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After you read the assignment in Plato’s Theaetetus, consider the following questions:

1. Begin by taking as much of a naive, everyday stance as you can. In, for example, green grass or a red shirt, where is the color green or red? The naive answer, of course, is that the green is in the grass, the red is in the shirt. This is reflected in our everyday language when we say that the grass is green, the shirt is red. Now, think about what considerations might lead a Socrates, or you, to call into question this naive, everyday understanding. (The students should come up with examples such as jaundice, color blindness, rose-colored glasses, perhaps darkness, any or all of which:

a. Make it questionable that the color simply resides in the object.

b. Suggest instead that the color is somehow "in" us, that is, that our eyes (or brains) somehow "construct" the color and then impose it on the object, "read it into" the object.

2. But it should be easy to raise different considerations that make this hypothesis no less dubious than the first. What would some of them be?

(They might mention that we can’t will the colors we want, that some we may even find repulsive, or they might point to the remarkable universality of color identification, all of which make it dubious that color is simply constructed, that, as Protagoras said, "man is the measure" of color.

3. So if the two obvious and polar explanations of where color resides don’t work, (i.e. that color is "in" the object or that it is "in" us), what other alternative explanation might there be? (With the help of Socrates in the Theaetetus, they should be led to speculate that perhaps color somehow arises in the convergence of the object, the eye, and light, that somehow the "locus" of color lies in that convergence. They should then be able to see that although the details of Socrates’ explanation of that convergence might be a bit primitive by our standards, the principle of his hypothesis, that color is located not simply in the object, the eye, or light, but in the convergence of them, is just the hypothesis that we are still working with today. The question then becomes, can we state in more detail than Socrates could have done just how that convergence "happens"? On to Galileo and Land!