Papers
2025. “The attractions of ‘object colors’”. Philosophy of Science.
In this piece (which you can read here), I set out to demonstrate the virtues of the coarse-grained version of reflectance-physicalism I argue for in my 2023 Erkenntnis piece (below).
2024. “Relationalism’s psychosemantic ills”. Analysis.
In this piece (which you can read here) I argue color relationalism squares with no mainstream account of the natural grounds of visual color content. On the view, any given neural vehicle of visual color content needs to have indefinitely many color contents. This is something no psychosemantics accommodates.
2023. “Spectral reflectances and commensurateness”. Erkenntnis.
In this paper (which you can read here) I argue that if students of macro-causation should prefer commensurate causes to highly fungible ones, then those interested in the causes of color experience and the neural states which underpin them should drop the received wisdom that surface spectral reflectances are their causes and accept instead that the causes are dispositions to reflect varying proportions of highly coarse-grained intensities of light. This motivates the reduction of color to these dispositions, contra Yablo, and more recently Watkins, and Gert.
2022. “Naïve realism and supersaturated hue”. Synthese.
In this paper (which you can read here) I argue for the poor fit between experience as of supersaturated hue (of, e.g., an orange more saturated than a narrow spectral bandwidth orange light) and those naïve realist theses which ground perceptual phenomenology in relation to perceptions or to the qualities perceptions reveal.
2022. “Russellian representationalism and the stygian hues”. Erkenntnis.
In this paper (which you can read here) I argue for the poor fit between some interesting findings in the cognitive neuroscience of color experience and the popular content-based view of perceptual experience on which experience supervenes on contents, where contents are extensions.
In preparation
I have a few papers out for review at a couple journals: one on color, one on the content of color experience; one on mental causation; and one on knowing what our perceptions are like. If you’re interested to learn more about them, contact me through the site and I’ll shoot you drafts.
William A Sharp | Philosophy 