Do colours exist in the dark? A study of folk beliefs

Do colours exist in the dark? This is an instance of a broader question about whether sensible qualities, like colours, sounds, felt temperatures and pains, can exist unperceived. Whether sensible qualities exist unperceived is a long-standing philosophical issue that is central to discussions about their nature and existence. The claim that colours cannot exist in the dark, and more broadly that sensible qualities cannot exist unperceived, is often used to motive broadly subjectivist theories, such as the ‘secondary quality’ or dispositionalist view of sensible qualities. Intuitive judgments about various real and imagined cases play an important role in these discussions. The current paper reports the results of two experiments that investigate judgments about a range of cases discussed in the philosophical literature. In the case of colour, the majority of participants judged that colours exist unperceived across a wide range of scenarios, and there was only limited evidence of any differences in judgments about apparently ‘relational’ colours, such as the colours of rainbows, mirrors, and illumination-dependent colours. This suggests that the folk regard colours as non-relational properties. Judgments about sounds varied depending on scenario type: while the majority thought that a tree that falls in a forest with no-one there to hear it makes a sound, judgments differed about whether there is a sound in a vacuum. Judgments about pain also varied depending on scenario type, particularly in the hypothetical case in which all humans have developed congenital insensitivity to pain so that no-one ever feels pain. Even then, however, it was nevertheless notable that at least half of the participants judged that pains exist when they are not experienced.