Is Colour incompatibility analytic?

Abstract

AbstractIt is widely believed that some a priori necessary truths are not analytic in the sense of transformable by substitution of synonyms into logical truths. One much‐cited example comes from the supposed incompatibility between colour predicates. The idea is that sentences like “Nothing is both blue all over (or uniformly or at a point) and also red” are not transformable into a logical truth in the same way as “Nothing is both a bachelor and married” because the requisite conceptual link between “bachelor” and “not married” is absent between “blue” and “not red”. This paper examines whether colour exclusion may be more like the bachelor case than it initially appears. It transpires that the most promising line of thought is not, however, as has been argued at length in the literature, that “blue” in some more or less convoluted way manages to mean “not red”. Instead it is suggested that the requisite conceptual link may reside in the oft‐ignored qualifications (“all over”, “uniformly”, etc.), without which there is no incompatibility in the first place.