1 Primitivist Objectivism Joshua Gert “Primitivist Objectivism,” forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, eds. Derek Brown and Fiona Macpherson, Routledge. Please cite published version when available. Primitivist Objectivism (or simply ‘Primitivism’ for the remainder of this chapter) is the view that colors are irreducible, mind-independent, sui generis properties of objects, and that any normal eight-year-old in the developed world knows what they are and which of the objects they see have which ones. Proponents of Primitivism take it to be distinctive of their view that it supports virtually all of the simplest and most commonsensical beliefs about color. It is no coincidence that one of the early defenses of Primitivism bears the title ‘A Simple View of Color’. 1 The following list gives the flavor of the claims at issue: 1) Red, Green, Yellow and Blue are colors. 2) For the four colors just mentioned, if a patch has one of them, it doesn’t have any of the others. 3) Blood is red, snow is white, and grass is green. 4) We can typically perceive the color of an object by looking at it, but errors are possible too. 5) Colors are not something else; they have their own distinctive similarity relations and other structural features. It is arguable that only Primitivism vindicates all of these claims. Reductive objectivism denies 5, identifying colors with microphysical properties or reflectance properties – properties that have similarity relations quite different from those of the colors. Mentalism obviously denies 3.