ʹColourʹ as Part of the Format of Two Different Perceptual Primitives: The Dual Coding of Colour

The field of colour perception has often been praised in recent years as a paradigm of cognitive science. While this certainly has some validity, it contrasts with the fact that the field makes very little contact with the sort of inquiries into mental representations to be found elsewhere in cognitive science (understood as naturalistic inquiries of the mind/brain). I find this quite puzzling, because in the earlier literature of the field it was clearly recognised - for instance by Buhler, Gelb, Kardos, Koffka - that ʹcolourʹ could be understood only as part of the general problem of perceptual representations. Their insights could not, of course, take advantage of the theoretical language provided by what has been called the cognitive revolution. For that reason, and also because they were overshadowed by the success of more technical fields, they fell almost entirely into oblivion. The technical fields, successful with respect to their own specific goals, were colorimetry, neurophysiological investigations into peripheral colour coding, and more recently, functionalist-computational approaches that emphasise certain pre-given performance criteria. . The success of these fields has not been hampered by the fact that they share certain common-sense conceptions of colour, particularly the idea that colour is an autonomous attribute that can be studied almost in isolation from other perceptual attributes. Because such common-sense conceptions of colour appear to be, by and large, innocuous to advances in these fields, no need has arisen so far to relinquish them. However, precisely because of the successes of these fields inquiries into colour perception, understood as the endeavour to develop explanatory frameworks for the role of ʹcolourʹ within our perceptual and cognitive architecture, have suffered a less fortunate fate. The conceptual vocabulary which inquiries into colour perception