In this thesis I assess how well two separate philosophical accounts of color fare on a range of criteria identified as important constraints on philosophical theories of color. The two main criteria I am interested in are those of commonality and causality. The two philosophical accounts of color I assess are those of Jonathan Cohen and David Hilbert. I argue that Cohen and Hilbert's accounts fall short of these two constraints in important ways.
Cohen's account fails on the commonality criterion because it cannot identify any shared feature of color properties which do not share the same S or C values but which match nevertheless. Cohen's account fails on the causality criterion because Cohen's functional properties are not correlated with color experiences in the right way and therefore lack the right sort of causal powers to be considered colors. Hilbert's account of determinate color properties fails on the commonality criterion since he draws color distinctions between objects which we would suppose to be the same color.
Hilbert's account of color categories, on the other hand, fails on the causality criterion because, like Cohen's functional color properties, they are not correlated with color experiences in the right way and therefore lack the right sort of causal powers we would expect colors to have.
I conclude that a better philosophical account of color would be one which would take colors to be non-representational features of the visual field. It is then a simple matter to meet the commonality and causality criterion since color science (specifically the opponent process theory of Hurvich and Jameson) predicts that types of color experiences are directly correlated to types of neural events. This correlation between neural events and colors in the visual field can be appealed to to satisfy both the commonality and the causality criteria.