# Are Colors Secondary Qualities **Opening (not a real abstract):** Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of the senses are often thought to contain a profound truth: some perceptible properties are secondary qualities, dispositions to produce certain sorts of experiences in perceivers. Any apparent plausibility this has often derives, we argue, from an erroneous picture of perception. The colors are typically held to be one of the clearest examples of secondary qualities, and so we shall focus on these. Since the terminology of “secondary qualities” is liable to produce misunderstanding, some extra clarification won’t go amiss. First, for the purposes of this paper, secondary qualities are just stipulated to be dispositions to produce experiences—that is the way this terminology is (mostly) used by the contemporary philosophers we principally discuss. So, for example, Rae Langton’s (1998) account of Kant’s “primary/ **Authors:** [[Byrne]]