# What Was Molyneux's Question a Question About? **Opening (not a real abstract):** What Was Molyneux's Question a Question About? Jonathan Cohen (University of California, San Diego) and Mohan Matthen (University of Toronto)1 Nearly nine hundred years ago, the Andalusian Muslim statesman and philosopher, Abu Bakr ibn Tufail (1105-1185), conjectured that all sensory qualities were material, and inferred from this that they would have at least some characteristics that can be discerned independently of sensory experience. Thus, he said, if a newly sighted man encountered colours for the first time, he would experience them in ways consonant with (at least some) descriptions of colours he had been given while still unsighted. Or perhaps he meant something stronger, namely that the newly sighted man could actually recognize the colours on the basis of the descriptions he had been given while still unsighted.2 Of course, on either