Ross (this issue) has made a useful contribution to the case for color realism (or ''physicalism'' as he prefers). It is a difficult case to make, and it would be premature to claim that Ross, or anyone, has yet solved all the difficulties of the position or made a case strong enough to convince a skeptic. As with any academic work, a diligent reader could surely find weaknesses in the argument, but rather than trying to either pull it apart or patch it up I think it might be more useful to speculate on the potential significance of Ross being right. Does it matter to consciousness researchers whether colors are ''really'' on the surfaces of objects or ''really'' in the mind? I believe it may matter a great deal. I want to suggest that color realism could prove to be a vital component of a solution to the notorious ''hard problem.'' It is certainly not the whole story or even the final piece of the puzzle, but I think it is possible to discern the overall architecture of a satisfying solution to the problem, even though we do not yet know how to make all the structural members (including color realism) as strong as they will need to be.
There is a widespread suspicion that something went seriously wrong with our thinking about the mind at around the time of Descartes. The problem, however, is not that Descartes's arguments for dualism were so persuasive, and convinced so many people, that materialists have been a lonely minority fighting an uphill battle ever since. The defects of his position, particularly but not only the seeming impossibility of mind-body interaction, were well known to his contemporaries, and despite his continuing influence, materialism has now long been the dominant position, at least among analytical philosophers, scientists, and the scientistically inclined. But Descartes's mind-body dualism was not really the heart of his philosophy. He was very much a part of the intellectual movement of the 17th-century scientific revolution, and dualism was really a mere corollary (albeit, to him, a welcome corollary) of ideas about the nature of matter that were emerging at the time and which he helped to crystalize. Descartes's sin was to have seen and developed the consequences of these ideas for the philosophy of mind more fully and consistently than his contemporaries. The protoscientists of the time wanted to be able to fully describe matter in mathematical terms, which, to them, meant geometrical, spatiotemporal terms. Matter and material objects came to be regarded as having in reality only spatiotem-Commentary on P. W. Ross (2001). The location problem for color subjectivism. Consciousness and Cognition, 10(1), 42-58.