A reader asks:
Suppose I said that blue is not a Peter-van-Inwagen property, but a sensible property. Suppose also that I said that we see 1) substances and we see 2) their colors, and we see 3) the fact that substances are colored (and this last point amounts to not much more, if anything at all more, than the claim that we see both substances and their colors). I take it you would agree with these points.
There are some difficult questions here. No doubt we see material meso-particulars. I see a cat, a keyboard, a lamp. But do we see substances? 'Substance' is a theoretical term, of Aristotelian provenience, not what I call a 'datanic' term. If a cat is a bundle of universals, or a bundle of tropes, or a diachronic bundle of synchronic bundles of Castanedan guises, then a cat is not a substance. It is a Moorean fact that there are cats and that we see them; it is not Moorean fact that there are substances and that we see them. But let's set this problem aside.
A black cat sleeps on my desk. I see the cat and I see black (or blackness if you will) at the cat: I see black where the cat is. Contrary to what you suggest, there is more to a cat's being black than a cat and blackness even if the blackness is seen exactly where the cat is and nowhere else. For a cat's being black involves, in addition to the cat and black, the first's BEING the second. Note that a cat's being black is a fact, but neither a cat nor blackness is a fact.
This give rise to a puzzle. I see the cat, and I see black where the cat is. But do I see the cat's BEING black? Do I literally see (with my eyes) the fact of the cat's being black? And if I don't, how do I know that the cat IS black?
But let's set this vexing cluster of problems aside as well.
But then suppose that you discover that I think that colors are per se nowhere. They are not located in space in the way that substances are. When you turn your eye to something colored, geometrically speaking, you turn your eye only to the thing that is colored, but not the color of the thing, for this has no per se spatial location and therefore has nothing to do with the geometry of space beyond being the sensible property of something that has something to do with the geometry of space. Nonetheless, we see colors and we see the things that are colored. Would you find this view problematic? If so, why? Would you think that in making color only accidentally spatial that I depart from constituent ontology? I would like to think that I do not, for I say that both being an ox and being blue are parts of what it is to be a blue ox.
The view you sketch strikes me as incoherent. You cannot coherently maintain both that blue (of some definite shade) is a sensible property and that blue is nowhere. If blue is sensible, then it is sensible at some location or other. Therefore, blue cannot be nowhere.
Note that if there is a PVI-property of blueness, it could not itself be blue. Abstract objcts don't come in colors. So what good is it? What work does it do? You are still going to need the blueness of the blue cup. PVI-blueness is ontologically otiose, a metaphysical fifth wheel if you will. The blueness at the cup, by contrast, is blue! Right? If you deny that there is any blue blueness at the cup, are you then prepared to say that the cup is devoid of sensible properties?
Will you say that the blue cup is sensibly bluein virtue of instantiating PVI-blueness? How would that work? PVI-blueness is not a Platonic exemplar. It is not itself blue. How can a particular's instantiating it explain the particular's being sensibly blue?
Could blueness be accidentally spatial? I don't see how. Either it is necessary spatial, and in consequence thereof, sense-perceivable, or it is necessarily nonspatial in the manner of an abstract object. A blue wall is accidentally blue, but blueness, I should think, is necessarily spatial. And I do think you would be departing from constituent ontology if you were to hold that blueness is accidentally spatial.
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