Alex: "The perception of color depends upon various factors. These are the same eyes; however, depending on the light and surrounding hues, the eye color can appear quite different."
Mary: After a year and a half of dating you, I think I can safely say that your eyes are primarily green.
Alex: The interesting thing is that their greenness or blueness is completely conditional (dependent upon conditions like lighting and surrounding hues). They are neither unconditionally blue nor unconditionally green. So why should we prefer one color to the other? Maybe because one color appears more often? But this only happens because the conditions for that color happen to arise more often than the conditions for the other color. So what does that mean about “the” color of my eyes?
Here’s what Bertie Russell said, anyway. Mind you, here he’s talking about a table instead of a pair of eyes:
“This colour is not something which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the spectator and the way the light falls on the table. When, in ordinary life, we speak of the colour of the table, we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real; and therefore, to avoid favouritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular colour.”
Mary: Goddamn it they're green.
