representational model of color vision fares poorly in explaining aspects of color cognition. I offer an alternative explanation of color cognition in which visual representation and (non-relational) color constancy play a foundational epistemic role.
Publications
Spectral Productance and Color Primitivism
Review of Metaphysics, 77, 3 (2024): 509-534.
Perceptual psychology gives reason to believe that color vision is the capacity to represent illumination-invariant features of the environment. Some physicalists suggest that these features are spectral productance properties. But spectral productance properties are more fine-grained than the colors we perceive. I suggest a novel variety of primitivism that incorporates the advantages of physicalism without the fineness-of-grain problem.
In Defense of Color Realism
Acta Analytica 35 (2020): 101–127.
Our ordinary judgments about color, such as "That [pointing to a fire engine] is red," are usually true because they are made on the basis of color vision, a perceptual faculty that usually furnishes us with accurate representations. Color vision consists in the visual system's capacity for color constancy. While biologically useful yet systematically misleading representational capacities are possible, I argue that any case that color perception is such would implicate other capacities and engender a wide-ranging skepticism.