Table Of ContentPrimary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
Lawrence Nolan (ed.)
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Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
Lawrence Nolan (ed.)
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Subject: History of Western Philosophy, Metaphysics de
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p. v In memory of Paul Ho�man /b
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Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
Lawrence Nolan (ed.)
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199556151.001.0001
Published: 2011 Online ISBN: 9780191725548 Print ISBN: 9780199556151
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I would like to thank those who advised me at various stages of this project, especially Alex Byrne, Gary o
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Hat�eld, Nicholas Jolley, Peter Momtchilo�, Alan Nelson, Lex Newman, Bob Pasnau, and Al Spangler. I am /b
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also grateful to two anonymous referees commissioned by the press and several other referees that I k/5
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enlisted to comment on particular chapters. Last but not least I would like to acknowledge the students in 40
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my graduate seminar in metaphysics in fall 2009, especially John Clevenger. Their questions and insights h
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have shaped my own views about the nature of the primary–secondary quality distinction. te
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Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
Lawrence Nolan (ed.)
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199556151.001.0001
Published: 2011 Online ISBN: 9780191725548 Print ISBN: 9780199556151
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Notes on Contributors d
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https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199556151.002.0007 Pages ix–x from
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MICHAEL AYERS is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford and Fellow of the British /bo
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Academy. He is the author of Locke: Epistemology and Ontology (1991) and co-editor (with Daniel Garber) /5
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of The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (1998). 40
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ALEX BYRNE is Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and works primarily pte
in philosophy of mind and epistemology. He edited the two-volume Readings on Color (1997) with David r/14
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Hilbert, and they have also co-authored many papers on the subject. 55
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MARTHA BRANDT BOLTON is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University. She writes on various �gures in b
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seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy. Her recent articles include ‘Leibniz's Nouveaux Essais: U
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a Contest by Dialogue’, in Leibniz and the English Speaking World, ed. Phemister and Brown, and ‘Locke e
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and Leibniz on the Structure of Substance and Powers: the Metaphysics of Moral Subjects’, Studies on ity
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Locke: Sources, Contemporaries, and Legacy, eds. Hutton and Shurman. f N
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LISA DOWNING is Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. Her articles (on Locke, Berkeley, C
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and Malebranche, among others) focus on mechanist conceptions of body and their justi�cation, debates lin
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surrounding gravity/attraction, and changing conceptions of scienti�c explanation in the early modern a
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period. She is working on a book on empiricism and Newtonianism, among other projects. h
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GARY HATFIELD is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The l H
Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (1990), Descartes and the ill us
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Meditations (2003), and Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology (2009), as well as r o
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numerous articles and book chapters in the history of modern philosophy and the philosophy of 05
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psychology. He translated Kant's Prolegomena (2004). e
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DAVID HILBERT is Professor of Philosophy at University of Illinois at Chicago and works primarily on er 2
issues concerning color and vision. He is the author of Color and Color Perception (1987) and he edited a 02
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two-volume anthology on the philosophy and science of color, Readings on Color (1997), with Alex Byrne.
He is the author of several papers on color with Byrne and is currently working on perceptual constancies.
DAVID LANDY is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and specializes in
modern philosophy.
MI-KYOUNG LEE is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the
author of Epistemology after Protagoras: Responses to Relativism in Plato, Aristotle and Democritus (Oxford
2005), as well as numerous articles in the history of ancient Greek philosophy, especially epistemology.
ANTONIA LOLORDO is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. She is the author of
Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (2007) and numerous papers in modern
philosophy.
p. x EDWIN MCCANN is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is the D
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author of numerous articles in modern philosophy and is currently writing a book on Locke. wn
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BARRY MAUND is a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Western Australia. He is the ed
author of Colours: Their Nature and Representation (1995) and Perception (2003). He has written articles and fro
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chapters in philosophy of perception, philosophy of science, and the history of modern philosophy. He is http
the author of the entry on ‘Color’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. s://a
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ALAN NELSON is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written e
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numerous essays in early modern philosophy and the philosophy of science, and is the editor of A ic
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Companion to Rationalism (2005). p
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LAWRENCE NOLAN is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of /b
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numerous essays in early modern philosophy and is currently editing the Cambridge Descartes Lexicon. k/5
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ROBERT PASNAU is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the editor of the Cambridge /c
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History of Medieval Philosophy (2010), and the author of various books and studies in the history of pte
philosophy, including Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 (2010). r/1
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JAMES VAN CLEVE is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is the author of 23
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Problems from Kant (1999) and of many articles in epistemology, metaphysics, and the history of modern b
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philosophy. His next book will be entitled Problems from Reid. U
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KENNETH P. WINKLER is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Berkeley: An rsity
Interpretation (1989). A collection of his essays, Matters of Reason: Essays in Early Modern British Philosophy, of N
is forthcoming. His other books include The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley (2005) and an abridgment orth
of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding (1995). From 2000 to 2005 he was editor, with Elizabeth C
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Radcli�e, of the journal Hume Studies. rolin
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Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate
Lawrence Nolan (ed.)
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199556151.001.0001
Published: 2011 Online ISBN: 9780191725548 Print ISBN: 9780199556151
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CHAPTER n
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Introduction d
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I. The nature of the primary–secondary quality distinction and the /b
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aims of this volume /5
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The objects that we experience with our senses appear to have various properties, including extension (or p
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spatial dimension), size, shape, motion, and position, on the one hand, as well as color, sound, taste, odor, r/1
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heat, cold, etc., on the other hand. However, the seventeenth-century revolution in science ushered in a 5
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radically new conception of the nature of physical objects that sought to revise this common-sense picture. 50
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Known as “mechanism”, the new science conceived the universe on the model of a machine and tried to b
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explain all physical phenomena in terms of the mechanical properties of the insensibly small parts of n
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matter. If the universe is like a machine, then the only salient properties for the purpose of scienti�c rs
explanation are those that enable one object to causally a�ect another through direct contact, just as one ity o
explains the operation of a clock by appealing exclusively to the size, shape, and motion of its gears. The f N
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color of the clock or the sound it makes when it chimes on the hour are irrelevant to understanding how it rth C
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keeps time and thus do not �gure in such explanations. As a consequence, the new science restricted the ro
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“real qualities” of bodies to those that can be understood in mechanical or geometric terms, and treated a
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qualities such as sensuous red as mere appearances. Another way of expressing these points is to say that t C
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the “mechanical philosophers” drew a distinction between primary and secondary qualities and that this ap
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distinction was at the heart of the new science. The primary qualities were so-called because of their l H
privileged role in scienti�c explanation, in contrast to the secondary qualities. There were �erce ill u
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disagreements about the precise nature of both types of quality but the mechanical philosophers concurred r o
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in holding that secondary qualities are in some way derivative and/or dependent on the primary. Many such 0
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thinkers also tried to explain why, prior to engaging in philosophical re�ection, one is tempted to treat e
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colors and the like as qualities on a par with size and shape. m
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The primary–secondary quality distinction has its roots in ancient Greek and medieval Scholastic thought, 0
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p. 2 as some of the papers in this volume will attest. However, the formulation in the modern period (roughly
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) is rightly regarded as de�nitive. Although we associate this
distinction most commonly with Locke and Boyle, versions of it had many defenders, including Galileo,
Hobbes, Gassendi, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Newton, Leibniz, Hume, Reid, and Kant. The doctrine
of qualities has also been extremely in�uential over the past two centuries, and a new debate about the
nature of the distinction raged at the end of the twentieth century, especially among Australian
philosophers such as David Armstrong and J. J. C. Smart. It is sometimes asserted that the primary–
1
secondary quality distinction is the product of an outmoded science, but I take it that, with some
2
quali�cations, most contemporary philosophers would endorse a version of it. Various attempts have been
made to reduce qualities that have been traditionally categorized as secondary—such as heat—to primary
qualities, and, in light of these e�orts, one contemporary philosopher has predicted that the class of
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secondary qualities is subject to a career of declining membership. But such predictions are premature.
Moreover, even if these e�orts at reduction were completely successful, there would still be an important
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distinction between the primary qualities of objects and qualities such as heat as it is experienced or felt.
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Leaving aside the other qualities traditionally categorized as secondary, the nature of color is presently one ow
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of the most contentious topics in metaphysics. The physicalist account of color, which attempts to reduce it lo
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to a primary quality, is merely one among several theories and there is nothing even approaching a e
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consensus. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities thus appears alive and well. fro
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The central aim of this collection of essays is to trace the historical development of the distinction between ttps
two types of quality and, to a lesser extent, understand its impact on contemporary philosophy. Our focus ://a
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will be on the modern period since the classic formulation is to be found there. But the volume begins with de
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chapters on ancient Greek and medieval Scholastic accounts of qualities in an e�ort to pinpoint the ic
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distinction's origins. The next ten chapters are devoted to philosophical re�ections on qualities from the p
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seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Virtually every major �gure is represented from Gassendi to m
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Kant, and special attention is paid to �gures such as Locke and Descartes, who merit two chapters each, o
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given the complexity of their views and their central role in promoting the aspirations of the new science. /5
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The last two chapters are devoted to the contemporary debate over the status of color, but their respective 0
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authors self-consciously link their discussions to early modern disputes about the nature of secondary a
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qualities. All fourteen essays were specially commissioned for this volume and are appearing in print for the r/1
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p. 3 �rst time. Many of the authors have written on the primary–secondary quality distinction (or on the 7
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nature of color) in other contexts, and all were selected for their expertise on a given �gure, historical 2
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period, or topic. 7 b
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2. The beguiling character of the distinction rs
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There are few philosophical doctrines, if any, which are more familiar than the distinction between primary rth
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and secondary qualities. Most philosophers cut their teeth on it as part of their undergraduate training in a
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the discipline, and for good reason. Studying the doctrine of qualities introduces one to a wide swath of lin
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issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and semantics. It also a
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forces one to confront questions about the relation between philosophy and science, and about the nature of h
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scienti�c explanation. It o�ers an especially useful vantage point on the mechanical philosophy of the el H
seventeenth century, exposing the revolutionary character of the new science and showing how it di�ered ill u
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from that of its Scholastic-Aristotelian predecessor. e
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In addition to being familiar, the doctrine of qualities also seems intuitively simple, perhaps in part because 5
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it is often characterized as an appearance–reality distinction: there are certain qualities that objects in the ec
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world have intrinsically, independent of our perception of them, while there are others that we ascribe to b
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objects only in relation to our perceptual apparatus or sensibility. For example, the world in itself consists of r 2
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objects that are extended and shaped but not colored, at least not in the way that we experience color. Color 2
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as perceived is merely a subjective consequence of the way that objects a�ect our sensory faculties.
But the primary–secondary quality distinction is also very beguiling: despite its intuitive character, it is
notoriously elusive. There are several di�culties here. First and foremost, it is extremely di�cult to identify
the central ground of the distinction. Asserting that it is based on the more fundamental distinction between
appearance and reality does not take us very far, for that is consistent with a broad range of ways of being
distinct. What remains to be speci�ed is whether it is a distinction between essential vs non-essential
properties of objects, intrinsic vs extrinsic, objective vs subjective, perceiver-dependent vs perceiver-
independent, dispositional vs categorical, etc. Second, there are familiar lists of primary qualities
(extension, size, �gure, motion, force, etc.) and of secondary qualities (colors, sounds, tastes, odors, heat,
cold, etc.), but what are the criteria for membership in each class, and how do we determine whether the
lists are complete? I suggested above that the criterion for being a primary quality is explanatory basicality:
unlike secondary qualities, primary qualities play a crucial role in providing intelligible explanations of
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p. 4 natural phenomena. Although this claim continues to have a great deal of currency both among historical ow
commentators6 and contemporary proponents7 of the primary–secondary quality distinction, it is nlo
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controversial. Third, is the distinction between primary and secondary qualities supposed to be exhaustive e
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of all properties? It is sometimes noted that the distinction is restricted to simple properties (which in turn fro
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causally produce, or at least correspond to, simple ideas in us).8 But if that is true, at least among the h
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mechanical philosophers who recognize a metaphysical distinction, then it complicates e�orts to categorize s://a
the distinction using a standard framework for discriminating types of property such as those mentioned ca
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above (“dispositional vs categorical”, etc.). Fourth, what is the nature of secondary qualities? Are they m
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mind-dependent entities such as mental qualia, powers or dispositions of external objects, or the causal .o
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bases of such powers? One problem with the second view is that early modern mechanical philosophers .c
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associated irreducible powers with Scholastic occult qualities, which they abhorred because of their /b
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obscurity and vacuity in developing scienti�c explanations of natural phenomena. Within an early modern o
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context, this makes it tempting to hold that secondary qualities qua powers ultimately reduce to primary 0
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qualities or to an arrangement of such qualities (what Boyle and Locke call “textures”). But reducing /c
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secondary qualities to primary ones e�ectively collapses any metaphysical distinction between them, or so p
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it would seem. r/1
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3. Synopses of the essays in this collection 7
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As noted above, the primary aim of this volume is to trace the historical development of the distinction rs
between primary and secondary qualities and to understand its various incarnations. Thus, we begin with ity o
chapters on ancient Greek and medieval Scholastic accounts of qualities before turning to the mechanical f N
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philosophers of the modern period with whom the distinction is traditionally associated, and then to rth C
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contemporary theories of color to assess its in�uence. It is sometimes suggested that, like many seminal ro
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philosophical ideas, the distinction has its roots in ancient Greek thought. In chapter 1, Mi-Kyoung Lee a
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examines this suggestion by surveying the views of a variety of ancient philosophers, while reserving t C
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special treatment for Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus. She argues that certain strands of modern ap
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thinking about the distinction were indeed present in several classical philosophers but that Aristotle and, l H
as one would expect, the ancient atomists, come closest to anticipating their seventeenth-century ill u
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counterparts. r o
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p. 5 In a famous fragment, Democritus says that tastes, colors, heat, and cold exist only “by convention”, while D
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atoms and the void exist “in reality”. Some scholars deny that Democritus is drawing a primary–secondary e
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quality distinction here and claim instead that he is simply distinguishing between the intrinsic properties be
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of atoms and the derivative properties of composites. The latter distinction is of course crucial to 0
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Democritus' atomism, but Lee takes him to be engaged in the passage in question in an attack on the senses
and not to be making any claims about the properties of atoms. He is merely drawing an epistemic
distinction between the senses, which report only about how things appear, and reason, which is able to
divine the truth about reality. However, Lee maintains that this epistemic distinction does correspond to a
metaphysical distinction between primary and secondary qualities. She compares and contrasts
Democritus' views on qualities to those of Plato in the Timaeus, where he too espouses a type of atomism.
Like their seventeenth-century counterparts, Democritus and Plato both regard sensible qualities as
depending on the fundamental primary qualities of matter. They also recognize the perceiver-dependent
character of sensible qualities. However, whereas Democritus leaves it unclear whether qualities such as
colors and smells are 1) merely appearances in the minds of perceivers or 2) powers that belong to
aggregates of atoms to cause certain e�ects, Plato clearly regards such qualities as real properties of objects.
Like Democritus and Plato, Aristotle and Epicurus are concerned to identify the basic principles of nature
and to distinguish them from derived properties, of which sensible qualities such as color constitute a
special category. But Lee argues that the latter two philosophers go further than their predecessors in D
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insisting upon the reality of such qualities (despite their relational status) and their causal e�cacy. It is the n
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latter claim (among others) that the seventeenth-century mechanists found so o�ensive, but Lee notes that d
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there is much in Aristotle and Epicurus that the former could embrace, including the attempt to explain all fro
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other qualities in terms of the primary ones, which are taken to be universal. h
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Lee's paper shows that it would be a mistake to suppose that the distinction between primary and secondary ://a
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qualities was the invention of early modern philosophy. Even if they did not use this exact terminology, and ad
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even if not all of the strands of the distinction were always present, the ancient Greeks shared many of the
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same concerns as the seventeenth-century mechanists. In chapter 2, Robert Pasnau argues that the .ou
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distinction was also alive and well in the Scholastic tradition of the late Middle Ages. As in the modern .co
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period, the Scholastics treat the primary qualities as the fundamental causal agents in the natural world and /b
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regard them as inseparable from all bodies. They also hold that secondary qualities depend on the former for k
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their being. In addition to showing how the Scholastic distinction pre�gures its modern counterpart, 4
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Pasnau pinpoints the important di�erences between them. More notably, he argues that the term “primary h
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qualities” has a very di�erent extension in each tradition. The Scholastics bracket the mechanical qualities te
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of bodies (which they regard neither as primary nor secondary) and instead privilege the four qualities (Hot, 4
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p. 6 Cold, Wet, Dry) that give rise to Aristotle's four elements (earth, air, �re, and water). These qualities play 5
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a crucial role in Scholastic science but—unlike size, shape, extension, etc. in the modern tradition—are not 0
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explanatorily exhaustive. y
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In the second half of his essay, Pasnau attempts to dispel some of the myths associated with Scholastic ers
accounts of sensible qualities. In particular, he is concerned to correct the assumption that the Scholastics ity o
regard secondary qualities such as color as primitive, sui generis features of the world that exactly resemble f N
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our experience of them. Scholastic thinkers are often accused of “projecting” their sensations onto the rth
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world, but Pasnau argues that they are instead committed to “Revelation”, a somewhat weaker doctrine aro
according to which sensory experience reveals the true nature of sensible qualities. lina
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One expects that the primary–secondary quality distinction would �nd a natural home within every variety h
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of mechanistic atomism. After all, atomism holds that the only things that exist are atoms and their spatial e
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properties (i.e. their “primary qualities”). All the other properties that we attribute to bodies are merely ill u
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appearances that depend on the former, and hence qualify as “secondary qualities.” And, as we have seen, e
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among the ancient atomists, Democritus, Plato, and Epicurus are committed to some version of the n
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distinction. However, Antonia LoLordo argues in chapter 3 that the early modern atomist Pierre Gassendi D
e
does not draw such a distinction because he conceives all qualities (of composite bodies) as textures, that is, ce
m
as arrangements of atoms. Qualities traditionally categorized as primary, such as shape, and qualities b
e
traditionally categorized as secondary, such as color, are merely epistemically distinct in that we are able to r 20
2
hypothesize about the texture of bodies that constitutes their macroscopic shape, but cannot do this in the 2
case of color. She also observes that Gassendi and Walter Charleton both turn almost all qualities, including
those of macroscopic bodies, into occult qualities in the sense that they have a hidden nature. We do not
know in most instances what texture constitutes a given sensible quality. In discussing Gassendi's
endorsement of the texture view of all qualities, LoLordo also explains why he rejected the two competing
alternatives in the seventeenth century—namely, the appearance view and the power view—which one
associates with Galileo and Locke's respective accounts of secondary qualities. LoLordo locates the source of
