Color and Shape: A Plea for Equal Treatment Brian Cutter 1 Introduction Many philosophers, especially in the wake of the 17th century, have endorsed an inegalitarian view of shape and color, according to which shape is objective or mind-independent while color is subjective or mind-dependent. I shall argue that the modal relations between shape and color make this combination of views untenable. We must instead embrace some form of egalitarianism, according to which shape and color are, in a sense to be clarified, either both objective or both subjective. The plan for this paper is as follows: in §2, I introduce some terminology and give a more precise characterization of egalitarianism and its denial, inegal- itarianism. In §3, I advance an argument against inegalitarianism, which begins with the following principle about the modal relations between shape and color: it is impossible for something to have a color without having a shape, i.e. with- out being spatially extended in some way. I then proceed to argue that, given reasonable assumptions, inegalitarianism contradicts this principle. Given the immense plausibility of the latter, I conclude that we should reject inegalitari- anism. 2 Preliminaries Some terminology: let realism about color be the thesis that colors are instanti- ated by ordinary objects. “Ordinary objects” include objects like carrots, cups, pencils, and planets—roughly, those things common sense takes to belong to the extra-mental world. Realism about color therefore rules out eliminativist views (Hardin 1988, Maund 1995, Chalmers 2006), according to which nothing at all is colored, as well as projectivist views, according to which the only things that are colored are non-ordinary things like sense-data, sensory experiences, or patches of the visual field (Boghossian & Velleman 1989, Jackson 1977). Likewise, let realism about shape be the thesis that shapes are instantiated by ordinary ob- jects. I shall take for granted that all parties to the debate accept realism about both shape and color, but I shall not make any assumptions about which version of realism is correct about either. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to be a realist about a class of sen- sible qualities like color or shape. One may either adopt a subjectivist view, 1