Are Things Really Colored?

Look at a ripe tomato. It’s red, right? A perfect, undeniable red. Now look at the sky on a clear day. It’s blue. Grass is green. These seem like the most obvious facts in the world. The tomato has redness. The sky has blueness. The grass has greenness.

But here’s a strange thing: many scientists and philosophers have said this is wrong.

Not just “sometimes we’re mistaken about shades.” They mean that tomatoes aren’t really red. Skies aren’t really blue. Grass isn’t really green. Not in the way we think they are. They say that color is something that happens inside our heads—a trick our brains play on us. The world outside, they claim, is actually colorless.

This is one of the strangest and most persistent puzzles in philosophy. And nobody has fully solved it.

The Problem That Won’t Go Away

The trouble started in the 1600s, when scientists like Galileo, Descartes, and Newton were trying to understand what the physical world is really like. They discovered that light is a mix of different wavelengths, and that objects reflect some wavelengths and absorb others. A tomato reflects certain wavelengths and absorbs others. That’s it. There’s no “redness” out there in the world—just wavelengths of light bouncing off surfaces.

When you look at a tomato, light hits your eye, your retina converts it into electrical signals, your brain processes those signals, and then—somehow—you experience redness. But the redness itself seems to be something your brain adds. It’s not in the tomato. It’s in you.

This view is sometimes called Color Eliminativism: the idea that physical objects don’t actually have colors, not really. Colors are just sensations or perceptions in our minds.

Hundreds of years later, scientists still say things like this. One prominent psychologist wrote: “People universally believe that objects look colored because they are colored… As surprising as it may seem, these beliefs are fundamentally mistaken. Neither objects nor lights are actually ‘colored’ in anything like the way we experience them.”

That’s a pretty shocking claim. You probably think your bedroom walls are beige. But according to this view, they aren’t. Not really. There’s just light bouncing off them in a particular way, and your brain turns that into the experience of beige.

Why This Seems Crazy

Not everyone buys this. Many philosophers push back hard. Their resistance comes in a few different forms.

First, there’s the common-sense objection. We use color words all the time, and we’re very good at it. We teach children what “red” means by pointing to strawberries and fire trucks. We agree with each other about colors—most of the time, anyway. If colors were just illusions, how does this work so smoothly?

Second, think about what it means to say a color is “in your mind.” When you see a red tomato, the redness seems to be on the tomato, not inside your head. It looks like a property of the object, not a feeling you’re having. If someone told you that your headache was actually in your shoe, you’d think they were confused. That’s how it feels when someone says the redness is in your brain, not on the tomato.

Third, there’s something weird about the idea that the world is colorless. What would that even mean? Imagine trying to describe a world without color. You’d probably end up describing something black and white, or gray. But those are colors too. The claim isn’t that everything is gray—it’s that color itself isn’t really out there.

So What Are Colors, Then?

Philosophers have come up with several different answers to this question. Here are the main ones.

The Simple View: Colors Are Just What They Look Like

Some philosophers say that colors are simple, basic properties that objects really have. Red is just… redness. You can’t explain it in terms of anything else, like wavelengths or brain processes. It’s its own thing. This view is called Color Primitivism.

The problem is that science seems to show that these simple color properties don’t do anything. What actually causes us to see red is a complex pattern of light reflection and brain activity. The redness itself doesn’t seem to play any causal role. If colors don’t do anything, why think they exist at all?

The Physicalist View: Colors Are Hidden Properties

Another group of philosophers says that colors are real, but they’re not what they look like. Colors are actually complex physical properties—like the way an object’s surface reflects different wavelengths of light. When we see red, we’re detecting a particular reflectance pattern, even though we don’t experience it that way.

The problem here is that different physical patterns can produce exactly the same color experience. A red apple and a red LED light have completely different physical structures, but they both look red. If redness is a physical property, which physical property is it? There doesn’t seem to be one single physical thing that all red things share.

The Dispositional View: Colors Are Powers

A third group says that colors are dispositions—powers or tendencies to cause certain experiences in us. To be red is just to have the power to look red to normal humans in good lighting.

This solves some problems. It explains why color seems connected to our experience (because it’s defined in terms of our experience). It also explains why different physical patterns can all be red (because they all have the same power).

But it has a big problem too: colors don’t look like dispositions. When you look at a tomato, it doesn’t seem like you’re seeing “a power to cause red experiences.” It seems like you’re seeing a simple property of the tomato itself. If the dispositional view is right, then our experience is systematically misleading about what colors actually are.

The Relational View: Colors Depend on Who’s Looking

A more recent proposal is that colors are relational. An object isn’t just red—it’s red-for-you-in-this-light. The same object might be different colors for different creatures. A flower that looks one color to a human might look completely different to a bee, because bees see ultraviolet light. Who’s to say which one is the “real” color?

This view accepts that there’s no single answer to what color something “really” is. Color is always relative to a particular kind of perceiver in particular conditions. This might be the most honest answer, but it also means giving up the idea that there’s one true description of what the world is like.

Can We Live Without Color?

If colors aren’t real—or if they’re real but not what we think—then what happens to our everyday experience? Are we all walking around in a giant illusion?

Not necessarily. Remember that the most extreme version of color eliminativism says that physical objects don’t have colors-as-we-experience-them. That doesn’t mean our color experience is useless. Color vision evolved for a reason. It helps us identify objects, find food, and navigate the world. Two fruits might look different to us because of how they reflect light, even if neither of them “really” has the color we see.

Think about it this way: a chessboard works perfectly well whether the pieces are black and white or red and yellow. The contrast between the pieces is what matters, not whether the colors are “real.” Similarly, our visual system might be giving us useful contrasts and distinctions, even if the colors themselves aren’t properties of the external world.

Some philosophers defend Color Fictionalism: the idea that we should keep talking about colors as if they’re real, because it’s useful and practical, even though we know (philosophically speaking) that they aren’t. It’s like how we talk about the sun “rising” even though we know the earth is rotating. The language works fine for everyday purposes.

The Deep Puzzle

Here’s what makes this issue so interesting and so hard. Our experience of color is one of the most vivid and immediate things we know. It seems impossible to doubt that the tomato is red. And yet, when we try to fit color into our scientific picture of the world, it doesn’t seem to belong there. There’s a gap between how the world appears and how science describes it.

This gap isn’t just about color. It’s about all of our sensory experience—the taste of chocolate, the sound of a violin, the feeling of warmth. These are all experiences that seem to be qualities of the world, but might actually be constructions of our minds. Color just happens to be the place where the problem is most obvious, and most studied.

Philosophers still argue about this. There’s no consensus. And that’s partly because the puzzle touches on deeper questions about what reality is, what our minds are, and whether we can ever really know what the world is like independent of our experience.

So the next time you look at a red tomato, you might wonder: is it really red? Or is that just what your brain does with light? And does it matter?

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Color Eliminativism	The view that physical objects don’t actually have colors (at least not the colors we experience)
Color Primitivism	The view that colors are simple, basic properties that objects really possess
Color Physicalism	The view that colors are complex physical properties (like reflectance patterns)
Color Dispositionalism	The view that colors are powers or tendencies to cause color experiences in perceivers
Color Relationalism	The view that colors are relative to particular perceivers and circumstances
Color Fictionalism	The view that we should talk about colors as if they’re real even though they aren’t
Projectivism	The view that our minds “project” subjective color qualities onto objects
Unity	The principle that colors form a structured system of similarity and difference relations

Key People

David Hume (1711–1776): Scottish philosopher who argued that colors are “perceptions in the mind,” not qualities of objects.
René Descartes (1596–1650): French philosopher and scientist who thought objects don’t have colors like we experience them, but we should keep talking as if they do.
Mark Johnston: Contemporary philosopher who argued that our ordinary concept of color includes several core beliefs, and we have to decide which ones to keep.
C. L. Hardin: Contemporary philosopher who argues that careful study of color vision shows colors can’t be objective properties of the world.
Jonathan Cohen: Contemporary philosopher who defends Color Relationalism, arguing that colors are always relative to perceivers and circumstances.
Keith Allen: Contemporary philosopher who defends a version of Primitivism, arguing that objects really do have simple color properties.

Things to Think About

If colors aren’t real properties of objects, what about other qualities we experience—like the taste of sugar or the smell of coffee? Are those also just in our heads? Where do you draw the line?
Suppose you and your friend look at the same sweater and disagree about whether it’s blue or green. Could you both be right? What would that mean for the idea of “objective” color?
Some animals can see colors we can’t (like ultraviolet). Some animals see fewer colors than we do. Does it make sense to say that any one species sees the “true” colors of things?
Imagine a scientist could prove that objects have no colors at all. Would that change how you live your life? Should it?

Where This Shows Up

Art and design: Painters and designers work with color all the time, but they often rely on principles of color perception (like how colors change in different light) that raise exactly these philosophical questions.
Computer graphics and VR: When you design colors for a screen, you’re creating experiences that look like surface colors but are actually just combinations of red, green, and blue light. This is a practical version of the philosophical puzzle.
Animal vision research: Scientists studying how different animals see color are asking the same question about whether any one animal’s color experience is the “real” one.
Everyday arguments about color: When you argue with someone about whether something is blue or green, or whether your shirt matches your pants in different lighting, you’re running into the same problems philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries.